2. POST-TOTALITARIAN ELEMENTS AND EICHMANN’S MENTALITY IN THE YUGOSLAV WAR AND MASS KILLINGS
Vlasta Jalusic
In the large body of literature about the Holocaust and Nazi totalitarianism today, the extinction of the European Jewish population is treated as an unparalleled act that cannot and should not be repeated. “Never again” has become the motto of commemorations of the victims of Nazi terror in general and as such it represents the heart of the politics of memory, which, through awareness of the Holocaust’s warning, has attempted to create conditions in which the repetition of such an unparalleled crime would be impossible. However, in spite of the persistent claims in the genocide scholarship of its uniqueness and in spite of the refusal to compareit to contemporary genocides, the Nazi Holocaust has inevitably been linked to theevents in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. the Rwandan genocide, in particular—owing to the number of victims and the way the crime was accomplished—hasemerged as the most suitable case for emphasizing a “crucial similarity,”1 while the name “Srebrenica” has become associated with “the worst massacre in Europe after the Second World War.” Conserving the Holocaust as a unique or paradigmatic case of genocide or using it as an ultimate standard of moral condemnation obviously has had no eff ect, since the new events have evinced similarities to the Holocaust, as well as their own uniqueness. The “never again” politics helped neither in the understanding nor the prevention of genocidal developments because one could not simply learn from the past to prevent future “repetitions.”2 In both these more recent cases it seemed as if the “unparalleled” had reappeared, except that the killings on the soil of the former Yugoslavia turned out to be exceptional in the European context.
After the reports of the massacre of Srebrenica in the summer of 1995, questions emerged reminiscent of those after the Second World War: How was such a thing possible? How could it have happened “again” (in the middle of “civilized” Europe)? Why would people kill their cocitizens, sometimes their neighbors and acquaintances? These disturbing questions implied a broader frame: Is it possible to explain and (eventually) understand such events? Could we possibly prevent them, if we knew their origins and recognized them in time? How can we help ourselves with the lessons from the Holocaust and totalitarianism?
These questions not only touch upon the issue of “definitions” of genocide, for example, or of the potential for a catastrophe such as the destruction of European Jews. They also struggle with the moral and political problem of how to make the conditions, “origins,” or elements of such events “visible,” how to “see” that they take place in order to make those who can or should prevent them “recognize” them, in the sense of providing adequate legal arrangements and/or initiating action. This chapter will engage with some of the above questions concerning the background of crimes and mass murders in the former Yugoslavia, while aiming at an understanding of the case through the perspective and the legacy of Hannah Arendt’s thought.
The Arendtian Legacy and Post-Totalitarian Temptations
In spite of a growing literature on the “social construction” of both ethnicity and war in the former Yugoslavia, there still exist two interconnected and widespread explanations of the origins of war and mass killings. One is a thesis commonly voiced that people were “manipulated” by politicians, while the other involves the “in the beginning there were nationalisms” thesis that is partly connected to the former one. Manipulation and propaganda were seen as the reputed reasons for nationalist support, and the increasing emphasis on nationalisms, which erupted immediately after Tito’s death, were then seen as the proper impetus for war. Social scientists have time and again fallen into the trap of seeing nationalism as a kind of biological, essential, or natural force, which, as some kind of an ever-present virus or contagious disease, “attacked” people in the former Yugoslavia or resulted from “ancient hatred,” resulting in war and killing as their almost inevitable outcome.3
Such one-dimensional explanations are among the main reasons that I would like to point to some features of Arendtian political thought that might illuminate our understanding of some of the terrible events in the former Yugoslavia. The ideas about nationalism as “the origin” bear a resemblance to the presumption, rejected by Arendt, that an ancient hatred toward Jews—that is, an “eternal” anti-Semitism—was the main cause or a even a single explanation for the Holocaust and Nazi totalitarianism, a thesis which has been, in the case of German anti-Semitism, recently advocated zealously by Daniel Goldhagen.
Arendt refused monocausal explanations in attempting to create an understanding of the paths toward totalitarian domination and its novel crimes. On the one hand, she was thinking in terms of elements of totalitarianism, which she traced back to history, as she was trying to understand them, on the other hand, while taking into account something that mainstream social scientists’ methods did not consider: human action, human plurality, spontaneity, and the capacity to begin anew—exactly those elements of the human condition that totalitarianism was about to destroy.4 This enabled her to argue about totalitarianism in a nondeterminist and noncausative way, to retrace and discuss the elements that she found to be crucial in its development, but to state clearly that it did not automatically spring from one single element, or even from a set of them, and that it (the tragedy) was thus not inevitable.5 Anti-Semitism, imperialism, racism, and the decline of the nation-state were considered as important elements but not single causes. They would only “eventually crystallize into totalitarianism.”6 In the absence of causal relations, not only was the issue of individual guilt for the crimes strongly emphasized but also that of the individual and collective (political) responsibility for not preventing totalitarian developments as well. This approach, combining elements and underlining human agency in bringing about the political phenomena, resulted in a series of insights and lessons that are important for understanding the Yugoslav case.
Furthermore, Arendt did not consider totalitarianism and its threats—although they constituted an absolute novelty—to be a fixed and unchangeable evil structure. On the contrary, she immediately started to think about the possible “repetitions” and new, post-totalitarian predicaments.7 Although it is true that the Holocaust and the most extreme forms of totalitarian domination have already passed, it remains a fact that totalitarian elements—for example racism, bureaucracy, the decline of the nation-state, and various forms of totalitarian solutions—“can survive the system in the form of several temptations.”8 Arendt thought that the “unparalleled” new crimes that happened under Nazi-totalitarianism (such as the constructed superfluity of humans and the destruction of plurality, exemplified in the extermination camps) became a precedent, and thus it was more likely than before that they would happen again,9 once the “threshold” of “everything is possible” has been breached.10 However, they will not necessarily appear in their cruellest form;11 they will not “repeat” the identical event: “the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form . . . only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.”12
This new situation and the new predicaments were closely connected with the new context emerging after totalitarian experience, with the broken tradition in all itssenses, and especially with the impaired standards of political thinking and moraljudgment. There are two important issues for the present analysis linked to this new context. One is related to the role and the power of ideologies—such as anti-Semitism, racism and, associated intrinsically with them, nationalism—and to the role of their transformed successors. The other applies to the potential for new crimes, brought about by totalitarianism, along with the “nature” of evil and the issue of responsibility.
Racism, Anti-Semitism, Nationalism, and the Power of Ideologies
Racism, anti-Semitism, and nationalism can be explained as interrelated modern ideologies: modern anti-Semitism is a special and principally a totalitarian variety,while the other two represent the ideologies of imagined communities (of race and of the nation-state). Basically, they each embody sets of attitudes, beliefs, and activities that produce and legitimize exclusions from, and inclusions into, imagined communities and are essentially linked to the establishment of boundaries between the imagined communities and “the Others.” They are thus, as noted byArendt, intrinsically connected to the rise (and decline) of the nation-state and its mechanisms of power. Though the ideas of race and nation can overlap, since, as noted by Balibar, “discourses on race and nation are never far apart,” nationalism and racism do not represent the same or coderivable phenomena. There exists an ambiguous relation between them: nationalism can be seen as a determining condition for the production of racism, and racism might become a parameter to define nationalism.13 This, however, does not necessarily imply that racism is an inevitable consequence of nationalism or that nationalism is impossible without latent racism.14 The difference between them is not between the “normal” and “extreme” in terms of degree. Both being exclusive ways of human conduct, they nevertheless represent two different types of approach to the issue of political organization: if nationalism tends to articulate itself in terms of state objectives (either in statebuilding or through an ideology such as “self determination”) then racism attempts to overcome the state framework.15
This interrelation and opposition—namely, that racism can not be consideredas a simple “intensifi cation” of nationalism—was clearly observable in the relationship between Nazi racism and German nationalism, where racism exceeded and actually destroyed the nationalist project and became a goal in itself. Arendt has shown how the intersections between both phenomena in the German case and in other Pan-nationalisms and movements operate to form a new, “advanced” type of nationalism, the so called “tribal (völkisch) nationalism,” with “race” as not only an indispensable part of its structure but its final target. This type of nationalism does not represent an “excessive” or “ultra” nationalism, but it shows a split between “traditional” nationalism, aiming at one’s own state, and tribal nationalism, having as its goal an achievement of some kind of organic, racialized nation, transcending the boundaries of the nation-state. Tribal nationalisms were thus simultaneously an addition to and modification of nationalism: they were used as powerful ideologies by those peoples who understood themselves as rootless, but as an organic national body, surrounded by a world of enemies such as Germany or Russia and dispersed over the home country’s borders. They believed in the chosen nature of their own race or people against others, adopted racism as the ideology of their national unity, and shared with overseas imperialism a hostility against their “narrow’ (nation) state.”16
This transformation of nationalism through the open establishment of a common ground between racism and nationalism, shown in the phenomenon of tribal nationalisms, was an ideal site for totalitarian policies themselves. It represented, together with anti-Semitism as its central component,17 a superb means for the destruction of reality (in Arendt’s terms the “world” itself ) and thus for undermining the common ground of thinking and judgment. These movements have found an ideal “Other” in the fabricated image of the international Jew “in general,” the“elusive enemy,”18 representing the paradigmatic case of neoracism, “racism without race,” and needing no pseudobiological concept of race or nature, since culture or some other type of ideological production can sufficiently replace it.19 Only here anti-Semitism became a “pure” ideology, an “outrage to common sense,”20 in the sense of total fabrication. However, totalitarian policies are “far from being simply anti-Semitic or racist or imperialist or communist.” They “use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of factual reality, from which the ideologies originally derived their strength and their propaganda value. . . have all but disappeared.”21 This peculiar “self-manipulating” moment in the ideologies of racism and tribal nationalism, hardly comprehensible to those whosee political action as above all an instrumental activity or manipulation of others, might cast light on the means by which totalitarian threats might adapt and become “ideologically” functional in the long run. They do so not by building an “instrumental” world where everything is “under control” but by creating what Arendt called “images,” a “reality” frame, independent of the world, which starts to operate through its self-perpetuating logic as “truth.”22 These images function similarly to Erving Goffman’s strong discourse, a frame that, once established, is very hard to resist, since it functions as reality (“The Truth”) itself regardless of any “real basis” in truth. Since it is already permanently “in action,” such an image can finally have perfectly real effects on the people’s behaviour and actions. It can justify and normalize all possible deeds, including ethnic cleansing, or genocide. The “real” in respect to ideology is thus no longer its content or its attempt at indoctrination, but “self-manipulation,” intense “social constructionism,” productivity,and creativity. Modern ideologies adopt the mode of fabrication, without needing to “indoctrinate” or to constitute a “deep” conviction or belief. They seem rather to be a superficial set of fabricated policies of “everyday,” “simple,” and “obvious” truths. If we approach it this way, then such an “image” comes close to the Arendtian description of the evil as banal: it is nothing deep but is, as she once put it, after reconsidering her claim about radical evil in totalitarianism, “spreading like a fungus on the surface.”23
Between “Structure” and “Intention”:
The Banality of Evil and the New Crimes?
These considerations are closely connected to the issue of the role played by ideologiesin the motives of perpetrators, and in the attitudes of bystanders in instances of totalitarian temptations and mass murders. Arendt tackled this issue with the articulation of her “banality of evil” thesis and presumably reduced the role that she had previously attributed to ideology. She challenged the predominant interpretations of genocide and crimes against humanity in terms of anti-Semitic indoctrination and anticipated the later discussions and results of historical scholarship.24 It is usually understood that the “banality of evil” thesis confirms and belongs to what is called the structural-functionalist holocaust interpretation camp, which insists on modern structures as the origin for crimes “without motives” as a keyfactor. This stands in contrast to the ideological-intentionalist interpretation that insists on the power of indoctrination (presumably of ideologies) and on the evil intentions of the perpetrators.25 However, taking a closer look at Arendt’s analysis reveals the misunderstanding and misinterpretation behind such assumptions,which do not help us to think about the new experiences. With her analysis of thoughtlessness, Arendt in fact went beyond this dichotomy (although she insisted that she had abandoned the role of ideology in favor of the banality of the perpetrator).26 I will try to show later how illuminating this can be for understanding the power of ideologies—racism and nationalism—in the case of the massive crimes in the former Yugoslavia.
In Eichmann, Arendt revealed a new type of perpetrator, one who committed a novel sort of crime, without traditional motives of hatred and without needing to be a monstrously fanatic, deeply indoctrinated anti-Semite. He appeared “banal”and “thoughtless” in the strict sense of the word, someone who was not able tothink about what he was doing, although he “knew quite well what it was all about.”27 The main controversy provoked by this case became the issue of the intentionality or nonintentionality of his evil deeds, the question of whether Arendt, by detecting his thoughtlessness, had really absolved Eichmann of his deeds and ,instead, blamed the victims (Jewish councils). In addition, there was the question of whether (and if so, why) she “changed her mind” and abandoned the concept of “radical evil” for that of “banality.”28 One of the recent (and paradigmatic) opponents of Arendt, Yaacov Lozowick, maintains that Arendt unjustifiably placed the main emphasis on the functional and not on ideological causes and completely overlooked the historic fact that Eichmann, together with his bunch of fellowbureaucrats, was an indoctrinated anti-Semite. Thus he was, contra Arendt, very much aware of his mission, and of what he was doing when sending transports of Jews to the concentration camps. This proves his evil motives and personality and the nonbanality of his deeds, and “cuts the ground from beneath” Arendt’s thesis that he was a banal perpetrator.29
Arendt’s point, however, was not at all that Eichmann was not conscious of the effects of his actions in the casual sense. On the contrary, she pointed to the fact that he was very much aware of the consequences of his deeds.30 Her specific definition of “thoughtlessness” was not “mindlessness” or stupidity; it was rather based on the difference between knowing and thinking (analysed more closely in The Life of the Mind). Thoughtlessness represents a special kind of mentality—not the absence of rational and instrumental thinking but of the judging ability and activity, imagination itself. It emerges under conditions of inverted human order and represents a shield against reality—in fact, a constructed world of self-deception.
By raising the issue of banality and Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, Arendt was not only pointing to a novel type of crime (“crime against humanity” or, beyond that, “against diversity” and not solely genocide)31 and proclaiming Eichmann a “hostis generis humani.” She was also pointing to their universality and to the enormous potential for future repetition,32 as the massive circumstances behind the development of such a type of thoughtless perpetrator could only spread and evolve on a global scale. Additionally, she stopped judging evil deeds by “intentions” and will but focused her attention on the factual effects of deeds.33 Evil deeds and their new perpetrators do not necessarily have to look or be represented as monstrous in order to have immediate monstrous consequences. They do not have to be acts of an evil “will” or of any will at all. As our contemporary circumstances show, they might even present themselves as good and as fighting against presumably monstrous evils, which can be fabricated in the form of an elusive enemy.
Departing from the lessons about the power of ideologies, the banality of evil, and thoughtlessness I have outlined, there are two issues I would particularly like to tackle when turning to the Yugoslav case: first, the question of nationalism and the role of racism—as powerful ideological means for the mass mobilization and justification of violence and killings. Then, I would like to elaborate on the relation of racist and nationalist ideologies to the direct mobilization for the commission of crimes and to raise the question whether thoughtlessness represents a part of the general “structure” or frame that enables such crimes to happen in our time.
Elements of Racism: Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia was a paradigmatic new case in which race thinking, not directly connected to any assumed ‘biological’ formulation, began to play an important role in the preparation for war, and where the combined elements of race production, mass mobilization, and terror influenced ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and postconflict state building. However, racism in particular was overlooked or sidestepped by most analyses,34 while mobilization, war, and genocide were debated in terms of excessive (ethnic) nationalism, ancient hatred, and elite manipulation. Except for a few authors, there are few references to racism in the literature about the war and the killings in the former Yugoslavia.35 Even those analyses that account for elements of racism and refer to ‘racist dimensions’ speak mainly about ethnonationalism, ultranationalism,36 extreme nationalism, or, like Branimir Anzulovic in his book Heavenly Serbia, about ethnotribalism, which comes closest to noting racist elements and the issue of tribal nationalist mobilization.37
One reason for the prevailing omission of racism in this literature is certainly its nonconceptualization as a relevant explanatory moment for the Yugoslav case and the stress instead on biological racism, which thus does not link it with what is usually seen as nationalism or excessive nationalism.38 Another incentive might resemble the academic avoidance of the question of massive popular participation in the Rwandan genocide, since it raises unpleasant questions about indifference, conformism, and collaboration39 and does not tackle the issue of widespread racist thinking among intellectuals. Racism might thus be subsumed under the more “respectable” cover of nationalism or “culture.” As Etienne Balibar has suggested, a strong emphasis on the distinction between nationalism and racism or Nazi-racismcan conceal the racist elements within nationalism itself (especially underlining the difference between “normal” and “excessive” forms).40
In what sense can we speak of the power of racism in the 1980s and 1990s in the former Yugoslavia? It should be understood in relation to tribal nationalism as explained within its broader and transformative aspect and be tested against theabove described role and power of totalitarian ideologies. Racism was, of course, not the “cause” of war/s in the sense of being the only element that led to the conflict.41 Nonetheless, not unlike modern anti-Semitism, which, as Arendt noted, arose from a relatively unimportant political phenomenon to became a powerful transformative ideology, in the former Yugoslavia a new, transformed sort of racism emerged: it grew out of the nationalist soil and cemented various elements and discourses, including nationalist ones, together. Its mobilizing force and role are close to the tribal nationalism described in the first part of the chapter. It is a paradigmatic case of racism without race: race here is a social construction, a result ofthe essentialization of characteristics attributed to the group(s) (racialization) and primordialization of identities, rendering them natural and unchangeable. This process of racism was, to be sure, connected to nationalism, and it grew up on its own terrain.
Elements of racism in post-Tito Yugoslavia began to unfold with the help bothof the masses and the rising elites, there being a need of popular support for their policies in the 1980s, and in view of the democratic multiparty elections in the1990s.42 These elements were crucial for the subsequent radical divisions. The consequences of race thinking and racism first came into view in connection with policies and police repression in the Serbian autonomous province of Kosovo (the Serbian “sacred land” that had an Albanian majority—a non-Slavic population) in the early 1980s, long before the beginning of the war. The Kosovo problem was the core of the process of the destruction of Yugoslavia, and during the process of escalation it became an “abstraction,” a myth. It was there that the relations were first racialized and that the difference was framed in terms of quasi-biological differences and, so to speak, “written on the body.” To understand the racialization of relations in the former Yugoslavia, one must consider the attitudes toward Kosovo Albanians, since the “Kosovization” of Serbian politics later spread to the whole of Yugoslav politics.43
Albanians were the target of Serbian race-thinking even at the beginning of the twentieth century: they were, on the one hand, dehumanized and represented as a wild, anarchic tribe without history and state—similar to apes and sleeping in trees—“European Redskins” who could not govern themselves, a sort of strange, resistant element that should be exterminated. On the other hand, they were treated actually as “lost Serbs,” the worst converted characters, who had been assimilated through a process of Albanian violence, rape, killings, and property theft, since this was the only way to explain the preservation and even the demographic growth of Albanians.44 In 1937, a Serbian academic, Vaso Cubrilovic, prepared a memorandum to the “solution of the Albanian question.” He raised the alarm regarding the “demographic explosion” of the Albanian population and suggested that all methods for marginalizing the Muslim-Albanian population had so far failed and that one should introduce methods which would correspond to the “Western approaches”: the introduction of laws that would make the life of Albanians in Yugoslavia unbearable, followed by mass deportations.45
The proposed measures had the character of ethnic cleansing avant la lettre, and they point to a very problematic scholarly tradition from the first part of the twentieth century, which, based on racist premises, advocated population transfer and exchange as normal “policy solutions.”46 Not surprisingly, the discourse of “planned resettlement” was restored in the 1980s through intellectual and scientific discussions of the necessary demographic policies to hinder the supposed “demographic genocide” of Serbs in Kosovo. Dobrica Cosic, a member of the Serbian Academia of Sciences, a novelist and confirmed dissident, who became president of Yugoslavia in 1992 and belonged among the intellectuals who formed the new Serbian Kosovo platform after Tito’s death, stated in 1991: “Planned resettlement and population exchanges, while most diffi ult and most painful, are still better than a life of hatred and mutual killings.”47 In this process, Albanians were represented once more as dangerous, sly intruders who threaten “our” families, women, property, graves, and tradition and who can conspicuously misuse their own sexuality and rape or attempt to rape “our” women from sheer “separatist” motives. Here, the image of the “Other” was successfully combined with the image of an intruder, a settler, who is occupying and taking over “our land.” This image of the intruder or settler acquired the status of an elusive enemy, which could later be applied easily to the Muslim population in Bosnia, who were targeted as “Turks.”48
Through the prototype of the racialized Other, Albanians were not the onlyc ase of racialization. In the second half of the 1980s, the “clash of civilizations” loomed large—one could see derogatory images of a presumed Balkan and uncivilized enemy throughout Yugoslavia. The “Balkan man” was depicted as lazy, indifferent, and violent; and contrasted with images of a diligent, hard working, honest,c ivilized non-Balkan man. West-east and north-south divisions paved the way for the Europe-Balkans dividing line in these boundary drawings. They divided Yugoslavia itself and helped to reinforce the already existing Western racist-cultural prejudices and images that conditioned later problematic responses to the massmurders. The Slovenian and Croatian media and cultural elites tried to classify themselves as more civilized than the others and to place themselves on the “European” side of the demarcation line between Europe and Yugoslavia. They did soby enforcing an image of the “Balkans” as violent and macho, lazy and backward, fatalist, fraudulent, and cunning. The “North” or “West” saw itself as defending and cherishing European culture against the sinister backdrop of the wild, dark, orthodox, oriental, and Islamic Balkans. Yet the “eastern” part of Yugoslavia, on the other hand, worshipped its own putatively ancient, traditional, hospitable, and “anti-fascist” values. From that perspective, Slovenians were characterized as feminized, weak, exploitative, cunning, selfish, and calculating, whereas Croatians were positioned as more Western but also as Nazi-followers, and the supposed similarity of Croat and German characteristics of evil with bellicose traits emphasized (Croats who “speak Croatian but think ‘German’”).49 Albanians, Muslims, and Roma were in the worst position. In fact, to all those who shared a Slavic language, Albanians represented the “‘Other’ within.”50
Notes
1. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, and Oxford, 2001), 5.
2. On the question of the difference between the Holocaust and genocide, and of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, concerning scholarly discourse, see A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and Genocide,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke, and New York, 2004), 547. On the comparison of the Holocaust with the Rwandan genocide, see Nigel Eltringham, Accounting for Horror: Post Genocide Debates in Rwanda (London, 2004), 51–68.
3. There are too many examples to list to them all but one might be the following: “To a historian, today’s Balkan crises are rooted in, above all, the crippling dependence of all Balkan peoples on the ideology and psychology of expansionist nationalism.” See William W. Hagen, “Balkans’ Lethal Nationalisms,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 4 (1999): 52.
4. Ernst Vollrath, “Hannah Arendt and the Method of Political Thinking,” Social Research 44, no.1 (1977): 166.
5. Arendt considered the title, given by the publisher to The Origins of Totalitarianism, to be inappropriate since it conveyed the wrong impression that her intentions were to clarify “origins” and “causes.” Hannah Arendt, “A Reply to Eric Voegelin,” in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 1994), 403.
6. Ibid.
7. She started to think about possible new forms of totalitarianism in the essay “Ideology and Terror,” included in the 1958 revised edition of Origins, and she continued with that on the basis of observations of post-Second World War changes in Germany, of the consequences of the “thaw” in the Soviet Union, of the experience of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. and the experience in the United States with McCarthyism.
8. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, 1986), 459.
9. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1977), 273.
10. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA, 1998), 181ff .
11. Perhaps, in the future, we will see “large sections of population become ‘superfluous’ even in terms of labour,” or we will have to face “the use of instruments beside which Hitler’s gassing installations look like an evil child’s fumbling toys.” See Arendt, Eichmann, 273.
12. Arendt, Origins, 460.
13. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London, 1991), 37–8 and R. Miles, Racism after Race Relations (London, 1993), 59.
14. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 37–38.
15. Racism is thus not an “‘expression’ of nationalism, but a supplement to nationalism, or more precisely a supplement internal to nationalism, always in excess of it, but always indispensable to its constitution and yet always still insufficient to achieve its project, just as nationalism is both indispensable and always insufficient to achieve the formation of the nation or the projectof the ‘nationalization’ of society.” Ibid, 54.
16. See Arendt, Origins, 227–243.
17. Richard Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 67.
18. Omer Bartov, “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust,” American Historical Review 10, no. 3 (1998), 771–816.
19. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 22–23.
20. Arendt, Origins, 3–10.
21. Ibid., xv.
22. In “Lying in Politics,” she spoke about such an imaginary enterprise as “image making as global policy.” In Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York, 1972), 18–19. About image making as a policy see also “Home to Roost,” in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 2003), 257–275.
23. Hannah Arendt, “Letter to Gershom Scholem,” in The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron H. Feldman (NewYork, 1978), 150.
24. Hans Mommsen, “Hannah Arendt’s Interpretation of the Holocaust as a Challenge to Human Existence: The Intellectual Background,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Aschheim (Berkeley, 2002), 225–6.
25. This debate was renewed with the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York, 1996) maintaining that the main cause of the Holocaust was the German ideology of anti-Semitism. For more about this debate, see A. D. Moses, “Structure and Agenc yin the Holocaust: Daniel J. Goldhagen and his Critics,” History and Theory 37, no. 2 (1998), 194–219, 202ff .
26. Arendt apparently changed her mind regarding the role and power of ideology when reporting about the process against Eichmann. She claimed that in Origins she had overstated the influence of ideologies on the individual. In her letter to Mary McCarthy on September 20, 1963, she wrote that anti-Semitism itself gets lost in the process of extermination and instead the “movement” itself takes the lead. It seems, however, that Arendt unconsciously held two notions of ideology: the first concerns the role of ideology as indoctrination and is close to the Marxist notion; the second underlines ideological productivity—of totalitarian movements and policies, fabricating the frame of "reality" that is comparable to Foucauldian productivity and power of discourse. Later, she returned to this ideological productivity—as early as in Eichmannin Jerusalem—when claiming that Eichmann had been living in the world of "self-deception"common to millions of Germans and thus living in a kind of a "fabricated truth." She noticed the power of the image when trying to withstand incomprehensibly brutal attacks on her book about Eichmann. Many of those who attacked the Eichmann book were actually dealing with a fabricated image of it and not with what she really wrote. Hannah Arendt-Mary McCarthy. ImVertrauen: Briefwechsel 1949 – 1975 (Munich, 1995), 233–4, 238–9.
27. Arendt, Eichmann, 287.
28. Among recent critiques of the Arendtian "banality of evil" thesis, see Yaacov Lozowick, Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security and the Banality of Evil (London and New York, 2002), and Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton,NJ, 2001), 31–69. An excellent clarification of the relation between radical and banal evil is given in Bernstein, Hannah Arendt, 137–153. For overviews of the reception of Arendt’s book on Eichmann and the debates about the main issues, see: Richard I. Cohen, "A Generation’s Response to Eichmann in Jerusalem," in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Aschheim, 253–277; Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven and London, 1982), 328–377; Jennifer Ring, The Political Consequences of Thinking, Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (Albany, 1997); Hans Mommsen, "Hannah Arendt’s Interpretation of the Holocaust as a Challenge to Human Existence: The Intellectual Background"; Susan Neiman, "Theodicy in Jerusalem"; and Dana Villa, "Apologist or Critic? On Arendt’s Relation to Heidegger," in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Aschheim, 224–232, 65–90, and 325–337. On the intellectual anchorage and universalist effects of the notion of the banality of evil, see Richard H. King, Race, Culture and Intellectuals 1940–1970 (Baltimore and Washington, D.C., 2004), 173–195.
29. Lozowick, Hitler’s Bureaucrats, 230. Lozowick repeats Yehuda Bauer’s judgment, which, however, forgets that Arendt never claimed Eichmann’s deeds as ‘banal’ but the perpetrator himself (seeKing, Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 189).
30. Arendt, Eichmann, 212ff , 22, 277–8.
31. She considered the Holocaust a crime against humanity "committed on the body of the Jewish people." See Eichmann, 7.
32. See King, Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 192.
33. See Neiman, "Theodicy in Jerusalem."
34. Julie Mertus, "The Role of Racism as a Cause or Factor in Wars and Civil Conflict," in International Council on Human Rights Policy: Consultation on Racism and Human Rights Geneva, (December3–4), 1999, (http://www.ichrp.org/ac/excerpts/50.pdf ), accessed 13 May 2005, 1.
35. Michael A. Sells’ The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London,1998) explores "religious mythology, extreme nationalism, and racialist theory" in the case of Bosnia (xv). See also David Bruce MacDonald, Balkan Holocausts? Serbian and Croatian Victim-Centred Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia (Manchester and New York, 2002), 122ff . and Aleksa Djilas, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919–1953 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 107, who both underline the importance of racial differences in the process of distinction making between the Serbian and the Croatian groups.
36. See J. A. Irvine, "Balkan Authoritarian Ultranationalist Ideology and State-Building in Croatia, 1990–1996," in Problems of Post-Communism 44, no. 4 (2001): 30–44.
37. See Branimir Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Gencide (London, 1999). Other exceptions besides Julie Mertus’s writings are Branka Magas’s refl ections on Milosevic’s Serbia as a fascist state in terms of the only remaining "post-Stalinist" state (among the post Yugoslav republics) that "remained largely intact to be turned to a racist, even genocidal project"; in Magas, "Milosevic’s Serbia and Ethnic Cleansing: The Making of a Fascist State," Against the Current 52 (September/October, 1994). Similarly, some analyses speak about chauvinism, "bordering on racism," "racist reasoning," and about depictions of the Other that are linked to racist metaphors. See Robert M. Hayden, "The Triumph of Chauvinistic Nationalism in Yugoslavia: Bleak Implications for Anthropology," Anthropology of East Europe Review 11, nos. 1–2 (1993). As well as the exceptions, one must enumerate the problem of Orientalist approaches toward the Balkans. See Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997) and Dusan I. Bjelic and Obrad Savic, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalizaton and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA,2002).
38. Such an approach keeps nationalism and racism strictly apart and insists on the fundamental difference between them. On the basis of the claim that the Holocaust was about biological racism, one can then refuse all comparisons and claims, for example, that the "Balkan ethnic cleansing" was "fundamentally different" from the Holocaust, which was a "program of biological extermination based on racist eugenic theories." The fundamental difference is that it "does not require mass extermination but rather mass removal." See Hagen, "Balkans Lethal Nationalisms," 8 (my emphasis). Such "particular" treatment of "ethnic cleansing" as a local peculiarity and a "lesser evil" actually legitimizes it and its methods of annihilation—similar to a very problematic scholarly tradition from the first part of the twentieth century.
39. Mamdani, When Victims become Killers, 8.
40. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 46–7.
41. Mertus, "The Role of Racism," 1.
42. In an apparent paradox, they coincided with the opening of the public space and the emergence of wide press and other media freedom and made possible the public revival and competition of the old debates about the voice and standing of particular nations. This shows that—contraryto the common liberal belief that governments are the foremost producers of nationalistpropaganda and that free speech is the best "antidote"—under conditions of incipient democratizationand openness of public debate, nationalist mythmaking and ethnic confl ict can befostered and that nationalist and racist ideas can be sold successfully in the "marketplace ofideas." The instances of the media in Yugoslav and Rwandan demonstrate that the impact ofnationalist and racist propaganda depends on the "demand," and the masses are not just theinnocent victims of elites. See a convincing analysis by Jack Snyder and Karin Ballentine, "Nationalismand the Marketplace of Ideas," International Security 21, no. 2 (1996): 5–40.
43. See Julie Mertus, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War (Berkeley, 1999), 8–9.
44. See the chapter on Albanians in I. Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia (Ithaca, 1984) and OliveraMilosavljeviæ, U tradiciji nacionalizma ili stereotipi srpskih intelektualaca XX veka o ‘nama’ i ‘drugima’[In theTradition of Nationalism,
or Stereotypes of Serbian Intellectuals about ‘Us’ and ‘Others’ in the XX Century](Belgrade, 2002), 218ff . It is signifi cant that the so-called "race betrayal" is also a key themeof the famous epic poetry written by Njegoš, The Mountain Wreath. The Slavic Muslims wereseen as "turkifi ed" by having converted to Islam, and this "was not simply to adopt the religionand mores of a Turk, but to transform oneself into a Turk. To convert to a religion other thanChristianity was simultaneously to convert from the Slav race to an alien race." Sells, The BridgeBetrayed, 45.45. Wolfgang Petritsch, Karl Kaser, Robert Pichler. Kosovo, Kosova: Mythen, Daten, Fakten (Klagenfurt,1999), 113–128.
46. The measures—the agreed transfer of the 200,000 Albanians, Turks, and Muslims from Kosovoand Macedonia to Turkey—were not carried out, owing to the outbreak of the Second World War and for other reasons. However, between 90.000 and 150,000 Albanians left Kosovo at that time. Petritsch, et al,. Kosovo, 128. On the issue of "ethnic cleansing," see Tone Bringa, "Averted Gaze: Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina," in Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton (Berkeley, 2002), 204–5 and Milosavljevic, Utradiciji nacionalizma. Bringa rightfully problematizes the terms "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide" in the Yugoslav conflict, showing how the use of "ethnic cleansing" (denoted as a "lesser evil") supported nonintervention policies and the relativization of crimes and how the term genocide was misused by the Serb leadership and propagandists. Ibid., 203–4.
47. Olivera Milosavljevic, "The Abuse of the Authority of Science," in The Road to War in Serbia:Trauma and Catharsis, ed. Nebojsa Popov (Budapest, 2000), 302.
48. Mamdani shows how the Rwandan genocide took place as a ‘native genocide’ and how the Tutsi were constructed as ‘settlers’ to be targeted as intruders and not neighbors. Mamdani, WhenVictims, 10ff .
49. Milosavljevic, U tradiciji nacionalizma, 252ff .
50. See Slavenka Drakuliæc ”We Are A
ll Albanians," The Nation 268, no. 21 (June 7, 1999); FrankeWilmer, The Social Construction of Man, The State and War: Identity, Conflict and Violence in Former Yugoslavia (New York and London 2002), 101.