The Dark Side of Democracy
Michael Mann
580 pages including index
published in 2005

To be honest I only got this out of the library because its cover and backflap copy make it look like one of those horrid rightwing books that explain in a calm, cultured manner how we should give up democracy for our own good and let our betters govern, because if we do it ourselves it will inexordinately lead to genocide. This however turned out not to be the case. Michael Mann does explain here why genocide and ethnic cleansing is something mostly practises by democracies rather than authoritarian or totalitarian states, but he makes clear it's only a particular kind of democracy that's dangerous, and only in certain circumstances. Mann also makes clear that he doesn't think abandoning democracy is the way to avoid genocides. Instead The Dark Side of Democracy is a honest attempt at explaining how societies get themselves into the danger zone where ethnic based violence happens and how that can swing in full scale, violent ethnic cleansing with genocide as the final stage.

As you might imagine, this is not a very cheerful read, and in fact I became decidedly grumpy during the week I read this, according to my girlfriend. Despite this, I found The Dark Side of Democracy to be weirdly exhilarating, in as far as a book on genocide can ever be exhilarating, even mildly optimistic. The most depressing thing about genocide and ethnic cleansing, as reinforced by our collective memory about the Holocaust and the recent histories of Ruanda and Yugoslavia, is the idea that it could happen in any society, in any of our own societies. Genocide isn't done by faceless savages in places far away and long ago, but by people not that long ago, not that far away, people who looked a lot like you and I. What The Dark Side of Democracy postulates is that this isn't true, that it only happens in certain circumstances in a certain type of society. Mann attempts to prove this by first defining eight general theses that together provide a generic explanation for why violent ethnic cleansing and genocide happens in a given society, then looks at the historical evidence to see how the theory fits it.

The theses Michael Mann postulates are as follows:

1. Murderous cleansing is modern, because it's the dark side of democracy. It can happen when a multiethnic state becomes democratic and the idea of demos, democracy, becomes bound up with ethnos, the people: democracy for only one sort of people. Or it can happen when a settler democracy (like the United States...) is founded in already populated areas. Stable, established democracies are much less prone to violent ethnic cleansing than regimes starting to democratise. Finally, when ethnic cleansing happens it's never done by a truly democratic regime; it's democracy's dark side because it perverts liberal or socialist ideas of democracy.
2. Ethnic hostility rises where ethnicity trumps claas as the main form of social stratification, in the process capturing and channeling classlike sentiments towards ethnonationalism. No genocides in the old communist regimes in other words, though mass murder of class enemies obviously did happen in several countries.
3. The danger zone of murderous cleansing is reached when either two different, established ethnic groups lay claim to the same territory as part of their own state and both their claims seem legitamite to themselves, with a fair chance of being implemented. Genocide or ethnic cleansing is not guaranteed at this stage, but the potential is there.
4. This situation comes to the brink, when either the weaker side in an ethnic conflict chooses to fight rather than submit because it believes outside help is coming, or the stronger side thinks it has such a overwhelming military superiority and legitamite claim that it engage in ethnic cleansing with little risk to itself.
5. At this point genocide or murderous ethnic cleansing happens if the state that actually controls the contested territory has been factionalised and radicalised in a geopolitically unstable situation, most often during or just before a war. If the state is strong enough and not threatened by outside forces, it can weather the crisis and de-escalate the situation, though non-murderous ethnic cleansing might still happen.
6. If murderous cleansing does happen at this point, it's rarely the initial intent of the perpetrators. Mann shows how murderous cleansing usually is not even the first fallback plan, but is arrived at because other solutions to a percieved ethnical threat have failed...
7. There are three levels of perpetrators: radical elites running the state who do the planning, bands of militants doing much of the actual killing and core constituencies providing mass support, though usually not majority support for the cleansing, if only by not voicing their opposition. All three groups are necessary for the cleansing to happen, but not everybody is equally culpable, or even involved.
8. Finally, it's ordinary people, not monsters, who are brought through normal social structures into committing ethnic cleansing and genocide, for quite mundane reasons. No society or person is invulnerable to this, but it's only during the situation sketched out in these eight theses that we can become involved.

This is all laid out in the first chapter, with the remaining sixteen chapters investigating the history of ethnic cleansing from ancient times, through the colonalisation of America and Africa into the twentieth century and its awful record of genocide: Armenia, Nazi Germany, mass murder in the USSR, China and Cambodia and finally Yugoslavia and Ruanda. Also looked at are two counterexamples, of situations where ethnic tension has not resulted in ethnic cleansing, in India and Indonesia and what to do to combat ethnic cleansing.

The Dark Side of Democracy is a difficult and often distressing book, but it's also an honest look at how and why genocide happens. It's definately not a rightwing rant as I originally thought.

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