Teaching and Learning Guide for

This guide accompanies the following article: Daniele Conversi, ‘Democracy and Nationalism – Teaching Guide’, Sociology Compass 2/1 (2008): 156–182, 10.1111/j.1751‐9020.2007.00063.x Introduction For many years, scholars and laymen have hung on to the belief that democracy, particularly liberal democracy, could easily do away with national and ethnic conflicts , so that we could all live in a more peaceful world. Many have forgotten that dictators in the past had already used democracy to establish their iron grip. Hitler seized power in a democratic context, however, unique and peculiar may we judge Weimar Germany from today’s standards. Over 50 years later, Milosevic’s ascent to power in Serbia was confirmed within an electoral democratic framework. More recently, populist autocrats like Italy’s PM Silvio Berlusconi, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and some Latin American leaders have thrived on majoritarian democratic principles, treating electoral results as vox populi vox dei while manipulating popular emotions through patriotic appeals. However, an increasing number of authors share a disenchanted view of liberal democracy, stressing its incapacity to bring durable peace and granting human co‐existence. This trend can be called ‘demo‐skepticism’ and should not be confused with ‘anti‐democratic’ thought. ‘Demo‐skeptics’ stress in particular democracy’s incapacity to regulate and rein in nationalism. Michael Man’s milestone work on the Dark Side of Democracy demonstrates how majority rule can lead to the explosion of ethnic cleansing and genocide. In line with Mann’s argument, majoritarian democracies as political systems do not often take into account minority aspirations and identities. In such a context, the rule of the dominant ethnonational majority remains unchallenged on most grounds. Obsessed by fear of difference, many majoritarian democracies have been historically unable to deal with ethnic, cultural and religious pluralism – depending on which of these bases a majority group is defined. Moreover, majoritarian democracies are often opposed, or suspicious about, multiculturalism. Over the past two centuries, this has led to self‐defeating policies of cultural assimilation, predicated on a vision of cultural homogeneity, which eventually led to physical eliminationism and genocide in a context of international war. Therefore, we can identify a link between cultural homogenization, intolerance and, eventually, the degeneration of democracy. Finally, liberal democracy both in its majoritarian and in its multicultural variety, can be charged with having encouraged, rather than simply adapted to, globalization, with all its harrowing consequences. The litmus test for contemporary democracy will probably be its capacity to tackle climate change catastrophe and survive intact ( http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/politics/comparativePolitics/Nationalism/?view=usaeci=9780199228232 . Annotated readings: Michael Man 2005. The Dark Side of Democracy . Explaining Ethnic Cleansing . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. This book provocatively argues that Western‐style modern democracy lies at the heart of the worst tragedy of the 20 th century, genocide: for man, the most horrific instances of ethnic cleansing, from the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust and the Rwandan massacres, have their roots in the increasing participation of demographic majorities into representative politics. The American Constitution’s opening salvo, ‘We are the people’, lends itself to two opposite interpretations: one ethnic, the other civic. The ‘people’ can be either the ethnos , sharing putative descent, or the demos , sharing citizenship and hypothetical equal rights, irrespective of their descent. However, in a settler society built on pillage, destruction, and where the clearing of the conquered lands of its original inhabitants was legitimized in God’s name, the ethnic variety tended to prevail, imbued with legalistic and ideological justifications. In fact, some of the worst instances of genocides occurred in settler societies, where invaders (white European settlers) used their immense technological superiority to subdue entire populations in order to seize land and resources. Things radically changed with Westernizing modernity and the rest of the book is entirely dedicated to the 20th century. The Armenian genocide in Turkey is recognized as the precursor of modern genocides. During the collapse of the Ottoman empire, state structures modernized and westernized rapidly and non‐Muslims became suddenly exposed to the demise of Ottoman liberal consociational laws (pp. 62 and 114–119). The Nazi Holocaust is identified as the most premeditated and state‐centered of genocides (p. 201). But the ‘final solution’ could only be carried out under war circumstances, during which escalation was justified as ‘self‐defense’. The most extreme forms of totalitarian mass murder in human history were carried out under ‘socialist’ dictatorships: Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot exterminated much greater proportions of their own people than any nationalist regimes. Rwanda fully substantiates the book’s core argument: Hutu genocidal leaders always spoke in the name of majoritarian democracy against Tutsi ‘invaders’ (p. 443). Indeed, as in most ‘developmental’ genocides, minorities (in this case, the Tutsis) were marked as ‘obstacles’ to development and ‘progress’. Appeals to mass ‘democracy’ were channeled through populist manipulation leading to ‘democratic genocide’ (if such as notion is at all acceptable). Mann convincingly demonstrates that western did not offer salvation. His use of the concept of democracy is limited to majoritarianism or ‘majority rule’– hence the concern with the tyranny of the majority. Ethnic cleansing is thus linked to a plebiscitarian form of representative government as emerged with the Western nation‐state system. Indeed, his book might more aptly be re‐named the ‘Dark side of Nation‐statism’. Neither the modern nation‐state, nor Anglo‐Saxon communitarianism did contemplate an extension of democratic rights beyond the narrow boundaries of the dominant ethnos , he claims. Special issue of the Political Studies Review , Volume 4 Issue 3, pp. 247–395 (September 2006), http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118625374/issue . The discussion based on a review symposium on Michael Mann’s Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing . Heather Rae 2002. State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 372 pp. This is the first systematic comparative study on cultural homogenization as it historically relates to nation‐formation and state building. Practices of ‘pathological homogenization’ have been a recurrent feature in modern Western history. Beginning with early modern Spain and France under Louis XIV, Rae focuses then on Turkey’s genocidal state‐building and Yugoslavia’s waves of ethnic cleansing accompanying the country’s break up. http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0511031890

Democracy · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Law · Populism, Right-Wing Movements