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Notes From
the Editors
The Necessity
of Gangster Capitalism: Primitive Accumulation in Russia and China
by Nancy Holmstrom and
Richard Smith
Overcoming
Racism
by Staughton Lynd
Remembering
Murray Levin
by Howard Zinn
|
Whether or not it is true, as Václav
Havel famously claimed, that NATO's attack on Yugoslavia represents the first
war to be waged "in the name of principles and values," the first
"ethical war," it might well be the case that it is the first act of
armed aggression against a sovereign state whose popular legitimation relied
almost wholly upon an alleged historical analogy. NATO spokespersons and
apologists could not allude often enough to the Second World War, Hitler, and
the Nazi regime's persecution of the Jews. They did this in lieu of providing
reasoned justification for NATO's action, perhaps because under existing
international law there was surely no such justification to be found. The NATO
attack had to be presented as morally urgent, since it was manifestly illegal.
For this purpose, allusion to the "Holocaust" and, in Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen's words, the "absolute evil" of its perpetrators, was the
most obvious and effective instrument.1
Thus, on May 13, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars—a group
which can be supposed, on the whole, to have been skeptical of NATO
intervention—Bill Clinton explicitly compared the alleged "ethnic
cleansing" of the Kosovo Albanians by Yugoslav forces to the "ethnic
extermination of the Holocaust." The two were not "the same," he
said cryptically, but they were "related." In continental Europe,
German Minister of Defense Rudolf Scharping set the tone, announcing
confidently, in late March, that "the genocide [Völkermord]
has begun."2 Over the next several
weeks, Scharping continued to provide grist for the mill of Germany's boulevard
press by adding pointed details about "concentration camps" and
racial "selection" (and even—momentarily forgoing the specific
allusions to the "Holocaust" for a graphic invocation of pure
"evil"—of Serbian soldiers "playing soccer" with the
severed heads of their victims).3 References
to the media's autonomous employment of the same set of allusions are not, I
trust, necessary here. The association of Albanians in Yugoslavia with Jews
under the Third Reich and, concomitantly, of Serbs with Nazis—curiously,
not of Serbs with Germans or Serbian Socialist Party members with Nazis,
which latter analogies would at least maintain a plausible
proportionality—permeated coverage of the Kosovo crisis in the western
media.4 The Milosevic/Hitler association was,
of course, part of the same schema. Such associations effectively served to
undermine the possibility of dispassionate discussion of NATO policy. Who,
after all, would want to be thought accomplice, even by omission, to another
"Holocaust?"
Typically, however, the allusion to the Nazi persecution of the Jews was
left so vague that it remained unclear whether comparison was being made to the
specifically German Jews (i.e., those Jews who were legally resident
within the recognized borders of Germany prior, say, to March 1938 and the
Anschluss of Austria), or rather to all such Jews throughout
Europe who eventually fell under the civil or military, official or unofficial,
jurisdiction of the German Reich (whether through residence in Germany or
residence in those territories that were, from 1938 onward, annexed to the
Reich and/or occupied militarily by its forces). This may seem like an
insignificant nuance, but, in fact, the eliding of this distinction was
crucial to the legitimating function that the allusion played in NATO
propaganda. For it is the alleged analogy to the genocidal extreme at
which Nazi "Jewish policy" arrived during the Second World War and
which affected all of European Jewry that was invoked in order to
stylize the Kosovo Albanians into "persecuted Jews." This hyperbolic
construal of the analogy—grounded, as will be seen below, in a remarkable
debasement of the very concept of "genocide"—forestalled
examination of the legal and political details of the Kosovo Albanians' status
under the Yugoslav regime. Only such an examination would allow meaningful
comparison to be made to the status of German Jews under the prewar Nazi
regime. When comparison is thus made on the basis of the respective details, as
will be done here, the claim to analogy obviously fails.
In this connection, Hollywood depictions of the Third Reich and especially
no doubt Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List made an important
ideological contribution in preparing the ground for public acceptance of
NATO's actions. In a popular consciousness weaned on such representations, all
the details of the Third Reich and the Second World War merge into the
background upon which the drama of the "Holocaust" is played out. The
latter is so thoroughly identified with the "essence" of the Nazi
regime that all its other crimes (like, for instance, the crimes of one Oskar
Schindler in serving as an informant for the German Abwehr in
Czechoslovakia) are effectively absolved. Thus, it has been possible in the
United States—and, symptomatically, also in Germany—for vague
allusions to the Third Reich to bring with them the implication that just as it
was "right" for the Allies to wage war against Nazi Germany in light
of the latter's criminal policy with respect to the Jews (though perhaps not
"right" for them to have done so on account of the "mere"
invasion of Poland?), so it was also "right" for NATO to wage war
against present-day Yugoslavia in light of the latter's criminal policy with
respect to the Kosovo Albanians.
Nazi “Jewish Policy” and the Outbreak of
the Second World War
A first problem with such a suggestion is that the Allies never did, in
fact, wage war against Nazi Germany on account of its "Jewish policy"
and, furthermore, the specifically German Jews were never as such
the object of genocide. Rather, the Allies serially entered into a war against
Nazi Germany on the grounds of its invasion of or declaration of war against
other sovereign states, whether themselves or third states to which they were
bound by treaty; and the German Jews before the outbreak of the war were
subjected, under Nazi rule, not to any policy of planned extermination, but to
one of gradual political and civil exclusion, accompanied by state-sanctioned
and often state-promoted campaigns of extra-legal harassment. This latter
process was initiated by the 1933 laws designed (as it turned out, not entirely
successfully) to exclude Jews from employment in the civil service and liberal
professions; it reached a crucial legislative juncture with the so-called
Nuremberg Laws of 1935 (the "Law for the Protection of German Blood"
and the new Reich Citizenship Law); and continued thereafter in the form of
piecemeal "Aryanizations" (whether direct expropriations or
quasi-legal coerced transfers) of "Jewish-owned" firms. By 1938 the
Nazi goal of "driving out the Jews" from the German economy had been,
for all intents and purposes, achieved. (Of course, not long afterward, both
German and non-German Jews would be reinserted into the wartime Reich economy,
now in the guise of slave-laborers.) In stripping all such persons as counted
under the law as "Jews" of their German citizenship (an earlier law
had already enabled case-by-case "denaturalization"), the new Reich
Citizenship Law afforded the exclusion of the Jews with a certain legal
coherence which it would have lacked otherwise. Practically, however, its
effects were somewhat less dramatic. Given the role already played by the
so-called ius sanguinis or "right of blood" in the Wilhelmine
citizenship law of 1913, which continued in force through the Weimar period,
more recent Jewish emigrants to Germany and their descendants had largely been
prevented from acquiring German citizenship anyway.5 In any case, the entire process, in all its diverse
facets, clearly depended upon the legal definition of "Jewishness,"
which was finally codified with scholastic subtlety (if not logical
consistency)6 in a supplementary decree to
the Citizenship Law. Only after the outbreak of the war did the Nazi
regime implement a policy of planned extermination of all such Jews as
fell under the de facto authority of the Reich, thus comprising as well
the specifically German Jews.
Despite a recent reform proposal—which was quickly withdrawn by the
current Social Democratic/Green coalition government following evidence of
popular opposition and replaced by a largely cosmetic revision—the 1913
citizenship law effectively remains in force in Germany even
today.7 Consequently, if there is any
"minority" group in contemporary Europe whose legal status and
situation bears a strong, structural analogy to that of the German Jews under
the Third Reich, it is the roughly two million German Turks presently
living in Germany. As will be seen momentarily, the status and situation of the
Kosovo Albanians in the Yugoslav Federation bore no such analogy. The
overwhelming majority of the German Turks have either lived in Germany for
decades or were born there, yet only in exceptional cases do they enjoy the
status of German citizens.8 In light of the
wave of racist attacks on Turks in Germany that followed
"reunification," and the notably weak—if not to say, as far as
the assailants are concerned, positively accommodating—juridical and
legislative response to these attacks, the analogy is even more exact. This is
not to say that the progressive exclusion to which German Jews were subjected
in the Third Reich is likely to repeat itself as concerns Turks in the Federal
Republic,9 if only because on the whole
German Turks have never achieved the same degree of integration as German Jews
had before the Nazi party's rise to power. It was necessary for the Nazis, in
effect, to transform the German Jews into foreigners in their own
land;10 the German Turks, by contrast, have
never been allowed to be anything but that. In any case, I know of no major
"human rights" group that has devoted itself to exposing the
discriminatory effects of the German state's policy towards Germany's Turkish
residents, much less of any calls for a NATO intervention in Germany on the
account of the latter!
The Question of Genocide
Of course, if prior to the NATO intervention the Kosovo Albanians were being
subjected by the Yugoslav state to a genocidal policy, then the details of
their legal status under the ancien régime, and of the political
struggle that pitted Albanian nationalist forces against both the Serbian
provincial and Yugoslav federal states, would all be moot. There would, then,
be an abundantly obvious analogy—the very one which is so often
suggested—not, however, to the treatment of the German Jews per
se, but rather to that of European Jewry tout court under Nazi
rule.11 This would still not imply that the
Allied invasion of the German Reich in the Second World War provides a
meaningful precedent for NATO intervention in Yugoslavia today. As noted, the
Allied invasion was a response to German external aggression, not to the
Reich's Jewish policy. By drawing attention to this fact, I do not mean to be
suggesting that the principle of foreign intervention to prevent genocide is
unfounded. The Allied intervention in the Second World War simply did not
involve any application of such a principle. Indeed, the other cases in the
twentieth century which could plausibly be construed as instances of
state-sponsored genocide likewise occurred in the context of what were
already wartime situations and, though this is not the place to enter
into the matter, I suspect that this is not mere coincidence. So, the
foundation of such a principle of intervention is probably not in fact as
pressing a matter as is often suggested nowadays.
In any event, apart from its employment as a sanctimonious pretext, such a
principle is utterly irrelevant to the Kosovo case, since if the term
"genocide" is being used in anything like its hitherto customary
sense, there is no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that a genocide was
occurring or was about to occur there. Especially in the context of the wars of
Yugoslav succession, it has become alarmingly common nowadays to use the term
"genocide" to refer to any form of group oppression, rather
than just (as the term's very etymology implies) the organized physical
destruction—one does not speak, for instance, of a "homicide"
after which the victim is still alive!—of the members of some putative
group and on account of their ascribed group-membership. The last mentioned
condition is essential. It needs to be stressed that the genocidal policy of
the German Reich with regard to the Jews, for example, would not have been
possible without a prior stage of administrative "Absonderung:"
a "sorting out" from the population as a whole of those persons
who were to count as "Jews." The same, of course, holds for the
genocidal practices of the Reich with regard to Roma ("gypsies"), who
were also targeted for extermination throughout Germany and the occupied
territories.
The hyperinflationary use of the term "genocide" deserves,
incidentally, to be considered as a new and more subtle form of negationism.
This new form of negationism does not directly deny the occurrence of the
genocide perpetrated against European Jews; instead, through
overgeneralization, it effectively denies its specificity, thus making the
genocidal policy—or, more exactly, policies—of the Third Reich appear
a regrettable but, nonetheless, relatively "normal" occurrence. This
new negationism is surely more dangerous than the older, cruder variety, since
whereas the latter was largely restricted to neo-Nazi cranks, the former has
become, as one says in German, salonfähig—acceptable in good
company.12
According to the most widely disseminated estimates, the last year of the
conflict between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Yugoslav forces prior to
the inception of the NATO attack last March resulted in some two thousand
deaths. This figure includes victims from among all of Kosovo's
nationalities, including Serbs. Nevertheless, even if it were supposed
that all of the victims were Albanians, in light of a total Albanian population
in the region of some 1.8 million prior to the war, such numbers can hardly
justify talk of "genocide." According to well-known and widely
accepted estimates, some five to six million Jews fell victim to the genocidal
practices of the Third Reich, constituting at least half of the total Jewish
population resident in Europe. The gas chamber at Auschwitz was built to kill
two thousand persons at a time. Toward the end of the war, roughly six
thousand persons a day were being killed at Auschwitz alone. If significantly
dissimilar events are to be kept distinguished, then there must clearly be some
quantitative criterion for the application of the term "genocide."
Events in Kosovo prior to the NATO intervention clearly do not meet that
criterion.
I do not mean to suggest by this that numbers alone (or, more exactly,
proportions) matter. Even without numbers sufficient to constitute prima
facie evidence of the occurrence of genocide, it might still be legitimate
to speak adjectivally of a "genocidal policy" or
"genocidal practices" if there is evidence, as according to
the definition given above, of the methodical targeting of civilian
population for extermination on account of ascribed group-membership. But the
facts of the case in Kosovo likewise fail to satisfy this
"qualitative" criterion. Even the alleged massacre of Albanian
civilians by Yugoslav forces at Racak on January 15, 1999, which served as a
kind of "trigger" for the propaganda offensive preceding NATO's
bombing campaign, cannot be regarded as probative in this regard. Both
eyewitness accounts of western journalists, supported by Associated Press
footage of a gunbattle filmed earlier that day, and forensic evidence suggest
that the dead were, in fact, in this case too, KLA combatants.13
This is not to deny that after the onset of NATO bombing, Yugoslav
regular forces or Serb paramilitaries then took action against Albanian
civilians, either killing them or driving them from their homes, in the
interest of "cleansing" the region of its Albanian population. It is
also, frankly, not to affirm the latter. The fact is that for information even
about alleged "Serbian" atrocities committed after the start of the
NATO attack, we have hitherto been almost entirely dependent upon NATO sources.
Under these circumstances, intellectual honesty demands that we withhold
judgement—an attitude, incidentally, whose prudence has been largely
confirmed by recent revelations.14 In any
case, it remains true that there is no evidence of such aggression by Serb
forces against the civilian population before the bombing started.
The Trouble with “Minority
Rights”
If not, then, the victims or targets of a genocidal policy on the part of
the Yugoslav state, were the Kosovo Albanians subjected to a process of
political and civil exclusion analogous to that to which the German Jews were
subjected by the German State in the Third Reich? Here again, the
facts—and now we are dealing with straightforward institutional facts
which are easily verifiable by anyone—simply do not support such a
conclusion. The pivotal event in the conflict opposing the Yugoslav federal and
Serbian provincial states on the one hand, and the Albanian nationalist
leadership in Kosovo on the other, was the 1989 reform of the Serbian
Constitution, which reduced the autonomous powers of the province. This reform
did not in any way affect the political and civil rights of individual Kosovars
as citizens of the Yugoslav Federation and the Serbian Republic. These
continued to be guaranteed to all citizens of the Federation and the Republic,
regardless of self-proclaimed or ascribed nationality. Even this guarantee,
however, was not a concession, but rather an affront to the aspirations
of the provincial leadership. For these aspirations did not concern the
civil rights of Kosovo Albanians, but rather the communal or
"group" rights claimed on their behalf. It was the communal rights of
Kosovo Albanians inasmuch as a so-called "national minority" within
Serbia and Yugoslavia that the constitutional reform was perceived to have
infringed upon and their communal prerogatives, as created by the 1974 Yugoslav
Constitution, that it did indeed reduce.15
Now, the notion of national "minority rights" is a notoriously
slippery one. On a liberal interpretation of the expression—and this was
the intepretation which held sway in international jurisprudence until very
recently—such rights are strictly linguistic or cultural in character and,
in fact, belong to the individual. They are the rights of an individual
who so happens to form part of a linguistic or cultural
"minority" freely to employ her native tongue and to give expression
to other aspects of her cultural heritage. Obviously, when we begin to consider
the concrete institutional contexts in which such rights might be
claimed—the school, the courts, the legislature—the scope of their
validity becomes itself a complicated matter.
When, however, the subject of "minority rights" is understood as
the "national minority" itself, i.e., the group, and when the
"minority" in question in fact constitutes the majority on
some part of the national territory, then the content of such
"rights" will invariably take the form of communal self-government
within the relevant region. Inasmuch, however, as the population of the region
in question is itself ethnically heterogenous, this will require either that
the "group rights" of the local "minorities" are guaranteed
in turn or the degradation of the status of the latter, in effect, to
"second-class citizens" (or, more precisely, provisionally tolerated
"state-members," analogous indeed to the German Jews under the Third
Reich) with all the dangers of eventual expulsion or worse which this comports.
Indeed, the discrimination and insecurity suffered by non-Albanians in Kosovo
under the pre-1989 autonomous regime clearly contributed to their agitation and
to the agitation within the Serbian Republic as a whole for a modification of
the province's status.
Though the western media, French nouveau philosophes, and NATO
officials have somehow managed to depict such ethnic-national minority politics
as the model for "multiculturalism," they are obviously rather the
perfect recipe for what could be more accurately described as juxtaposed
monoculturalism. Their immanent logic is such that the only stable
outcome to which they can lead is not in fact a regime of protected
"minority rights" within the framework of existing political
structures, but rather full-fledged secession and the creation of new
ethnically homogenous "microstates" under the banner of
"national self-determination" (with the prospect, in the case of
"microstates" geographically contiguous to a larger ethnic-national
"homeland," of eventual attachment to the latter). More exactly,
where the population of each of the erstwhile national regions is likewise
ethnically "mixed" and their own "national minorities"
constitute in turn local "majorities," what can be expected is
a nesting pattern of secessions followed by civil war to determine what
parts of the fragmented national territory will pertain finally to which
"ethnicities." So-called "ethnic cleansing" is likewise a
completely "normal" aspect of this process, inasmuch as once the
principle of ethnic-national "self-determination" has been accepted,
the spiral of dissolution and intercommunal violence can only be halted when
the populations of the new national territories have obtained the requisite
degree of homogeneity. The dynamic here described is exactly the dynamic that
has played itself out in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Even the
much-vaunted and reputedly "multicultural" Federation of Bosnia and
Herzegovina is, in fact, a largely fictive state invented by the western powers
and masking the existence of not two but, effectively, three independent
and juxtaposed ethnic-national "microstates" dividing the Bosnian
territory.16 Those KFOR officials, media
commentators, and western political leaders who today denounce the violence
committed against the Serbian population in Kosovo and bemoan the exodus of the
latter from the region can hardly be supposed ingenuous in their expressions of
fellow-feeling. The "cleansing" of Kosovo of Serbs and other
"minorities" was a completely predictable consequence of the project
of ethnic-national state-building to which NATO lent its military support.
Of course, if "self-determination" is interpreted simply as rule
"with the consent of the governed"—as according to Lloyd
George's famous formula from 1918—then the demand for
"self-determination" need not lead to the consequences described
above. In this case, "self-determination" is barely more than a
synonym for democratic government, with the added connotation of local
rule when the demand is raised against the claims to authority of a colonial or
imperial power. The problems arise, however, when the "nation" whose
"self-determination" is in question is construed not as a
politically constituted community, but rather as an ethnic group
whose communal character is supposed in principle to pre-exist the state. In
this latter case, the "right of national self-determination" is
transformed into the ostensible right of each "nation" in this ethnic
sense to form its own state.
In any event, the struggle of German Jews following the rise to power of the
Nazis was a defensive struggle to protect their civil rights as
individuals against the discriminatory and exclusionary policies of the Nazi
state. It was not a struggle to protect any "minority rights"
that they might be supposed to claim or enjoy as a group, much less to assert
any supposed collective right to "national self-determination."
(There were, of course, Zionist groups in Weimar Germany, but it is highly
implausible to suppose that even the most optimistic of them expected to secede
from the German Reich with some part of German territory!) The Nazi state did
not seek to withdraw from Jews any "minority rights," since they had
never been ascribed nor, for the most part, had they demanded any such rights
in the first place. In fact, the opposite is the case. It was precisely
the Nazi state's withdrawal of their political and civil rights and its
exclusion of the Jews from ever widening domains of normal civil activity, as
noted above, which led to the formation within the now isolated or
"abgesonderten" Jewish community of just those institutions
typically associated with self-government under a regime of "minority
rights." Thus it was only in the autumn of 1933 that a political
organization supposed specifically to represent the interests of German Jews,
the Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland, was founded. Similarly,
in 1933, as an emergency response to the School Law of April 25, which
established a numerus clausus on Jewish enrollment in high schools and
universities, Jews were, in effect, forced to establish independent
"Jewish" schools. By the end of 1936, there had likewise developed an
independent Jewish welfare system, an independent Jewish healthcare system, and
a full-fledged, if shrinking on account of immigration, "Jewish economic
sector." There were even now the rudiments of a "Jewish"
judicial system, drawing on the tradition of rabbinical courts, which offered
arbitration of civil disputes among Jews and hence allowed them to circumvent
the hostile environment of the German courts.17
The founding of almost every one of such autonomous "Jewish"
institutions bears a clear, if superficial, resemblance to developments among
the Kosovo Albanian community of the 1990s: the establishment of an independent
Kosovo Albanian government in 1991, the founding of specifically
"Albanian" educational and healthcare systems, the application of the
Kanun, the traditional unwritten law of the Albanian clans, and so on.
But, in fact, the contrast between the two cases could not be starker.
Following the 1989 re-assertion of Serbian sovereignty over the territory of
Kosovo, the political leadership of the Kosovo Albanians chose to
boycott the institutions of the Serbian state and to establish parallel,
ethnically specific "Albanian" institutions. This does not lessen the
repressiveness of the Serbian state's response to the national aspirations of
Kosovo Albanians: a response that was inevitably all the more repressive in
light of the fact that the Yugoslav federation, under the provisions of its
1974 constitution, previously had largely catered to these aspirations. But we
should be clear, at least, that this response was directed precisely at
national aspirations which, in principle, rejected the authority of the Serbian
state and which, even before 1989, had aimed to organize the institutions of
public life in Kosovo along ethnic lines.
German Jews under the Third Reich were, by contrast, forced to
establish parallel institutions by virtue of their being excluded from
the institutions of the German state. In effect, it was the Nazi regime
that transformed German Jews into an ethnic "community" with a
special status as such under the law. They did not themselves demand this
status. For German Jews, whose newfound institutional "autonomy" was
not matched by any claim to territorial sovereignty, this process was the
prelude to expulsion and, for those who did not succeed in escaping beyond the
borders of the Reich and the occupied territories, extermination. For Kosovo
Albanians, the process of political affirmation of their autonomous status was
rather the prelude to de facto secession—and indeed to the
expulsion of non-Albanian, ethnically "foreign" elements from
the newly "liberated" national territory.
Precedent and Perspectives
It can only be regarded as the symptom of a severe deterioration of
historical consciousness that amidst all the allusions to the Second World War
and the Third Reich which accompanied the public treatment of the Kosovo
crisis, a more obvious analogy for the latter, from exactly the same historical
context, was almost completely ignored: namely, the Sudetenland crisis
of 1938. The similarities between the two cases can be appreciated from the
comments of a contemporary, written on September 23, 1938:
For almost two decades now, and among various
other nationalities, also Germans in Czecho-Slovakia have in the most unworthy
fashion been abused, tormented, economically ruined and above all prevented
from realizing the right of self-determination of nations also for themselves.
All attempts by these oppressed people to alter their fate have failed on
account of the brutal will to destroy of the Czechs. The latter possessed the
state's means of repression and did not hesitate to use them in a ruthless and
barbaric manner.
The author of these words is, of course, Adolf Hitler. In his letter to
Neville Chamberlain, written during a break in their consultations at Bad
Godesberg, one week prior to the signing of the Munich Agreement, Hitler goes
on to cite a figure of 120 thousand refugees having already been forced to flee
the region, and demands the immediate severing of the Sudetenland from
Czechoslovakia—in the absence of which the German Wehrmacht would take
control of the Sudetenland by force.18
Hitler's grim depiction of the urgency of the Sudeten Germans' plight drew
support from the crescendo of atrocity stories which Goebbels' Propaganda
Ministry had disseminated in the German press over the previous weeks and which
appeared under headlines such as "13 More Blood-Witnesses for
Sudeten-German Right to Self-Determination: Arson Attacks, Murder, Martial Law,
Foreign [i.e., Czechoslovak] Police and Soldiers with Tanks Rage Against the
German Population;" and "Bloody Butchery in Halbersbirk: With Tanks
and Machine-Guns Against a Sudeten-German Village;" and "Czech Orgy
of Murder in the Sudetenland;" and "Bestial Abuse of Sudeten-Germans
in the Prisons;" and even, dramatically portraying the putative threats of
the "bestial" Czechs, "We Will Play Football with Your
Heads."19
But while it was the alleged atrocities committed against the
Sudeten-Germans which were used as propaganda to hasten the intervention,
Hitler also insisted upon a quasi-legal justification for the severing of the
Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia: namely, the very "right of
national self-determination" which is so often invoked today (even indeed
by critics of the NATO attack!) in connection with Kosovo. Of course,
Hitler claimed to be especially concerned for the "right to
self-determination" of the Sudeten-Germans, but he presented himself in
his meetings with Chamberlain also as the advocate for the other allegedly
"oppressed national minorities" in Czechoslovakia: Poles, Hungarians,
Ruthenians, and Slovaks. Just a few months later, he would appear yet again as
the patron of aspirations to national "self-determination" in
orchestrating the secession of Slovakia from rump Czechoslovakia.
Hitler's letter to Chamberlain rehearsed much of the same content as his
closing speech to the Nazi Party Congress on September 12. "I
demand," he said there (in somewhat unusual German), "that the
oppression of 3 Million Germans in Czecho-Slovakia come to an end and that the
free right to self-determination take its place [an dessen Stelle
tritt]."20 Indeed, already in a
Reichstag speech of February 20, 1938, Hitler had made clear his plans for
the Sudetenland. The Reichstag speech is especially interesting for our
purposes, since in it Hitler explicitly recognizes that the "right to
national self-determination" could only be fulfilled at the cost of the
violation of international law, understood in the customary sense as the law
guaranteeing the rights of and governing the relations among sovereign states.
Speaking of the Sudeten-Germans and their relation to the German Reich, Hitler
comments: "The juridical separation from the Reich as far as international
law is concerned [die staatsrechtliche Trennung vom Reich] cannot lead
to a national-political lawlessness [zu einer volkspolitischen
Rechtslosmachung], this is to say that the universal rights to national
self-determination ... cannot be ignored simply because Germans are here
concerned."21 The Nazi legal theorist
Carl Schmitt, writing just after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and shortly
before the German invasion of Poland, called the idea of
ethnic-nationhood—of "each and every people [Volk] as a form
of life determined by kind and origin, blood and soil"—the
"great political idea" which it would be the vocation of the German
Reich to disseminate throughout Europe. "The deed of our
Führer," Schmitt concluded, with obvious reference to Hitler's
"solution" of the "Sudeten question," "has infused
this thought of our Reich with political actuality, historical truth and a
great future in international law."22
The "great future" that Schmitt foresaw in 1939 turned out to be a
catastrophe for Europe that lasted exactly until May 1945. However, in the wake
of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia, political leaders of the NATO alliance,
so-called "human rights" advocates and leading political theorists in
both Europe and the United States have all been displaying a notable enthusiasm
for the subordination of states' sovereignty to the alleged
"rights"of ethnic-nations or "peoples." The "great
future" of Schmitt's "great idea" might well be now, and there
is no reason to expect that its current realization will prove any less
catastrophic than its first. One thing, in any event, is certain: the struggle
of German Jews under the Third Reich was not a struggle for
"self-determination" in the ethnic-national sense. It was, on the
contrary, the application of the ethnic-national "principle of
self-determination" under Nazi hegemony that eventually made the very
existence of Jews and other "stateless peoples" in occupied Europe
untenable.
NOTES
- Goldhagen himself, who, whatever the virtues or otherwise of his book on
Nazi Germany, has given no sign of actually knowing anything about the Balkans
or Yugoslavia, nonetheless substantially contributed to the popular currency
enjoyed by this analogy. See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, "A New Serbia,"
The New Republic, May 17, 1999. I use the term "Holocaust" in
scare-quotes, by the way, because it is quite literally a mystifying expression
and hence, to my mind, in general better avoided. The Greek holocauston
is the biblical term for a burnt sacrifice.
- Associated Press, March 29, 1999. For the enthusiastic uptake of the
Defense Minister's remark in the boulevard press, see, for example,
"Scharping: Völkermord an den Albanern hat begonnen,"
Berliner Kurier, March 30, 1999. Curiously, some three weeks later,
Scharping spoke merely of "increasingly strong indications of mass
executions." (See "Protokoll des Grauens," Berliner
Kurier, April 20, 1999 and Associated Press, April 19, 1999.) How did he
know, then, three weeks earlier, that "the genocide had begun?"
- Associated Press, April 16, 1999; and see "Fussball mit den
Köpfen der Opfer," Berliner Kurier, April 17, 1999. In a
similar register, German Minister of Foreign Affairs Joschka Fischer remarked
that the Serbs were even taking away the toys of Albanian children—before
himself returning to the "Holocaust" allusions by describing the
flight of Albanian refugees from the region as a "deportation." See
"Serben nehmen Kinder sogar ihr Spielzeug weg," Berliner
Kurier, April 4, 1999. As will be seen further on in the main text,
Scharping's "soccer" atrocity story was not exactly original.
- In fact, though the identity of the victims has changed, the
"Holocaust" association has been a standard trope of anti-Serb
propaganda at least since 1992 and the first reports of alleged
"deathcamps" in Bosnia. On the twisted history of such reports, see,
for example, Peter Brock, "Dateline Yugoslavia," Foreign
Policy, no. 93, Winter 1993-94; Jacques Merlino, Les
vérités yougoslaves ne sont pas toutes bonnes à dire
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), pp. 125-32; and Thomas Deichmann, "The
Picture that Fooled the World" in NATO in the Balkans (New York:
International Action Center, 1998).
- On the process of exclusion of the German Jews under National Socialism,
see Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz (Urbana: University of
Illinois, 1970); Wolfgang Wipperman and Michael Burleigh, The Racial State:
Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 4; and
Avraham Barkai, From Boycott to Annihilation: the Economic Struggle of the
German Jews, 1933-1943 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989).
More generally, on the history of German citizenship law and the ius
sanguinis, see Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and
Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
- In fact the decree's derivation of the status of the "half-Jew"
with two "Aryan" parents involves a classic example of the
reductio ad absurdum. According to the decree, a "half-Jew"
with two "Aryan" parents—unlike a "half-Jew" with one
"Jewish" and one "Aryan" parent—would not count as a
"Jew." But by definition the "half-Jew" must have two
"Jewish" grandparents. Hence one of the grandparents of each
of the parents of the "half-Jew" who does not have one
"Jewish" and one "Aryan" parent (i.e., who has two
"Aryan" parents) must him- or herself be "Jewish." But by
definition of the law, a "half-Jew" one of whose parents is
"Jewish" is a "Jew." Hence the "Aryan" parents
must be "Jewish."
- Indeed, inasmuch as the Federal Republic recognizes claims to German
nationality based on the collective naturalizations of putative ethnic Germans
in the occupied territories undertaken by the Nazi regime, the 1913 law is
still today interpreted through the lens of its radicalization by the National
Socialists.
- The revised version of the citizenship law reform, passed by the two houses
of the German parliament in May, will ascribe German citizenship to children
born in Germany of "foreign" parents for, in effect, a probationary
period. By the age of 23, such "foreign children born in Germany"
must decide between retaining their German passport or a passport issued by
their parents' presumed ethnic-national "homeland" (thus, for
example, Turkey for persons of presumed Turkish ancestry, whether or not they
were themselves born there). In an analogous fashion, candidates for
naturalization will under "normal" circumstances be required to
renounce the citizenship of their countries of origin. Under present
conditions, this refusal of so-called "dual-citizenship" will create
serious disincentives for both these categories of prospective citizens. In any
event, the reformed version of German citizenship law, like the hitherto
existing law it replaces, remains implicitly racist and discriminatory, since
it does not in principle or in fact deny the possibility of
"dual-citizenship" to "German nationals," i.e., putatively
ethnic Germans. German law distinguishes between the latter [deutsche
Volkszugehörige] and German citizens [deutsche
Staatsangehörige], and guarantees "nationals" the right,
supposing they were born in Germany, to acquire the citizenship of another
country without foregoing their German citizenship, and the right, supposing
they were born elsewhere, to acquire German citizenship without foregoing the
citizenship of their country of origin.
- Though here too, it must be said, there are parallels. Thus, in 1997,
Germany's so-called "Foreigner Law" was revised such as to require
that children under sixteen who are not citizens of an EU member state obtain a
visa in order to travel to Germany to join parents living there. Given the
peculiarities of existing German citizenship law, this stipulation applies,
among others, to German Turkish children born in Germany who happen in
the meanwhile to have traveled abroad. In other words, these children must
currently apply for a visa in order to be able to return home. At least
as concerns children henceforth born in Germany, this particular anomaly
should be eliminated with the citizenship law reform.
- Formally considered, the 1935 Citizenship Law did not quite complete this
process, since while it deprived the German Jews of citizenship
[Reichsbürgerschaft], it continued to attribute to them the
subordinate status of "state members" [Staatsangehörige].
The German Jews lost even this latter status upon "taking up
residence" in a foreign country—even if this came to pass by way of
deportation. See Brubaker, pp. 167-168. The distinction between
Bürgerschaft and Staatsangehörigkeit does not,
incidentally, exist in current German law, which is why in this latter context
both the one and the other can be translated without further ado as
"citizenship." (See note 8.) Apart from the rare cases of naturalized
citizens, German Turks do not even enjoy the status of "state
members." Their status is quite simply that of foreigners legally resident
in Germany.
- In fact, having been pressured to emigrate in the years leading up to the
war, a relatively smaller percentage of German Jews were murdered by the Nazi
regime than European Jews in general; and the German Jewish victims of the
regime represent only a small percentage (just over 2 percent) of the total
number of Jews murdered.
- It has also become acceptable, for instance, in the halls of the German
Bundestag where, since 1992, sessions devoted to Balkan politics have featured
constant references to "genocide" by representatives of all parties
except the post-Communist PDS.
- See Le Figaro, January 20, 1999; "Les morts de Racak ont-ils
vraiment été massacrés froidement?," Le monde,
January 21, 1999; and "Racak: les victimes `tuées par balles
à distance, selon des legistes'," Agence France-Press, February 23,
1999. Photos provided to the press by Rudolf Scharping in late April, and
allegedly documenting another Serb-orchestrated "massacre" from
January, clearly depict fallen combatants, complete with cartridge-belts,
automatic weapons, and KLA insignias on their uniforms. The news agency Reuters
responded to Scharping's supposed "revelation" by indicating that it
had already published photos of the scene and that the dead were KLA guerrilla.
See "`Massaker schon vor Rambouillet'," April 28, 1999, Berliner
Zeitung. Interestingly, in a recent interview with Le monde, French
Minister of Defense Alain Richard casually remarks that the NATO attack was
"organized starting in autumn 1998," a date which suggests that NATO
was not in any case responding to internal events in Kosovo. See
"Instaurer des critère de convergence peut inciter efficacement des
Etats européens à une défense commune," Le
monde, July 14, 1999.
- See, for example, "No Bodies at Rumored Grave Site in Kosovo,"
Reuters, October 12, 1999. Immediately after the cessation of hostilities in
June, ten thousand was the figure which began to circulate as representing the
number of Albanians killed by Serb forces after the inception of NATO bombing.
But even supposing this figure were to withstand scrutiny as a general casualty
figure, who can honestly say that every body found is that of an Albanian,
rather than of a Serb or Roma or ethnic Turk? And does the mere discovery of a
body tell us who did the killing and under what circumstances? Again, there is
no question that the KLA has in the past itself conducted reprisals against
ethnic Albanians who refused to cooperate with it. In early August, Bernard
Kouchner raised the figure to eleven thousand, claiming to cite information
gathered by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia—which quickly denied that this was its estimate. (See Le
monde, August 4, 1999.) KLA militants are evidently less discrete than UN
"high representatives" when discussing the origins of Kosovo's
war-dead. Thus the KLA appointed "mayor" of the town of Malicevo,
reflecting upon the battles that took place in the area, casually remarked to a
French reporter: "We had 300 dead, but the Serbs lost at least twice as
many ...." See "Les soldats russes subissent la vindicte des
Albanais," Le monde, August 3, 1999.
- The reason for the cautiousness of my formulation here is that it is not
clear that the prerogatives enjoyed by the Kosovo Albanians under the 1974
Constitution were the result of any generally recognized "right." The
Serbian "autonomous provinces" of Kosovo and Voivodina had an
exceptional status within the Federation; although Republics besides Serbia
also comprised territories in which "nationalities" other than the
"titular" ones (as in the "Croatian nationality" in Croatia
or the "Macedonian" in Macedonia) constituted the local majority,
none of these territories was accorded autonomy.
- For a detailed discussion of "minority rights" and the logic of
ethnic-national state-building in the Balkans, see Robert Hayden, Blueprints
for a House Divided: the Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). Specifically on
Bosnia-Herzegovina, see Part 2.
- On the foregoing, see Barkai, ch. 2.
- The full text of the letter is reproduced in Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden
und Proklamationen (Neustadt: Verlagsdruckerei Schmidt, 1962), pp. 916-918.
Hitler intentionally wrote "Tschechoslowakei" with a hyphen as
"Tschecho-Slowakei", in order to emphasize the
"ethnographic" distinctness of its "Czech" and
"Slovak" components.
- See Engelbert Schwerzenbeck, N-S Pressepolitik und die Sudetenkrise
1938 (Munich: Minerva, 1979), pp. 356 and 362.
- See Domarus, p. 904.
- See Ernst Nittner, ed., Dokumente zur Sudetendeutschen Frage
(Munich: Ackermann-Gemeinde, 1967).
- Carl Schmitt, Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung (Berlin-Wien:
Deutscher Rechtsverlag, 1939), p. 88.
JOHN
ROSENTHAL teaches
in the Philosophy Department at Colorado College. He would like to thank
Klaus-Gerd Giesen, Robert hayden, Laura Duhan Kaplan, and Ellen Meiksins Wood
for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay, and states that opinions
expressed and errors committed are, of course, solely his
responsibility.
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