When today we are forced to talk about “escalations” of collective violence, state-sponsored violence, and genocide, doesn’t that mean that we have failed in the decisive task left to us by the experience of Nazism and the Shoah: the commitment of “Never Again!”?
It was a key political belief held after 1945 that studying the murder of the European Jews could provide important guidelines for the democratization of societal structures. However, changes in international politics after 1990, especially the new proximity of violent conflicts, have demonstrated that collective violence and genocides cannot be regarded as singular events from the past, let alone historical errors. Moreover, it would be inadequate to describe the violence in the Balkans in the 1990’s, the Rwandan Genocide, the genocidal politics in the Darfur region of Sudan, or the mass violence of IS and Boko Haram as escalated reactions or as eruptions of hatred.
This leads to the question: Can we uncover similar or even identical causes behind different historical instances of mass violence? What are the implications of the obvious repeatability and actual repetition of state-organized violence, even after the Shoah?
Against this background, the question “Are genocides comparable?” needs to address three issues. First, we have to clarify what we mean by the term “genocide.” Where does it come from and what analytic value for the study of collective violence can we derive from it? Second, we must discuss at which level a comparative perspective on genocide can be usefully employed. In this context, we also have to ask what a “comparison” can contribute to the task of early warning and the prevention of violence. Finally, we need to raise questions of uniqueness and comparability, including the difficult topics of relation of relativization.
The Term ‘Genocide’
The term “genocide” was coined in 1944 by the Polish-Jewish expert of international law Raphael Lemkin in a study on the rule of the Axis Powers in occupied Eastern Europe. He used the term to “signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.”1
According to Lemkin’s proposal, genocide is not yet another level of escalation in conflict or war. Rather, it is a political program that is pursued intentionally and systematically to reach one goal: the disintegration and, ultimately, total annihilation of an entire national group.
Thus, the term captures the quality and the strategies of destructive collective violence in modern times, and emphasizes its genuinely political character. It was in his reflections on the Armenian Genocide of 1915-16 that Lemkin first pointed out that violence against groups does not constitute a specific element of crime; it was then that he began to propose ways to overcome this deficit. In light of the Nazi crimes, he explicitly added a criminal law dimension to his previous reflections on international law. Lemkin, who was an aide to the American Chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson during the Nuremberg trials of the major war criminals in 1945-46, was eventually also involved in the formulation of the Genocide Convention, which was adopted by the United Nations on Dec. 9, 1948, even though the wording of the Convention in some regards differed from Lemkin’s original concept.
Unlike in Lemkin’s original version, the U.N. Convention does not explicitly label “genocide” as a political act and state crime. The Convention defines a crime and, in line with legal conventions, its subjective and objective elements: the intention (a subjective element of crime) to annihilate a “national,” “ethnic,” “racial,” or “religious” group as such (an objective element of crime).
Looking back at the history of the tern “genocide,” it now becomes clear that although the term developed within a legal context, it is not a legal/normative term in the narrower sense. Unlike the category of “war crimes,” the term was not initially coined to define an element of crime in international law, but to distinguish a certain form of political violence from others, and to describe and capture it conceptually. The legal/normative dimension was added to the term only later.
Comparison and Comparability
It first needs to be made clear that a comparison of genocidal politics should not seek to determine homologies. Rather, a comparative perspective must consider differences. In fact, one of the tasks that researchers on collective violence and genocide have to tackle is distinguishing the typical structures and aims of different politics of violence, such as war, civil war, forced displacement, massacres, “ethnic cleansing,” and, ultimately, genocide. This is necessary not to create a ranking of horrors, but to more clearly categorize the different forms of collective violence. It is possible to draw a distinction between violence, war, and civil war based on typical structural traits. Among others, these concern the respective perpetrator groups and institutions, mechanisms of publicity, the ideological framing, motives, and aims of the perpetrators, and the legitimizing arguments.
This means that a comparative perspective has to make visible the structural similarities as well as differences. It is therefore crucial to remind ourselves what a comparison should not look like:
– In no way should a comparison be limited to a collection of cases, an accumulation of different crimes of collective violence.
– Moreover, it is crucial for a comparative perspective not to try to deduce generalized patterns from the Shoah and transfer them to other instances of collective violence.
Genocides display structural features that can be repeated, but the planning processes as well as the triggering events are very much unique; they follow from the historical, religious, and cultural self-conception of the respective societies.
The observation of structural features repeating themselves was also a precondition for introducing “genocide” as a legal term in international law, because defining such an element of crime requires that intentions, acts, events, and consequences are comparable across historical cases. The observability of repeatable structural elements is, last but not least, a premise for establishing “genocide” as a legal term in international law—for the definition of an element of crime necessarily presumes that the intentions, acts, events, and consequences constituting it can be compared historically.
As the Princeton historian Anson Rabinbach put it succinctly, “For example, if lawyers were to conclude from historical comparisons and juridical evidence that the events judged at Nuremberg were ‘utterly incommensurable’ they would have to conclude that ‘the legal rules that emerged from the trial would be inapplicable to virtually all subsequent events however similar.’”2 If, for example, the legal professions would deduce from historical comparisons and legal elements of crime, that acts, which had to be judged at the Nuremberg Trials would be completely non-comparable, then they would have to conclude that the legal norms developed during the Nuremberg Trials could not be applied to all other following acts, as similar as they appear.
We thus have to assume that genocides contain structural features that are typical and can be repeated. This is a precondition for the recognition, the possible prevention and, eventually, the legal prosecution of genocides.
Regarding those repeatable structural features, it is crucial to recognize that genocides have to be considered as processes involving societies as a whole—as societal processes aimed at the transformation and reorganization of society, a populace, or a territory. It is precisely at this point that comparisons become useful and promise insights, because the specific processes of modern genocides basically cannot be detached from the structures and characteristics of modern societies.
Of course, the planning and implementation of the different processes on which genocide is based can only be understood as specific processes. But persecution and violence rely on arguments that reflect norms common to the modern world: stability, balance, the restoration and protection of identity, the rhetoric of domestic enemies, or the realization of a new order. The possibility of a genocide is considered especially in the context of plans to mold the future of a society—legitimized as “security” or “salvation,” legitimized by reference to general patterns of progress and civilization.
As a consequence, it is crucial that we take seriously the ideological frameworks that perpetrators use to justify their actions, intentions, strategies, and motivations—for genocidal ideologies are not just world views, but social visions developed against the background of a certain knowledge of the political and social order. The perpetrators of a genocide empower themselves to take decisive historical action in order to create fundamentally changed conditions for the future of a nation. Their goal is to achieve a radical transformation of social reality—a new history—by means of a radical break. The actions taken are said to constitute a moral obligation. They can only be judged by the history of the following generations.
The two most important aspects that connect genocides at a structural level and, at the same time, separate them from other forms of collective violence, are the intentions of the perpetrators and the realization by society as a whole, because the politics of genocide are typically embedded in society. More precisely,
– by preparatory discourses of exclusion
– by the planning and implementation at the hands of societal support groups
– by legitimation strategies for an extermination policy that are socially acceptable
– or by the aims and blueprints of a society as well as the social transformations that genocidal procedures try to achieve and leave behind.
Relation and Relativization
A comparative perspective on genocide is easily suspected of attempting to relativize the Holocaust or, at least, of indirectly contributing to a relativization. As a consequence, both in research and the context of commemorative culture, it is has become common to speak of “the Holocaust and genocide.” This formulation directly links the Holocaust to the category of “genocide,” and at the same time reserves a special status for the Holocaust within this category or conceives of the Holocaust as transcending the category.
As Kristin Leah Platt convincingly argued, this idea of the Holocaust being something “special” would not only move the event to a symbolical level, but also construct the group of victims as symbolic victims of civilization.3 The designation of the Holocaust as a “breach of civilization” (Zivilisationsbruch) therefore has the effect of mystifying the event and taking it out of history, even de-historizing it. Related to the mystic-symbolic status of the Shoah as a unique event is a universal paradigm of the politics of remembrance and a moral responsibility to the “Never Again!” that I mentioned at the beginning—the demand to vigorously counter politics of destructive violence and to prevent them.
Thus, the comparison with other genocides does not imply a relativization of the Shoah. Rather, it means locating it in broader historical and social contexts and emphasizing its importance for these contexts.
Tendencies of relativization become a problem when singularity and uniqueness are played off against each other. But all historical events are singular in an absolute sense, that is, they do not repeat themselves in an identical manner.
An event can be unique only in differentiation from other, analogous events, which requires a comparison, too. Moreover, an event can claim to be unique only with regard to certain factors, because if all factors were unique, they could not be analyzed scientifically. From where, then, would we be able to derive standards and criteria?
This also means that uniqueness, individuality, and general traits of an event do not originate from the event itself. Determining them requires the description, analysis, and evaluation of (historical) facts with the help of terminological constructs (e.g., the term “genocide”), which is constitutive for the reconstruction of socio-historic reality.
In his book Rethinking the Holocaust, published in 2001, Yehuda Bauer made this point by offering a strongly worded, almost polemical comment on discourses about the uniqueness of the Shoah: “Absolute uniqueness thus leads to its opposite, total trivialization: if the Holocaust is a onetime, inexplicable occurrence, then it is a waste of time to deal with it.”4
Comparisons basically want to isolate causal factors that can be seen as possible reasons for the occurrence of a social phenomenon.
This shows the genuine contribution of a comparative perspective on the structures of genocide, because only in comparison with analogous or similar events and their contexts is it possible to identify these factors. On the other hand, a comparison can highlight the individuality of a case. However, what all genocides have in common is the aspect of a constitutive violence. A violence that is supposed to shape the future.
It is the attempt to implement a visionary blueprint for society within a very short time, within the lifetime of a generation empowering itself to create.
Notes
[1] Lemkin, Raphael: Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, New Jersey (2nd Edition), 2008 (first: 1944), p.79.
2 Rabinbach, Anson: Raphael Lemkin’s Concept of Genocide, Website der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, Jan. 1, 2005 (https://ip-journal.dgap.org/en/ip-journal/topics/raphael-lemkin%E2%80%99s-concept-genocide).
3 Platt, Kristin Leah: Perspektiven und Aufgaben der Genozidforschung. Vom sozialen Testament zum Problem der globalen Enthistorisierung, in: Zeitschrift für Genozidforschung 6, 1, 2005, pp. 8-41, here p. 23.
4 Bauer, Yehuda: Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven CT: Yale UP 2001, S. 14.
Mihran Dabag is the director of the Institute for Diaspora and Genocide Studies of Bochum’s Ruhr University
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