Ethnization of politics in the 20th century
Prof. Dr. Michael Wildt, Chair of German History in the 20th Century with a focus on National Socialism Humboldt University of Berlin
Presentation at the international conference “Johannes Lepsius and Dealing with the Armenian Genocide” on 26/27 November 2010 at the House of Brandenburg-Prussian History in Potsdam.
Ethnization of politics in the 20th century
A sketch
The nineteenth century was the century of nations — the twentieth that of the people. There is no doubt that the two terms are close together; their semantic fields often even seem to be congruent — and yet they do not fall into one. By equating people and nation, we lose sight of the differences that distinguish the twentieth century from the nineteenth century in its specific violence.
The French Revolution emphatically declared the people a nation and the sole sovereign: “Le principe de toute souveraaineté réside essentiellement dans la nation. Nul corps, nul individu ne peut exercer d'autorité qui n'en émane expressément,” it was stated in the Declaration of Human and Civil Rights of August 26, 1789. Four years later, in the Constitution of June 24, 1793, the people took the place of the nation: “La Souvenaineté réside dans le peuple; elle est une et indivisible, imprescriptible et inalialible endable.” In addition, Article 7 read: “Le peuple souveraain est l'universalité des citoyens français.” This ambivalence of the political people between sovereign universality and individual citizenship, or in the terms of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as whose student the Jacobins understood themselves completely, between Volunteer generale and Volonté de tous, remains the debate about the people and their sovereignty.
Who should belong to the people? Olympe de Gouges was already angry against the men of the French Revolution that women were denied civil rights. When Maximilien Robespierre eloquently advocated universal, equal suffrage, this meant only adult free men, excluding women and slaves. And how do the people express their will? Rousseau's proposal to create many small political units so that the people could each assemble to pass laws, since only the people themselves could formulate their general will, was apparently virtually impracticable. But Rousseau's fundamental criticism of the idea that the people could be represented by representatives, and his insistence that the politically sovereign people could not be found in the mere interest-based majority decisions of the many, repeatedly raised the question of how the general will of the people is expressed. Was it inconceivable that a small group or even an individual embodied this general will, possibly even against the majority opinion? The answer was law and representation — that was the formula for the nation as a constitutional state in the 19th century. If any metaphysical justification for rule, in particular the royal claim to govern by the grace of God, fell into decay with the Enlightenment, only the citizenry itself and its representatives in parliament could be the source of legitimate legislation. In principle, such an association of citizens was in no way linked to the commonality of origin, language or culture.
But the nation as a people could also be asserted pre-constitutionally, on the basis of its history, culture or even their common blood, which had yet to become a state. Hardly any of the European nation states of the 19th century were able to display a uniform national culture. Rather, it had to be created first, absolutely by force. The respective nationalization policies, which primarily involve the implementation of a national language, a uniform school system and, last but not least, the development of a
National historiography served, testify to the intensive effort to transform “Peasants into Frenchmen” (Eugen Weber), i.e. to establish the nation in the state first.
Even a torso such as the League of Little German Princesses, which united in 1871 under the leadership of Prussia and declared a German national state — was henceforth regarded as such. The regulatory model remained state-oriented: “Every nation is a state,” as the liberal constitutional lawyer Johann Caspar Bluntschli put it.
For existing state nations such as France, Spain or Portugal, this principle would reinforce their national homogenization policy; for the still stateless national movements, in particular in the three multinational empires, the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman Empire, it meant a call to demand greater autonomy or even state independence, to enforce it by force if necessary.
The problem of the ideal required harmony of nation, people and territory was in no way solved for the European world of states by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. On the contrary, even the classic, conservative definition of state law of the 19th century, Georg Jellinek's trinity of national territory, state people, state authority as a paradigmatic structure of the nation state, was able to break up existing state systems, as can be seen from the fate of the three empires of the Tsar, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans.
Neither the nation-state foundations of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro in the course of the 19th century, nor the arrangement of the major powers at the Berlin Conference in 1878 to resolve the then virulent “Oriental Question” of the nation, people and territory on the Balkan Peninsula. Rather, the obvious weakness of the Ottoman Empire encouraged the desire of the young nation states to expand their territory. With strong support from Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Sultanate in October 1912 and, within a few weeks, conquered the remaining Ottoman territories on the Balkan Peninsula, primarily Albania, Thrace and Macedonia. But the alliance quickly fell apart; the newly allied states were now at war with each other because the respective national claims on the jointly conquered territories clashed against each other. These Balkan wars of 1912/13 were already characterized by all those violent phenomena that we identify today as “ethnic cleansing.” The excesses of violence perpetrated by European colonizers in the colonized world were now reaching Europe itself: Entire villages were surrounded and the men were shot. The rest of the population, women, children, elderly people were rounded up in the local church or mosque, the places of worship were then set on fire so that the defenceless people were burned alive. Retreating armies burned down entire villages to drive out the population. While Muslims in Thrace used to try to protect themselves by painting Christian crosses on their houses, this no longer helped in the Balkan Wars. Their homes were identified and destroyed. The cultural charge of the wars as the “liberation” of the Christian West from the “Muslim yoke” led in particular to the systematic expulsion of the Muslim population from the Balkan Peninsula. The newly conquered Serbian, Greek and Bulgarian territories were subjected to a rigorous settlement policy, although or precisely because their own nationality was often only a minority. It was not least these murders and expulsions of Muslims from Europe that served as legitimacy for the “Young Turks” to deport and murder Christian Armenians and Greeks themselves.
The lines between regular warfare, ethnic cleansing and genocidal killings became blurred in the Balkan Wars and Wolfgang Höpken referred to them as ethnic wars with good reason. Ethnic cleansing was not a by-product of the conduct of war, but the conduct of war itself was profoundly influenced by ethnic purposes and objectives.
The first state treaty on so-called population transfer was concluded between Bulgaria and Turkey in 1913, although this treaty — similar to the one signed by Lausanne between Greece and Turkey in 1923 — had primarily the function of legalizing the expulsions that had already been carried out.
Even these various treaties, which were intended to codify new territorial conditions on the Balkan Peninsula, proved the abysmal nature of the endeavour to establish ethnic differences as state borders. How do you decide whether the city of Debar, for example, belongs to Albania or Serbia? One side insisted that Debar was mostly inhabited by Albanian Muslims, while the other side stated that the city had never been an Albanian center: although there were two Orthodox episcopates, a Bulgarian and a Serbian school, but no Albanian; all trade was in the hands of Christians and the surrounding villages were mostly inhabited by Christians.
The criteria by which the nation is constructed as an “imaginary order” (M. Rainer Lepisus) are as varied as they are controversial. Eric Hobsbawm has drawn attention to the fact that ethnicity and language use became central criteria for determining the nation towards the end of the 19th century, with in particular those
Community associations that declared themselves a people, a nation without having their own state, focused on the ethnic argument. The concept of the people as Demos, which is characterized by legal association and civic equality, is the idea of the people as ethnos opposite, in which imagined ethnic communities, historical myths, phantasms of communal blood and soil are linked together.
In this specific historical constellation, the formula of the right of peoples to self-determination, which both the Bolsheviks and American President Woodrow Wilson threw into the debate at the end of the First World War, was able to develop enormous political influence. In the crumbling tsarist empire, which, according to the 1897 census, was home to a clear majority of non-Russian peoples, the Bolsheviks sued for the right to secession and the formation of an independent state. At the end of October, even before the decree on the distribution of land, Lenin presented a resolution to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, in which the Council Congress acknowledged the unrestricted right of self-determination of even the smallest peoples in the former Tsarist Empire and released all non-Russian peoples from the Union of the Empire.
While the Bolsheviks used the right to self-determination more strategically to win allies for the revolutionary dismantling of tsarist Russia, Wilson's declaration was undoubtedly an expression of America's democratic spirit. Since the beginning of the war, the President of the United States had repeatedly publicly emphasized that a future peace order in Europe could only succeed if the imperial suppression of the freedom aspirations of small peoples would end and each people would decide their own government. The proclamations of the new Bolshevik government in Moscow urged Wilson to now address the world public with a peace policy program. In a speech on January 8, 1918, he announced to the American Congress his famous “14 points,” to which the German government later also referred explicitly when it admitted military defeat in October and offered armistice negotiations.
According to Wilson, the principle on which his entire peace program was based was, literally, “the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another.” In addition to the disclosure of all treaties, freedom of navigation, equality of trade relations and general disarmament, Wilson called for the impartial settlement of all colonial claims, with the interests of the affected populations being given the same weight as the legal claims of colonial powers. All occupied territories should be evacuated, in particular the sovereignty of Belgium restored.
An independent Polish state should (re) be established, which included the areas in which an indisputably Polish population lived, and the peoples of Austria-Hungary should also be given the freest opportunity for autonomous development. The Turkish part of the Ottoman Empire should also be granted sovereignty, and the other nationalities currently still under Turkish rule — meaning Armenians and Greeks, although unnamed — must be guaranteed the security of their lives and an absolutely unimpeded opportunity for autonomous development. For the Balkans, Wilson also called for the evacuation of all occupied territories; Serbia should be granted free access to the sea and relations between the Balkan states should be regulated by friendly communication in accordance with the historically established principles of affiliation and nationality. The core of Wilson's concept was the formation of a “general association of nations,” the later League of Nations, which was intended to guarantee the political independence and territorial integrity of the large and small states.
As diplomatically balanced as Wilson's proposals were and could therefore also serve as a basis for the peace negotiations at Versailles in 1919, his initiative nevertheless met with a Europe that had already begun to order itself according to “blood.” The formula of peoples' right to self-determination further fuelled ethnic ambitions in Europe. The Treaty of Sévres, which was dictated by the Allies as a successor Treaty to Versailles to the Ottoman Empire in August 1920 and which, among other things, provided for the formation of a separate Armenian nation state in Eastern Anatolia, was no longer worth the paper on which it was written. Greece had already exploited the Ottoman weakness and occupied the port city of Smyrna in Asia Minor and a coastal strip in May 1919. More than a million Greeks still lived in Ottoman Asia Minor, and the dream of a Greater Greece now seemed to be a reality. In July 1921, the Greek military pushed north and east far into the interior of the Aegean Sea, burning down Turkish villages in the conquered areas and expelling their population. However, the Greek attack came to a standstill in front of Ankara. The Turkish troops under Mustafa Kemal succeeded in a successful counteroffensive that forced the Greeks to retreat, which once again devastated entire villages, mistreated, raped and killed civilians. In the port of Smyrna, from which tens of thousands tried to escape, disaster struck in mid-September when the city began to burn and the trapped refugees on the quay were left defenceless at the mercy of the flames.
The Lausanne Treaty, which was signed in July 1923 by Greece and Turkey as well as Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan, sanctioned the expulsions and deportations as “population transfer”: All Anatolian Greeks, a total of between 1.2 and 1.5 million, most of whom had already been expelled down to around 290,000, had to leave their homes as well as around 350,000 Turks who were expelled from Greece to Turkey.
The signatory parties were also not totalitarian dictatorships. France, Great Britain, Italy were ruled by parliament, as was Greece. In this respect, democratic societies apparently do not seem to rule out practices of ethnic cleansing and popular sovereignty is no obstacle to excessive violence against civilians. There is an ambivalence in the concept of popular sovereignty that allows not only participation but also aggression (Dieter Langewiesche), which is as compatible with policies of inclusion as with violent exclusion.
In terms of territoriality and state, decisions about ethnic affiliations only create the problems they promise to solve, because every ethnic differentiation creates ethnic majorities and minorities, which inevitably call for territorial homogeneity. But the concept of ethnicity blurs a difference that raises the question of life and death beyond history, language, culture and ancestry myths: this difference will be expressed by the concept of race.
Biologism sets the decisive turning point that separates the people from the nation as soon as it also becomes a social paradigm. In my opinion, it is worth taking up Michel Foucault's thesis in this context, according to which, since the end of the 18th century, a new power regime has emerged in Europe that is no longer guided by sovereignty, by the right to kill, but by technologies of power aimed at life, on processes of birth control, fertility rates, hygiene, disease control:
“Bio-politics,” as Foucault calls this new power regime.
With the advent of organic politics, according to Foucault, racism is becoming a fundamental mechanism of power. In the biopolitical regime, racist convictions introduce significant distinctions into the biological continuum, not least between life forms that should continue to exist and those that must die. For this racism, which can culminate in the biological definition of a people, the state is not a necessary implication.
As is well known, cultural minorities in existing nation states were assimilated with repressive nationalization policies to the point of complete dissolution of their identity. They were undoubtedly subjected to considerable pressure and government coercion, but they were not destroyed. The concept of nation can therefore include ethnic attributions that already entail requirements for homogeneity. But it is only biologism that stamps the otherness of the “other” into a fact of nature, i.e. inescapable of invoking genetic and no longer simply genealogical differences which, by definition, cannot be assimilated. In this way, murderous policies of segregation and eradication solve the former
Assimilation projects off.
Racism, which in Foucault primarily appears as a functional biopolitical selection criterion, contains its own phantasm of differentiation and hierarchization, not only in relation to other peoples and “races,” but also within one's own people. The spread of racial anti-Semitism at the end of the 19th century as a qualitatively new form of hostility towards Jews is therefore closely linked to the implementation of biology as the guiding science of “life.”
With the development of biological sciences, in particular Darwinism and eugenics, the “people” could be constructed beyond the horizon of a purely genealogical community of descent: on the one hand retrospectively as a historical “blood community” and on the other hand, directed towards the future, as a breeding community, as a collective that was first produced biopolitically. The phantasm of the “new person” was given a supposedly scientifically verified “natural” basis and, thanks to the new biopolitical technologies, a practical option for social implementation.
Just as Volk can no longer be regarded as a “state people” in Jellinek's sense from a biopolitical perspective, the territory can no longer be understood as a cartographically defined “state territory.” “Lebensraum” becomes the name for territories of biopolitically composed peoples. Such a habitat extends beyond state borders and even calls them into question. The virulence with which the German Reich, particularly after 1933, kept the question of “ethnic Germans” on the agenda in Europe was not only aimed at revising the Treaty of Versailles, i.e. the return to the borders of 1914, but far more at the reorganization of Europe. Various pan movements acted in a similar way, as Hannah Arendt pointed out early on. Territorial structures such as Greater Serbia, Greater Bulgaria or Greater Greece extended far beyond existing nation-state borders.
Cartography was therefore of immense importance, as Benedict Anderson drew attention to, it was possible to construct a political and geographical narrative of power with the help of maps. For example, the formation of nation states was closely linked to the census, i.e. to the counting and segmentation of populations, but it was also an arena of politicized cartography: borders were to be redefined and politically enforced in their terms. In contrast, the biopolitically inspired, new maps of the people primarily identified language, cultural and living spaces. Significantly, the relevance of the map material appears again and again in the memoirs of the diplomats involved in the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. With him, all delegations sought to prove their peoples' claim to self-determination. The demand for the territorial autonomy of ethnic groups, which is based on ostensibly clear population majorities and closed settlement structures in a corresponding region, always points to an underlying idea of homogeneity, according to which “people” and “space” belong together. “Foreign” groups that do not comply with the respective constructed assignments must therefore either be satisfied with an inferior status in the marked rooms or leave the country.
From the perspective of bio-power, the perception of the people as state sovereign is also changing. When the identity of the people is no longer politically defined, when it is no longer the political will of the citizens that constitutes the people, but the affiliation of “blood,” extraconstitutional criteria for the constitution of the people take on considerably greater weight.
While equality on the foil of the nation was primarily understood as the equality of civil legal entities before the law, it follows from the draft of the people as a life order of their own law and from the postulate of optimising this order of life, a biopolitics whose basic scheme distinguishes strictly between “worth living” and “not worth living.” That the euthanasia measures are the annihilation policy of
National Socialists began, is not an accidental fact. It was the “blood,” not the law, that defined the people.
The construction of the nation as a legal system was replaced by the construction of the people as the order of life. The rise of bio-power shifted the political ambivalences that were inherent in the concept of the nation from the outset. Demos Naturalized to ethnos, and the general public as an addressee of bio-power became particularized to optimize individual, racially hierarchical peoples. Popular sovereignty as a principle of legitimacy of modern political rule was given, as Carl Schmitt had put it, a biologized basis of “equality of species.” The result was those extremely violent constellations that could neither be alleviated by the international regulation of minority rights nor by the conciliation competence of the League of Nations, and not even with conventional, hegemonic assimilation policies as they were known in the 19th century.
Carl Schmitt coldly stated in his “Constitutional Doctrine” published in 1928 that national homogeneity does not exist in European state reality. Although there is the possibility of peaceful assimilation of minorities, Schmitt said literally, another method is “faster and more violent,” namely “elimination of the foreign component through suppression, expulsion of heterogeneous sections of the population and similar radical means.” The biological definition of the people allows neither equality nor territorial integrity, but requires segregation, expulsion and annihilation.
It is this radicalization of ethnic politics into racist biopolitics that, beyond the demand for ethnic homogeneity in the nation state, which always means forced assimilation, expulsion or deportation, has mass-murderous, genocidal consequences.