Michael Mann
THE DARK SIDE OF DEMOCRACY
Explaining ethnic cleansing
580pp. Cambridge University Press. Paperback, £17.99 (US $24.99).
978 0 521 53854 1
Michael Mann is one of the leading historical sociologists of our time, a reputation well earned by the two volumes of his work The Sources of Social Power (From the beginning to AD 1760, 1986; 1760–1914, 1993). The third volume, dealing with the twentieth century, is not yet completed, because Mann was drawn away to develop themes which he encountered during his work on it. The result is two massive tomes, The Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy, both published in 2004, as well as a critique of American foreign policy in the wake of 9/11, Incoherent Empire (2005). As one may expect from its author’s work, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining ethnic cleansing, is replete with brilliant ideas and acute observations, and exhibits masterful handling of overwhelming detail. And yet, one is regrettably obliged to conclude that in his overall framing of the question the author has gone seriously astray.
His main thesis is as follows: murderous ethnic cleansing, which in extreme forms can become genocidal, is predominantly a modern phenomenon. It is the “dark side of democracy”, when the rule of the people, demos, and the people’s ethnicity, ethnos, get “confused”. In premodern times class dominated over ethnicity, in the sense that conquerors and social elites sought to subjugate and exploit people of other ethnic groups, rather than get rid of them. However, with the advent of modernity, popular sovereignty and universal citizenship, ethnic groups laying claim to the same territory occasionally resorted to the use of force and, when frustrated, sometimes escalated into murderous ethnic cleansing and even genocide.
Discussing the premodern world, Mann is far too judicious a scholar not to anticipate and respond to possible objections regarding the prevalence of premodern mass annihilations. He is not unaware of the fact, highlighted by recent scholarship, that prehistoric conflict between small human groups often resulted in massacre and even extermination. One can start at the beginning, with the spread of our species Homo sapiens sapiens out of Africa, estimated to have occurred from around 70–80,000 years ago. In the process, all the archaic humans that inhabited the Old World became completely extinct, gradually everywhere displaced and replaced, falling victim to what was probably our species’ more effective combined package of subsistence, reproduction and fighting. Incidentally, there is no need to shift the blame of murderous mass killing from “our civilization” to “our species”, both in the spirit of the 1960s. For as viewers of wildlife documentaries are all too aware, very high rates of intra-killing within animal species are the norm in nature.
An example of a late prehistorical episode of ethnic cleansing is the displacement and replacement of the earlier inhabitants of present-day Japan by the population now known as Japanese. Apparently arriving across the sea from Korea around 300 bc, bringing wet-rice agriculture with them, the Japanese gradually pushed the earlier (Jamon) inhabitants up the archipelago by a combination of numbers, dense agricultural settlement, and warfare, with the result that only about 150,000, the Ainu, remain today, in Hokkaido and other northern islands. And this is merely one example, chosen out of many from the shadowy light of prehistory.
But what about premodern history, when states, stratified societies and elite rule dominated? This is an era which is far more central to Mann’s argument. He is again aware of this period’s cases of massive killings, massacres, razing of cities and mass unsettlement of populations, mentioning some well-known examples from the wars of Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England (and displacement of the Britons) and the exploits of nomadic hordes such as the Mongols. As he correctly writes: “Warfare occasionally strayed into ethnocide”. Indeed, who can deny the massive Assyrian deportations, the destruction of Melos and its inhabitants, of Plataea and its inhabitants, of Thebes, the similar fate of Carthage and Corinth – all proverbial cases out of so many throughout history? All the same, Mann insists that since economic exploitation by a ruling – often ethnically foreign – elite was the rationale of premodern society, all the above should be regarded as marginal. According to this logic, the conquering and ruling elites resorted to vicious means in order to suppress and/or set an example to others as quickly and efficiently as possible, with the view of resuming exploitation with the least possible disturbance.
And yet this attractive model is somewhat misleading. For one thing, enslavement was always one of the main options of exploitation, and not only in the figurative sense (employed by Mann) of subjugating people in and on their land, but also in the ordinary sense (which he barely mentions) of taking them as captives and selling them far away from home. This was standard practice in military operations, often constituting the main booty, and occasionally carried out wholesale by conquering armies, emptying cities and bleeding provinces white. We sometimes hear of the price of slaves falling in the markets on account of the massive supply. Africa is, of course, a specially gruesome example, where tens of millions were carried away – north through the Sahara, and from East Africa, by Arab and Muslim slave traders, well before Europeans took up the trade from West Africa. Both Arabs and Europeans worked in collaboration with native polities that provided the slaves through raids and war carried out against their neighbours. Thus there was perfect economic sense for “ethnic cleansing” before modernity, and, indeed, it was mostly the ethnically foreign that fell victim to enslavement. Mann sometimes gives the impression that the people in premodern state societies were invariably entirely disenfranchised, and he assumes, like many other historical sociologists, that for the ruling elites foreign ethnic groups differed little from their own ethnic folk. But neither assumption was ever quite true.
Furthermore, the model that Mann seems to have in mind is predominantly one of imperial wars, where an imperial power subjugates others. These are the most high-profile wars, carried out by the most famous historical players. However, routine warlike activity in history was much more mundane, endemically taking place between neighbouring small-scale polities, driven by a variety of motives, with border land being the most common among them. Acquisitions habitually resulted in fleeing populations that did not wait to be killed, looted, enslaved, or driven away, while the victors grabbed and settled on their land. This was so commonplace as barely to merit special attention. In most cases, rule over the other was beyond the power of such polities, and on the rare occasions that one of them succeeded in conquering a long-time neighbour and rival, it more characteristically razed it to the ground. If “macro ethnic cleansing” was rare in premodern times, as Mann claims, it is because macro-ethnicities themselves and macro-states were rarer; yet murderous micro ethnic cleansing took place all the time.
Mann includes “ethnocide” – state-induced cultural assimilation, through hegemony and suppression, of foreign ethnic groups that were brought under its rule – in the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing. He clearly mentions that such processes took place, for example, throughout the countries of North-western Europe well before modernity, with France and Britain among the most-cited cases. Again like most historical sociologists, he tends to assume that, in these cases as in others, it was primarily the elite that was so assimilated and co-opted in premodern times, whereas the masses remained largely unaffected well into modernity, most notably retaining their native vernaculars. However, the inaccuracy of this view of the past is amply illustrated by some of the greatest of empires. China and Rome are both mentioned by Mann in a context related to but slightly different from the one discussed here. In the former, the spread of Chinese civilization in early historical times from north to south, from the Yellow River basin to that of the Yangtze, appears to have been achieved through a mixture of military force, colonization, and state and cultural dominance, resulting in the displacement and assimilation of the local populations. As a result, most people of southern China became what is known as Han Chinese, with the masses speaking related Chinese languages of northern origin. Rome’s expansion in the west penetrated so deep culturally that in both the Iberian peninsula and Gaul (though not in Britain, where Roman rule was shorter) the native Celtic languages (and cultures) practically disappeared, replaced by Latin even in the rural areas. Consequently, barely a trace of those native languages can be found in the latter-day languages of those countries that evolved out of the spoken Latin vernacular. Similarly, throughout most of the Middle East and North Africa in the wake of the Arab conquest, both Muslim identity and the Arab language gradually but consistently spread from the ruling elite to the urban and rural masses, thoroughly displacing and replacing much older identities and vernaculars.
So ethnic cleansing involving widespread massacres, mass destruction of settlements, mass enslavement, masses of refugees driven out by war, and hegemonic cultural assimilation of both the elites and the masses of the conquered – all befalling alien rival peoples – were commonplace in premodern times, more commonplace probably than in modern times. All the same, Mann may still have a point in claiming that modern ethnic cleansing is somehow different, possessing a special quality that distinguishes it from what took place earlier. As he puts it, democracy is the new development that begat ethnic cleansing. His point would carry some validity, if it were not for the strange – sometimes bizarre – meanings that he confers on the concept of democracy.
Mann sees the advent of salvation universal religions as a first step towards democratization, that of the soul though not yet of the body – that is, not yet the reality of social and political life. He argues that with these religions mass persecution, deportation and wholesale massacre were generated for the first time, intended to eliminate the non-believer and heretic. The sense of equality of all men before God is indeed often credited with some impact on the later development of political equality, at least in North-western Europe. Yet to connect this “democratization of the soul” with ethnic cleansing seems highly contrived, an argument forced by the author’s general thesis. In the first place, as Mann himself admits, not all salvation, universal and “democratizing” religions were so implicated. Only exclusivist, monotheistic religions had this element at their very core, with Buddhism, for example, exhibiting tolerance and non-militancy.
Furthermore, as Mann concedes, it was primarily Christianity, rather than Islam, that engaged in religious persecution and violent cleansing. He cites the genocidal Crusade against the Albigensians in southern France, the persecution, massacres, deportations and forced conversions of the Jews, the ethnic cleansing of the Jews and Moors from Spain, and some of the more horrific episodes in the Wars of Religion between Protestants and Catholics, most notably during the Thirty Years War in Germany, and Oliver Cromwell’s treatment of the Irish. But in addition to the ethnic aspect that surely existed in some of these cases, these were all expressions of religious bigotry, intolerance and militant missionary zeal, whose connection with democratization, spiritual or material, is rather strained. I suppose that Mann’s intention can be interpreted to mean that if God’s word was addressed to all men equally, then a bigoted, intolerant and militant conception of that creed may hold that everybody must either embrace it or be eliminated.
However, Mann’s real thesis concerns mod-ernity, to which the vast majority of his book is dedicated. He rightly argues that the spreading notions of popular sovereignty and equal universal citizenship made the existence of the ethnically foreign within a state more problematic, giving rise to deep tensions and violence. The growth of popular sovereignty, the institutionalization of universal citizenship, the creation of mass society, and deepening popular mobilization are sometimes reasonably labelled democratization, and their connection with the rise of nationalism has been pointed out by some scholars of nationalism, although remaining anathema to many of them. There was no “confusion” here between the two meanings of the concept of the people, demos and ethnos, as Mann has it, criticizing President Woodrow Wilson, for example, for such a category mistake; rather, as their involvement in the public sphere increased, peoples exhibited a strong preference for political self-identification and selfdetermination in connection with their ethnic folk, a preference that profoundly affected both domestic and international politics during the past two centuries, often violently. In this sense, democratization and nationalism have gone hand in hand. However, whereas popular sovereignty, universal citizenship, mass society and popular mobilization – processes that have encompassed practically the entire globe since the onset of modernity – can be labelled democratization, they cannot be equated with democracy, a far more restricted phenomenon, without stretching semantics to breaking point. For, of course, the great majority of state societies that underwent these processes did not turn democratic, unless this term is applied indiscriminately to a whole range of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, often of the most suppressive and atrocious kind.
Indeed, one is surprised to learn that the cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that Mann treats extensively and attributes to democracy as its dark side include not only ethnic expulsions and massacres in the non-democratic Balkans before and after the First World War, tsarist Russian treatment of Muslims in the conquered Caucasus, the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire under the authoritarian-nationalist Young Turks, the deportation of the Germans from post-Second World War Eastern Europe, and the events in the democratizing former Yugoslavia and Rwanda during the 1990s, but also the Nazi genocide of the Jews and actual and planned treatment of the Slavs, as well as Communist cleansings, mass killings and genocide under Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. In Mann’s terminology there are “liberal democracies” and “ethnic democracies”, with Nazi Germany belonging to the latter type. One is to be reminded that the accepted distinction is actually between liberal (“civic”) nationalism and ethnic nationalism, which, although not without its problems, would appear to be less confusing, as well as being more clearly indicative of the real culprit: militant nationalism. Indeed, Mann’s is in fact a major book about nationalism – in its relationship to the rise of mass society – rather than about democracy.
Of course, the countries of totalitarian socialism can hardly be classified as “ethnic democracies”, so Mann overstretches the thesis yet more, claiming that the class persecution and elimination in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia were in fact carried out in the name of a class identified as the people, and thus fall under democratic (and ethnic?) cleansing. The old designations of these totalitarian socialist regimes, “people’s republics” and “democratic republics”, come to mind, though they are not used by Mann. To be sure, it should be pointed out that in all these cases, despite official rhetoric, minority ethnic populations were in fact often targeted for special harsh treatment. Yet most of the mass murders carried out by these regimes were directed, as Mann correctly observes, against alleged political and class enemies, which goes to show that mass murder of monumental scale is not necessarily ethnic, and certainly not democratic. It can, for example, be ideologically motivated, driven, as we saw, by either religious or secular zealous creed.
Why would an able sociologist like Mann tie himself in such strange knots? Because he believes that not only the above-described “ethnic democracies”, but also liberal democracies, strayed into ethnic cleansing, not strictly at home but in colonial-frontier settings. According to Mann, genocidal democracies were in fact responsible for “the most successful cleansing the world may have ever seen”, referring to two major cases: the fate of the Indians in the United States and that of the Aboriginals in Australia, both displaced from their land and experiencing, respectively, an estimated 90 and 80 per cent drop in numbers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is a source of a profound guilt in both countries, reinforcing pervasive doubts among enlightened public opinion regarding whether or not liberal-democratic societies really behave better than others, let alone live up to their lofty standards. For example, it has become increasingly evident that modern affluent liberal democracies do not fight each other, nor threaten to do so, a finding of major consequence about which Mann is sceptical because of their genocidal record. He concedes that well-established democracies do not carry out murderous ethnic cleansing, but claims that in earlier, more formative stages of their development they did. It is with a deep sense of moral responsibility, indeed mission, towards the present that Mann warns today’s established democracies about their past.
Yet Mann should have known better about the tragic fate of the US Indians and Australian Aboriginals, and in fact he does know better. To be sure, both populations fell victim to massive expropriation, which, when resisted by violent means, led to much more effective violence precipitated by governments and local white settlers. The land on which the natives lived was progressively taken from them, adversely affecting their livelihood. In the USA, some large-scale deadly deportations were carried out, such as that of the Cherokees, as well as cases of indiscriminate killings by local militias, most notably in California. Small-scale violence and killings were pervasive. Native women were occasionally taken away and forced into sex with white men.
The catalogue of injuries against the natives’ life, well-being and culture is long and painful. Most of the white population wished them ill, as did the authorities, the latter more in the independent Republic of the United States than in colonial Australia. Mann cites statements by the greatest Presidents of democratic America – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt – to demonstrate that they all prophesied the natives’ ultimate doom and believed that, in view of their savagery and acts of savage violence, this doom was much deserved. All this is undeniably true. Hence people tend to assume the worst. All the same, the demographic catastrophe that befell the US Indians and Australian Aboriginals was not caused by such means. The culprit was very different, and it struck irrespective of intent and regime type.
Yet again Mann is well aware of the role played by epidemic diseases in the cases described, citing the major relevant studies in his exhaustive list of references, though conspicuously not the deservedly acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning, international bestseller, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The fate of human societies, which effectively weaves the findings of these studies together. The source of the natives’ demographic slump in both the Americas and Australia was their lack of immunity to Old World diseases, such as smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, tuberculosis and a number of others, most of which had passed from domesticated livestock to humans during the Neolithic agricultural revolution and spread through the population of the Old World, which in time developed resistance to them. The sudden joining of the Old and New Worlds spelled disaster for the natives of the latter, as the diseases migrated across the oceans with the European newcomers.
Mann clearly presents the consequences of the ensuing biological holocaust, mentioning in effect the now prevailing assessment that it caused the death of some 90 per cent of the pre-contact native population throughout the Americas. He well recognizes that this horrific death toll was unintentional, rightly regarding the well-known sporadic cases, when contaminated blankets and cloths were deliberately given to the natives to precipitate their demise, as inconsequential to the general, practically unstoppable, trend. All the same, while writing at great length about everything else, he devotes only a couple of pages to this factor, practically ignoring the implications of that devastating development and the data cited for his thesis.
But indeed, how can we tell what precisely caused the demise of the native population, what part of it was due to epidemic diseases and what part to human brutality? In history and the social sciences, where events cannot be replayed, the only means of trying to answer such questions is through controlled comparisons. Mann argues correctly that in both the US and Australia, where farmer settlement was the norm, the farmers had little use for the natives and were particularly interested in seeing them gone. For this reason, he believes, settlers’ frontier democracy was the most atrocious towards the natives. But then, what can we learn from other places, where the relevant circumstances were different?
Although from time to time Mann likes to chide “our civilization” and “Europeans”, by association, as if they meant democracy, Spanish America was not democratic, of course; and the Spanish conquistadores were quintessentially premodern in Mann’s sense: they exhibited great ruthlessness during their conquests and suppressed and much abused the natives in general, but they equally wanted them to live so that they could be exploited. They wanted the natives to work for them in mines and landed estates or plantations, the common agricultural possession in Spanish America, which was very different from the settler’s family farm of much of North America, which Mann regards as the root of the natives’ demise. All the same, the natives of the Caribbean, where the Spanish first landed and established their rule, began to die of European diseases at such a fast rate that they were wiped out altogether, leaving no trace. The Spaniards saw no alternative but to import African slaves in their place, who, despite great mortality rates during ocean crossing and horrible abuse over centuries thereafter – hardly less than that experienced by the natives – survived in great numbers, wherever they were brought to in the Americas, on account of their natural resistance to Old World epidemic diseases.
Much the same applies to the rest of Spanish America, where European diseases were a major factor in facilitating the destruction of both the Aztec and Inca empires, killing off in each an estimated half of their populations, including emperors, at the time of conquest. It is now estimated that within a century after the conquest the native population was reduced by some 90 per cent, slowly recovering in the following centuries, after resistance to the new diseases developed the hard way – the only way known in premodern time. The natives of Amazonia, isolated until recently, have been much abused over the past generation by entrepreneurs and their workforces who penetrated the rainforests to carry out large-scale projects of economic development. However, above all their lives are threatened by contact with European diseases, whose deadly effect, in contrast to the past, can today be effectively prevented by large-scale immunization.
In North America, there was a dense agricultural-urban civilization in the valley of the Mississippi River, whose deserted towns were observed in 1540 by a Spanish probing expedition led by Hernando De Soto. This native civilization is believed to have succumbed to European diseases that spread from Mexico even before contact with the Europeans, let alone with white settlers, was made. When the English and French arrived at the same area in the following centuries, this civilization was already long gone. The same terrible process took place throughout North America as contact gradually spread across the continent. Sparse native populations were afflicted each in turn by disease brought in by the settlers – rather than falling victim to genocide – again reaching their lowest point some hundred years after contact. As Mann himself writes, the natives of California suffered a disastrous fall in their numbers to an estimated half of their pre-contact population while still under Spanish and Mexican rule and the mission and estate system – all this before their numbers continued to fall under US rule: only to a small degree due to direct killings, cruel and indiscriminate as they were. As Mann also notes, the natives of Pennsylvania and New Jersey were sheltered from harassment by the Quaker communities alongside which they lived – which did not, however, prevent their practical elimination by disease.
One last control case would be French Algeria. We have already seen that the atrocious treatment of black Africans in America did not cause their demise; nor did colonial abuse in black Africa itself in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have that effect, except for a few cases of direct genocide, perpetrated by imperial Germany against the Herero in South-West Africa (now Namibia) in 1904, and against the Maji-Maji in East Africa (now Tanzania), from 1905 to 1907. In North Africa, too, French occupation and settlement, including farm settlement, of Algeria from 1830 involved ferocious “pacification” of native resistance. The French conduct under Marshal Bugeaud was criticized, to little avail, by a delegation of the French Chamber of Deputies, headed by Alexis de Tocqueville, who requested that European standards be applied there. For all that, Algeria’s population did not tumble but actually surged from some 2.5 million in 1800 to about 6 million in 1920, during the very same period that the native North American population plummeted.
Thus, Mann’s main contention regarding the democracies’ track record is belied, as his independent variables – democracy and “frontier democracy” of farmer settlers – are examined in diverse cases across historical experience. This is not to say that the natives of America and Australia were not – often atrociously – maltreated. They were dispossessed by the advance of dense agricultural settlement; their livelihood, way of life and culture were disrupted; they experienced blatant discrimination; and there were some deadly deportations and quite a few killings. All these contributed to their disaster, yet they did not – could not – cause it. With respect to Mann’s general thesis, it is true that popular sovereignty, universal citizenship, mass popular mobilization and mass society – which can be labelled democratization – made nationalism more manifest and, consequently, added a new dimension to ethnic tensions and cleansing. It is also true that liberal democracies’ standards for the treatment of ethnic minorities in colonial settings were very different from those they practised in the domestic context, and they were sometimes harsh. Liberal democratic standards have risen precipitously during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All the same, one suspects that ideological over-zeal – leading to fundamental errors in argument and method – was largely responsible for Michael Mann’s crowning of ethnic cleansing as the dark side of democracy.
_________________________________________________________
Azar Gat's most recent book is War in Human Civilization, published last year.
