The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing

"When I started my book on racism I was quite open-minded. I started with the Middle Ages, and I thought there was a good hypothesis relating racism in the Western world with the European expansion. The European expansion brought with it the need to classify different peoples of the world, the need to assert European superiority. But I didn’t know where to stop. At the beginning I thought I would stop with Darwin, but then I understood I had to include the 20th century, because it confirmed even more clearly that racism is triggered by political projects. Michael Mann was extremely useful in my research because he made me understand better the relation between nationalism and racism. In those circumstances, in the 19th century, nationalism based on democracy and citizenship triggered a struggle for territory, for the definition of new countries, mainly in central-eastern Europe and the Balkans. In that part of Europe you still had these composite, multinational empires — the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman Empire. All of these trends of nationalism — which had started at the beginning of the 19th century in a very generous, internationalist way, with dreams of sharing and cosmopolitanism — were confronted by the revolutions of 1848. Suddenly all these political projects bumped into claims of minorities. For instance, the Czechs had to deal with a strong German minority in the territory they were claiming. The Hungarians were confronted and challenged by Croatians and Romanians in the territories they were claiming. After the failure of the revolutions of 1848, you have a different trend, much narrower, much less cosmopolitan, much more centred in this idea of nation as a collective descent. And democracy, based on citizenship, brought with it the idea of exclusion. When you claim a territory, the issue was to exclude minorities who were struggling for the same territory. So this is the dark side of democracy, and I think Michael Mann saw it very well. Michael Mann is a sociologist, he bases his work mainly on secondary literature, and I must say he does it brilliantly. I am very attracted by his theories and he has several great ideas. I would not follow the way he practices history because I prefer to work on primary sources, but his work was a great inspiration. Also, he links history with sociology. This is another inter-disciplinary approach. We always work with some theoretical framework, and I was very inspired all my life by Max Weber, another sociologist. So I am glad I can still maintain this dialogue with what Michael Mann represents, historical sociology. I have no doubt about that. With all the cases he presented in his book and I presented in my book, we have many, many practical examples. I’m not saying we can define rules — Michael Mann is more focused on rules — but we have all these experiences and we can prevent future problems. For instance, in South Sudan, right now. There is an ongoing struggle for monopoly of resources. South Sudan inherited three-quarters of the oil deposits from the old Sudan. It’s a multi-ethnic new state, and there are there major ethnicities, the Dinka, the Nuer and the Azande. They were pastoralist populations also engaged with agriculture. They don’t have a great difference of tradition between them. The problem is that with civil war in the old Sudan, they lost their cattle, they lost part of their agriculture, there was devastation. Now they are used to war and they are struggling for this monopolization of resources, mainly this access to oil. The United Nations understood this from the beginning and is trying to limit and overcome civil war."