ETHNIC CLEANSING
Ethnic cleansing, once a term of perpetrators, has become a term of art in the study of population movements. The term spread to English and other languages from Serbian in 1992, as the mass media broadcast a label that was borrowed from the lexicon of Serbian perpetrators. Although ethnic cleansing may be a new coinage, variants involving cleansing as the purification of the nation are not. In fact, similar language was used throughout the twentieth century, by Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, and others. Indeed, Stalin's purges (chystki) could easily betranslated as cleansing, as could Hitler's racial hygiene (Säuberung).
Although use of the term in scholarly discourse remains controversial, its function is fairly clear. The term is most often used to mean something like "coercive actions justified in national terms designed to clear territories of putatively undesirable populations without aspiring to their total physical extermination." It thus occupies some of the broad middle ground between voluntary migration and genocide. Part of the analytical value of the term is precisely that it captures a willingness to use force that need not include the willingness to exterminate the entire population.
Ethnic Cleansing and National Politics
Implicit in the idea of ethnic cleansing is a certain modern nationalist view of history and politics. In most, if not all, versions of modern nationalism, legitimate political power in a given territory is believed to be vouchsafed in a mass nation. According to certain important variants of modern nationalism, national identity is determined by ethnicity, which is connected to language and family origin. Ethnic cleansing connects these two ideas. Political legitimacy over territory rests with the nation; the nation is an ethnic group; therefore it is reasonable to expel other ethnic groups from desired territory. Since the political execution of ethnic cleansing involves the realization of a certain idea, the analytic use of the term ethnic cleansing involves a judgment about motives.
Such ideas are only one of a set of necessary conditions for the actual event. Most cases of ethnic cleansing involve the following conditions:
- The prior collapse of state authority;
- The cover of a larger war;
- The practical anticipation of future states to be created;
- Dedicated cleansers, with military or police training, at work far from home;
- Historical propaganda that both requires cleansing to be plausible and justifies cleansing already underway;
- A conscious escalatory push by dedicated elites and propagandists, allowing individual experiences to be understood as a national war; and
- A motive for seizing property that implicates society after the cleansing has begun.
Ethnic cleansing has nothing to do with ancient hatreds. The idea that ethnic groups exist and are constitutive of national identity is modern. In recorded cases of ethnic cleansing, hostility did not simply express itself in violence. Rather, international and domestic political factors created a propitious moment for the expression of ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalists then seek to use existing institutions, such as armies, police forces, or partisans, for new purposes. The cover of war and the habit of military discipline often facilitates the commencement of ethnic cleansing.
Ethnic cleansing, once begun, tends to self-perpetuate. Some perpetrators acquire the habits of murder and rape, and many construe the reaction of victims as a reason to continue. While political circumstances create the opportunity for ethnic cleansers to begin their work, the social world they create then allows ethnic cleansing to continue. The initiation of ethnic cleansing usually requires the breakdown of international order and the rule of law; its progress usually brings the destruction of local norms and customs.
By murdering individuals in the name of the nation, ethnic cleansers in effect target their own group for revenge. Once vengeance is taken, survivors on both sides will see the other as the aggressor, and propagandists can present both sides as nations. What began as an attack by a small number of people against certain localities becomes a battle of nation upon nation. With time, the property motive tends to become increasingly important. Leaders are ideologically motivated; their first followers often seek revenge; but others soon realize that coveted property is there for the taking. These dynamics are most important in cases where there are, or come to be, two national sides. In some cases of ethnic cleansing, the state or another actor enjoys a monopoly or near-monopoly on force. Nazi and Soviet ethnic cleansing are the most important examples.
Ethnic Cleansing and International Politics
In many cases, ethnic cleansing is regulated by treaty, and comes to be seen as a matter of regulated population movements. Yet accords such as Lausanne (1923) and Potsdam (1945) serve to legitimize an ongoing practice. The first regulated the mutual expulsions of Greeks and Turks; the second the flight of Germans from Eastern Europe. Much the same can be said of the agreements between Turkey and Bulgaria (1913) and between the Soviet Union and communist Poland (1944). Although such agreements preserved the semblance of international order, they organized and legitimated ethnic cleansing that was already underway.
Because ethnic cleansing is associated with modern nationalism, it is a phenomenon of the twentieth century. Because it usually requires demanding permissive conditions, its main instances are associated with war, and especially world war. Major examples of ethnic cleansing include:
- the Bulgarian-Greco-Turkish "exchanges" of 1913–1922;
- the massacre of Armenians in Turkey in 1915–1922;
- the deportation of "enemy nations" in Stalin's Soviet Union in 1935–1938;
- the ethnic cleansing of Jews and Poles from Nazi Germany and occupied Poland in 1939–1941;
- the mass murder of Poles by Ukrainian insurgents in 1943–1944 and the Polish response;
- the forced mutual repatriations of Ukrainians from Poland and Poles from the Soviet Union in 1944–1946;
- the expulsion of the Germans and Hungarians from Czechoslovakia in 1945–1946;
- the expulsion of Germans from eastern Europe in 1945–1947; and
- the murder of Bosnians, Kosovars, and others in the Yugoslav wars of 1992–1999.
It is impossible to rigidly separate ethnic cleansing from migration, on the one side, and genocide, on the other. Ethnic cleansing works in part by creating conditions in which people choose to leave a given territory. People need not have been coerced themselves to make such a decision. Ethnic cleansing in practice almost always involves acts of genocide, even if it falls short of the total destruction of a group. Ethnic cleansers may be indifferent to the survival of individuals; they may even wish to exploit them in some other locations, as with the resettlement of Ukrainians from Poland in 1947 or Stalin's pre-World War II cleansings. Yet ethnic cleansing may also provide a transition to full-scale genocide. In Hitler's Final Solution, policies of ethnic cleansing preceded a policy of total physical annihilation of Jews in Germany and the occupied territories. As the term ethnic cleansing has entered historical discussions, it has helped to shed light on the stages of Hitler's policy immediately antecedent to the Jewish Holocaust.
Soviet ethnic cleansing may be divided into two phases, before and after direct contact with German practices. Before and during World War II, Stalin deported all or part of nine "enemy nations" to the Soviet east. After World War II, Stalin deported all Poles west, across the newly expanded borders of the Soviet Union. In both cases, the motivation was the preservation of communist power and the creation of political calm, but the second involved accepting the need to remove groups not only from their homes but from the Soviet Union itself. The Soviet Union was not a national state, and neither were its constituent republics, but its leaders were aware of national questions, and sought to exploit or, at a minimum, defuse national questions. This new ethnic quality in postwar Soviet policy was part of a general trend, as the connection of homogeneity and stability came to be widely accepted.
After World War II, not only the Soviet Union but the United States and Britain accepted that ethnic homogeneity was needed for European peace. After the end of the Cold War, these perspectives changed. The United States, Britain, and their NATO allies prosecuted a war in Yugoslavia in 1999 with the express aim of bringing ethnic cleansing to a halt. Ethnic cleansing came to function as a term of both perpetrators and human rights activists, as a term of moral endorsement and moral opprobrium. The shock of the Yugoslav wars and the fact of a Western military response forced a reconsideration of the history of the twentieth century, in which ethnic cleansing as a social fact took a prominent place.
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