| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Michael Mann. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 580. Cloth $70.00, paper $24.00.
In a work of great knowledge and forceful argumentation, Michael Mann seeks to provide a general explanation for one of the worst atrocities of the modern era. His task is a difficult one, since ethnic cleansing spans widely diverse geographies, political systems, and time periods. How does one make sense of a phenomenon whose very ubiquity is one of its defining features? The title provides the starting point for the explanation. Ethnic cleansing is not an aberration or an act committed by individuals who are somehow different from the rest of us. It is the result of the democratic advance of the modern era, because when "the people" are made the source of sovereignty, the character and composition of the population become the critical elements in defining the polity and society. If the population is defined in ethnic terms, the demos as ethnos, as Mann repeatedly phrases it, then the basis is created for excluding other groups, sometimes by the most violent means. A similar phenomenon can happen in communist systems when the demos are defined as the proletariat. In those situations, class takes on an ethnic character and nonproletarian elements can be subject to the most severe repressions that look a lot like ethnic cleansings.	1
Yet if ethnic cleansing is a constituent feature of modern democracy, it does not occur everywhere and all the time, as Mann recognizes. He proceeds to a more precise delineation of the conditions that result in ethnic cleansing. These include a fractured elite in which one segment becomes radicalized; a "core constituency" that is mobilized in support of the ideology and its leaders; competing ethnic groups (usually just two) that lay claim to the state and territory; and a crisis situation, usually warfare, that dramatically heightens the elite's sense of insecurity and leads it to target a competing minority population as the source of all difficulties. Within this coterie of explanations, Mann emphasizes three factors. First, an elite, usually in possession of the state, unleashes ethnic cleansing. It is not some kind of volcano from below or the manifestation of age-old hatreds. Second, the core constituency, the people who practice violence, is typically young and male. Most often, not all that many of them are required to carry out ethnic cleansing. So Mann contests the widespread notion that ethnic cleansing requires mass support or complicity. Third, rarely, if ever, does a plan to remove entire population groups exist beforehand. As a crisis situation intensifies, the elite ratchets up the measures taken against targeted populations. When less violent measures fail to produce the desired results, the state implements the most radical policy of murderous ethnic cleansing. Here Mann deemphasizes the notion of intentionality, the key criterion of the United Nations definition of genocide.	2
Mann lays out this perspective in the first seventy pages or so and in the conclusion. In between he provides extensive discussions of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, "communist cleansing," the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. The treatment is highly uneven. The Nazis get the most attention, while the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia are crammed into one chapter. All along the way, Mann reasserts his arguments in a helpful fashion. This is not a work in which the theory is found at the beginning and end with barely a mention of it in the empirical chapters. The problems lie elsewhere.	3
Mann states that ethnic cleansing is "the dark side of democracy." But not one of the cases he discusses involves a democratic regime. Not by any stretch of the imagination can Nazi Germany, Democratic Kampuchea, the Soviet Union, or any of the others be considered a democracy. Democracies are by no means pristine in the matter of ethnic cleansing: witness United States' policy toward Native Americans in the nineteenth century or the Great Powers and the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, which legitimized the "population umixing" of Muslims and Christians in Turkey and Greece. It seems to me that Mann is writing about the dark side of nationalism, which is not at all the same thing as democracy. There is a fundamental confusion of terms here that undermines the explanatory power of the book.	. . .

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