The Nation - Anderson's Amphibologies: On Perry Anderson

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by Mark Mazover

As a student during the 1980s, I gave the "European Union" section in the library a wide berth. The pall of soporific technocracy that hung over it made the adjacent shelves of books on law and political science enticing by comparison. A lot more has been written on the EU since then, most of it perpetuating that same "mortal dullness," to borrow a phrase from the historian Perry Anderson. Dullness, on the other hand, is one charge no one has ever levied at Anderson, whose new book, The New Old World, is as insightful, combative and invigorating as its illustrious predecessors. Given Anderson's long and intimate engagement with Europe, both as an editor of the New Left Review and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books for the past two decades, one looks forward to what one gets--a bracing assault from somewhere on the left on the conventional Europieties, and new perspectives on the evolution, and likely future trajectory, of one of the most important political and cultural experiments of our time.

The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

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Anderson states the fundamental analytical difficulty of his project at the outset. Europe appears to be an "impossible object," constantly slipping among three quite distinct literatures. There are histories of the postwar continent, mostly written in the shadow of the cold war and paying little attention to the European Union; there is the vast outpouring of works, popular and scholarly, focusing not on Europe per se but on this or that European country. (The EU may be a polity of sorts, but the political and intellectual energies of most Europeans still flow at the national level.) Finally, there is what we might call professional EUrology: a series of interventions, chiefly by legal scholars and political scientists, on the technicalities of the integration process and its institutions. Given the amnesiac quality of much of this last in particular, Anderson's ability to move fluently among the three literatures, and above all to evaluate the EU as an ideology, is necessary and timely.

Anderson takes as his starting point a series of reflections on the work of the historian Alan Milward, who in The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-51 (1984), The European Rescue of the Nation-State (1992) and The Frontiers of National Sovereignty (1993) demonstrated the degree to which the politics of the nation-state remained vital in explaining the postwar drive toward European integration. Milward's argument was that the revival of democracy in the nation-states of Western Europe, shaken by the experience of occupation and war, depended on the pursuit of prosperity through the rebuilding of cross-border economic networks. As this rebuilding took place, it became the motor of more permanent and far-reaching European cooperation. Accepting the basic insight, Anderson argues that Milward nevertheless exaggerates the degree to which this process was democratic; in fact, far from restoring and deepening democracy in Europe, as the EU's founders wished, the institutions they built have eroded and weakened it. This tendency has reached an apogee in the creation of a single currency defended by a powerful centralized monetary authority that exerts deflationary pressure on wages in order to guard the rigid conditions of the Stability and Growth Pact. The lack of comparably powerful legislatures at the European level means that the voice of the popular will is silenced. (A rare exception was the rejection by French and Dutch voters of the EU's constitutional treaty in 2005, a wrinkle ironed out by the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009.) Any democratic impulse in the integration process long ago withered away and has been replaced by an elitarian, even oligarchic form of consensus policy-making conducted behind closed doors and consummated in faits accomplis.

Anderson is significantly more admiring than Milward of the federalist impulses of EU architect Jean Monnet and his peers. He applauds their transnational vision, their dirigiste commitment to welfarism and their desire to set Europe on foundations that would allow it to forge its own path between the superpowers. At the same time, he insists that the federalists' idealism needs to be set against the enduring impact of continental geopolitics: France's fear of Germany after World War II; West Germany's desire to rejoin the comity of powers; and above all, the brute reality of the American desire to see Europe as a stable garrison in the cold war. For Anderson, Europeans have simply failed to acknowledge their real status as an outpost of the American imperium; worse, over the decades from Truman to Bush II, they have become more subservient, not less.

Despite the disagreements, all this is presented with the utmost respect for Milward's intellectual achievement. (Indeed, Milward is the book's dedicatee.) The tone changes when Anderson takes up contemporary EUrology, dispatching with gusto the various models--intergovernmentalist, confederalist, imperial--that social scientists have offered as guides to understanding what has become in only a few decades one of the most complex of contemporary political structures. Common to most if not all versions of EUrology, Anderson charges, is an overestimation of what the EU has really achieved, an underplaying of its continued geopolitical weakness and a complacency about its embrace of neoliberal economics. The lack of accountability in European institutions cannot be written off as easily as the mainstream scholarship assumes, nor should we excuse or dignify the Eurocrats' attempt to replace the guns and blood of political struggle with consensus reached through secret diplomacy.

That the initial chapters of The New Old World are based for the most part on pieces published previously in the London Review of Books does not make them any less valuable: such a penetrating and wide-ranging critique of the field is still rare. But at this point in the book, just when one expects Anderson to elaborate his own analysis of the European Union in more detail, he instead reprints a number of tours d'horizon of the three countries--Italy, France and Germany--that constitute what he terms the European "Core." The shift in gears from the EUrological to the national is abrupt and justified perfunctorily as though to set before our eyes that very impossibility of writing about Europe that Anderson notes to be such a striking feature of the intellectual landscape.

Part of the problem is that these pieces, although worth rereading, are in some cases quite old and have inevitably dated. (The first part of the Germany chapter was originally published as an essay in the LRB in January 1999.) Anderson's political antennas, sensitive to considerations of the longue durée, are always closely attuned to the demands of the conjuncture. In his hands, historical analysis, massive and precisely crafted, invariably serves as ammunition in an unceasing war of position. Thus his essays, despite their dense scene-setting, distancing tone and expert knowledge, are nothing if not assessments of the moment. In this sense, though in almost no other, they resemble that effort at a "history of the present" that Anderson himself has castigated in the work of Timothy Garton Ash. (Like Garton Ash, Anderson focuses on the political class and its machinations; but whereas Garton Ash, in Anderson's view, cozies up to it and offers a view from over its shoulder, Anderson stands at a remove and is constantly unmasking it.)

There is another difficulty. Anderson singles out his Big Three not only because of their role in the European Union but also--perhaps primarily--for their predominant place in European cultural life. A strictly EUrological intent might have suggested a different choice of candidates; momentum toward integration has frequently come, after all, either from smaller countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands or from the European Commission (the chief administrative organ of the EU). But Anderson's idealist bent pushes him away from such themes and back to the specificities of Old Europe's national Kultur bearers. In each case, the rise of neoliberalism is linked to the left's loss of ideological and philosophical vigor. Something of the former Gramscian is manifested here: the implication is that because the left lost the war of ideas in Italy, France and Germany, catastrophic political consequences followed. Once there were titans like Sartre and de Gaulle, runs the message; now we are left with BHL and Sarko. The tone is regretful; the analysis, acerbic. But the overarching political conception is surprisingly old-fashioned--what counts is Big Three politics, each mediated by the international balance of forces but unfolding largely within its national borders. Dealing with exactly the same three countries, historian Charles Maier once wrote a classic of comparative history, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975), in an effort to explain the wider mutation of political life and institutions across Europe after World War I. Anderson does not do this. As membership in the EU has expanded from six states to twenty-seven, he has remained focused on the Big Three. He sees the EU as one further--perhaps the last--triumph of the Western European bourgeoisie, but his eschewal of systematic comparison offers less guidance than Maier's on the reasons for its success.

These somber analyses of the hollowing out of Europe's Core are followed in a quite different vein by a sequence of essays (originally published in the LRB in 2008) on Cyprus and Turkey. Here we move from domestic institutions and struggles over national cultures to sweeping, morally charged narratives set in an emphatically geopolitical context. Anderson terms his subject the European Union's "Eastern Question," in the belief that its treatment of Cyprus and Turkey reveals as much about the EU as the treatment of the old Eastern Question (the fallout from the decay of the Ottoman Empire) did about the real nature of the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century. This is, in short, all about the unmasking of European pretensions. Despite their fine talk about human rights, the Europeans have consistently left the Greek Cypriots in the lurch and acquiesced in Turkey's de facto partition of their island. At the same time, Anderson says, they have welcomed the prospect of Turkish membership, as EU policy-makers and polite opinion do their best to sweep inconvenient mention of the Armenian genocide under the carpet.

Anderson is in less familiar territory here, and it shows. His lengthy retelling of the Cyprus tragedy manages to be schoolmasterly and polemical at the same time. The pendant pieces on Turkey push tendentiousness further. He exaggerates the chances of Turkish membership in the EU (which currently look bleak, since Europeans, pace Anderson, do not do everything the Americans tell them to). But it is the history offered here that is uncharacteristically ropy. Having reminded us at the outset that the European Union is dealing with the descendant of an imperial state, he warns that the early modern Ottoman Empire was "designed for the battlefield, without territorial fixture or definition." One could as easily describe the British Empire in analogous terms, but to what end? The character of states is not fixed by their origins, and even when such assertions about empires are true, they are idle as guides to the present outlook and behavior of their postimperial successors. As for his suggestion that nineteenth-century imperial reforms failed to transform the religious foundations of Ottoman rule, this is scarcely borne out by the facts. If political Islam emerged in the late nineteenth century as a new program for the empire--dismissed by Anderson, with a typical impatience for the politics of piety, as "ideological bluster"--it was precisely because of the dramatic impact of the reform program on Islam's place in Ottoman society.

A matter highly relevant to the worldview of the Turkish political elite also deserves more weight than Anderson devotes to it: namely, the massive human cost of imperial decline, as millions of Muslims over the century after 1821 were forced to abandon their lands in the arc from Greece through the Balkans to the Caucasus, and made a new home in Anatolia. But accounting for that forced migration would have complicated and contextualized the story of the Armenian genocide, which is Anderson's real subject. It would have required explanation rather than indictment. One would have had to situate the genocide, for instance, within the embrace by the Committee of Union and Progress, the ruling party at the time, of a much more sweeping population politics, one that identified a bewildering range of ethnic groups--Christian and Muslim--as suspect and potentially disloyal elements, and brought to the fore the tight interconnection between the bureaucracies of mass murder and refugee resettlement during World War I.

As for the politics of the memory of the genocide, too much in Anderson's charge sheet is dictated by rhetorical positioning. It is true, as he says, that the Turkish elite has connived in a silence about the genocide that remains hard, indeed dangerous, to break. But his allegation that European sympathies in this matter are on the side of Turkey's Kemalist, secular elite strains belief. Turkey's cover-up has been denounced in the French Parliament, the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, among other venues. Of the many reasons Europeans are balking at Turkish membership, this is not the least important. And while it is certainly correct that Western historians of modern Turkey fight shy of using the "G-word" (just as Soviet historians used to weigh carefully what might jeopardize their access to the archives), this professional deformation does not inhibit the European commentariat that Anderson unnecessarily pillories.

A litany of authorial errors serves little purpose. It is more useful to explain the peculiarities of Anderson's perspective and tone. Fundamentally, this book charts the reaction to a deep and evidently wounding disappointment, one that has more to do with Anderson's ideas than can be explained solely by the global rise of neoliberalism and the long retreat of the left. It is Europe, perhaps above all, that has disappointed him. From very early in the history of the New Left Review, which turns fifty this year, Anderson embraced a Europeanist position for at least three reasons. First, it offered a convenient perch from which to lambaste the parochialism of the British left. Second, one could imagine that the regional concentration of power achieved by the Western European bourgeoisie through the economic integration process in the 1950s might paradoxically--if the left ever got its hands on the reins--pave the way for a coordinated continental path to socialism. And third, perhaps most important, the New Left Review regarded (Western) Europe as a kind of cultural and intellectual font and devoted itself to disseminating the works of Gramsci, Althusser, Mandel and many other social theorists previously neglected or unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world.

So far as the first of these reasons is concerned, the battle is over. The British Labour Party is now more unambiguously pro-European than the Tories, and Europe is not by and large a major bone of contention within it. As for the third reason, the scale of the achievement of the New Left Review and its associated imprint, Verso, which turns forty this year, is now clear: their dissemination of Euro-Marxism influenced intellectual life in Britain, especially on its campuses. But this did not have any greater political impact, since the universities were never, as the NLR once anticipated, the "weak link" of capitalism. Worse still, the fountainhead of ideas has dried up, and the European left is--so Anderson suggests--intellectually bankrupt.

This brings us to the remaining reason for Anderson's embrace of a Europeanist position: the chances of turning the European Union into an engine of socialism, or at least of social democracy. As late as 1998, Anderson was still willing to see this as a possibility; in an exchange with the Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio, he anticipated that if the German Social Democratic Party won elections that year, "the four major countries of Western Europe...will for the first time in history be ruled simultaneously by governments declaredly of the Left. This constellation would occur just as the great project of a single continental currency comes into being. The power to reshape the conditions of life for the peoples of Europe for the better would lie in the hands of the official Left, across national frontiers, in a way that it has never done before." The Social Democratic Party did prevail, and under Gerhard Schröder it did form a government, but the outcome belied Anderson's hopes. In short order, the Schröder government cut taxes, reduced welfare benefits and sent German troops into combat (in Kosovo and Afghanistan) for the first time since World War II. It was the latest in a series of disappointments--in the EU, its institutions, its electorates--that has left Anderson facing a Europe very different from the one he has believed in over so many years.

What is left for him, then, but to pour scorn upon the pretensions of contemporary liberal Euroboosters? Do they see Europe as a beacon of light, a reminder of a better world than that across the Atlantic? They forget, says Anderson, that the European Union in geopolitical terms is nothing more than a "deputy empire." Do they praise it for having devised a postconflictual form of politics? Prove them wrong by reminding them that key member states retain strong senses of their own self-interest. All of this makes Anderson enjoyable to read. But it also makes him a better prosecutor than judge.

The desire to rout the liberals and pick holes in their woolly self-delusions leads Anderson into strange company. In particular, he has a soft spot for tough-minded realists and neocons. Robert Kagan is commended for providing, in Of Paradise and Power (2003), the best account of Europe's subservience to the United States; Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (2009), Christopher Caldwell's assault on the hypocrisies of immigration debate in the EU, is said to break "free from the prevailing morass of sanctimony and evasion" thanks to "the clarity of its historical analysis and sharpness of its comparative perspective." Not that Anderson cannot spot the weaknesses in the realists' and neocons' arguments; but their readiness to ignore taboos, to castigate the self-satisfaction of Old Europe's elites, is something he seems to relish.

So too is their geopolitical realism. In Anderson's Europe, one is constantly waiting for the old demons to return. Unified Germany in particular is depicted as a potential Bismarckian, if not quite Nazi, Grossmacht ready to impose its will on its cowering neighbors; the European Union is a new Concert of Powers replaying in a new key the old struggle for mastery. Throughout The New Old World, present-day presidents and prime ministers are termed "rulers," their governments "regimes," as though to imply their fundamental illegitimacy--despite their electoral victories. It is a view of the continent--and its voters--that sits oddly with the other plank of the Andersonian critique: the EU's lack of democracy. Either power has relocated in some unaccountable way to the neoliberal corridors of Brussels, voiding national politics of much of its autonomy, or in fact it remains in the hands of the Germans, the French and other would-be hegemons. Anderson wants us to fear the old tyrannies and the new one at the same time, but this seems inconsistent, if not incoherent.

Elitism can take many forms, of course. Anderson's political goals have, on the showing of this book, moderated considerably over time: what counts now for him in Europe is the revival of popular politics and the struggle against growing economic inequality. But if previous positions have been tacitly abandoned, there has been no diminution in authorial certainty: the tone of omniscience remains for the most part intact, and there are flashes of the author's trademark hauteur. More discordant with his avowedly democratizing goals, it seems to me, is his prose. Connoisseurs of Andersoniana will enjoy recherché gems such as "amphibology," "capsizal" and "conflictivity." Without touching on the obiter dicta in French, German, Latin and Italian, we find, in only a few pages, "decathexis," "semi-catallaxy," "paralogism" and "censitary," alongside archaisms like "estoppage," "prebends" and "brigade" (used as a verb). Such language stands as testimony to elitism of a different kind, that of a small substratum of the postwar British left whose basically Leninist conception of radical politics led them to abjure too close a contact with the masses, whose ultimate victory they supposedly championed. But now another kind of elitism, much more impenetrable in word and deed, is in the ascendant in Europe. Anderson is good at puncturing its self-serving myths. But the explanation of its staying power must be sought elsewhere.

About Mark Mazower

Mark Mazower is the Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton)

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For workers in Western Europe, economic recovery seems a long way off

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By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 12, 2010; A06

NIMES, FRANCE -- Time and again, Mohamed Chakiyet has been called back to the employment bureau: another form to fill out, another bureaucrat to meet with, another training offer. But in the four months since he has been out of work, Chakiyet has yet to find a company willing to hire him -- or even grant him a job interview.

"I'm waiting," he said after his latest visit, which was no more promising than those that came before it. "But it's a little difficult."

Chakiyet, a lanky 19-year-old with a vocational training diploma, has set out to reach a modest goal: a job driving a delivery truck around this middle-size city 75 miles northwest of Marseille. For the time being, however, he has become a prime example of Western Europe's corrosive unemployment, which according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has risen to an average of almost 10 percent as a result of the global economic crisis and is likely to get worse before it gets better.

As European banks return to profits after huge government bailouts and political leaders forecast a broad if uneven return to growth, economists have warned that it will take longer to see any recovery in the job market. As a result, the greatest human drama associated with the crisis -- families thrown into distress and horizons closed for millions of youths -- seems likely to endure as part of the European landscape for another year and probably more.

"They keep having me come back," Chakiyet explained, "but I have not been able to get a single appointment with an employer. They don't seem to have their hearts in it."

Legislation that provided Western Europeans with a strong safety net and buffered them from the worst effects of the crisis is now likely to inhibit job growth, even if the continent's economies return to growth this year as predicted. The decision to hire a worker involves such a large commitment and layoffs are so expensive, economists say, that businessmen hesitate to make a decision until they are sure a recovery is underway.

"It's the way companies react to the crisis," explained Nicolas Véron, an analyst at the Bruegel research institute in Brussels. "They wait as long as possible before they lay off people, and they are also cautious before rehiring people, because they don't want to have to lay them off again. Hiring and firing costs are high."

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In addition, Western European leaders decided on modest stimulus programs, despite pleas from Washington, out of fear of expanding government debt. Chancellor Angela Merkel has been a particularly strong champion of budget discipline in Germany, where the OECD predicted that unemployment will probably rise above 9 percent this year and could hit 9.7 percent by 2011.

Nimes, a city of tree-lined avenues and bubbling fountains with 150,000 inhabitants, has been a pocket of high unemployment since the decline of its shoe and textile industries years ago. Signs of improvement were finally in the air, residents said, until the crisis struck 18 months ago. Since then, the unemployment rate has risen back above 13.5 percent, about three percentage points above the French national rate.

The malaise can be seen in places like the B-Kebab Café in the city's Pissevin neighborhood, where government-subsidized high-rises house poor families and unemployment is estimated at more than 40 percent. Dozens of men, many speaking Arabic, sat around drinking Moroccan tea and playing cards on a recent afternoon, as a rare snowfall covered the streets in white.

Denis Volpilière, president of the Nimes Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said plans for government-organized investment in new train lines and irrigation projects have raised hope for new jobs in the next few years. "But in the meantime," he added, "we have to manage all these people without jobs. How are we going to train these people for the needs of the economy?"

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In addition, the region's usually clement weather and rich agriculture, combined with generous welfare payments from Paris, have contributed to what Volpilière called "an irreducible unemployment rate" of people who have stopped looking for a job. In a recent report, the OECD warned that the rise in unemployment in France -- 600,000 additions to the rolls for a total of more than 3 million -- could translate into "long-lasting benefit dependency for a significant proportion of the recipient population."

In Britain, the situation is also grim. The unemployment rate is about 8 percent but is likely to rise this year. Martin Weale, director of London's National Institute for Economic and Social Research, said the rate has been kept down in part by workers' willingness to take on temporary jobs. Another possible factor, he said, is that Poland's economic boom has lured home many Polish workers who otherwise might have pushed up unemployment statistics.

"There is a strong suspicion that quite a few jobs that could have been lost were simply abandoned by the Polish who have gone home, and that has kept the rate down," he said. "The second thing is there is quite a lot more flexibility than is normally the case. In order to keep jobs, people have agreed to part-time work, wage freezes and reductions."

Nicole Boebion-Thiery, a divorced nurse, said she has been looking for work ever since she was pushed out of her last job in a nursing home near Nimes, just as the global crisis settled in. But her goal is specific, she said after a visit to the employment bureau: She wants to work with small children.

"What I'd really like to do is go to pediatrics school," she said.

In any case, she added, Nimes's public hospitals, facing cutbacks, have no openings for 56-year-old veterans such as herself and rely instead on fresh graduates from the city's two nursing schools. Her main hope is to find a job in a private clinic, she said, but the employment bureau has come up with no prospects.

Instead, she has gone through a training program run by the employment center to teach people how to conduct themselves during a job interview and how to write a letter seeking work. To support herself and her 17-year-old son, she has relied on a $1,100-a-month pension that she got on retiring from her earlier job as a nurse in Nancy, in northeastern France. Because of her formal status as a retiree, Boebion-Thiery has not been able to sign up for unemployment benefits or additional welfare payments for the long-term unemployed offered recently by President Nicolas Sarkozy's government to help weather the crisis.

When she heard the government was encouraging retired nurses to return to work to alleviate a nursing shortage, she inquired in Nimes's hospitals. But she said she was told she would receive only the pension from Nancy, whether she worked or not.

Special correspondent Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.

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European Court: Landmark Ruling on Racial and Religious Exclusion

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Judgment says Bosnia’s Political Ban on Jews, Roma Discriminatory

December 22, 2009

(London) - The ruling today by the European Court of Human Rights, that the exclusion of Jews and Roma from Bosnia's highest state offices is unlawful discrimination, is a major step toward ending racial and religious exclusion in Europe, the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Human Rights Watch said today. Bosnia, along with the US and European states that continue to play a critical role in the country, should move swiftly to remove all discriminatory provisions from the country's constitution.

"The court's ruling is a major step forward in Europe's struggle against discrimination and ethnic conflict," said Sheri P. Rosenberg, co-counsel for the successful applicant Jakob Finci and a professor and director of the Human Rights Clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. "This decision affirms that ethnic domination should have no role in a democracy."

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The court found, by 14 votes to 3 (16 votes to 1 with respect to the presidency), that the exclusion of Jews and Roma could not be justified. It stated that the "authorities must use all available means to combat racism, thereby reinforcing democracy's vision of a society in which diversity is not perceived as a threat but as a source of enrichment."

"The European Court has made it clear that race-based exclusion from political office, such as that suffered by Jews and Roma in Bosnia, has no place in Europe," said Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor at Human Rights Watch, who was co-counsel for Finci from his previous employment with Minority Rights Group International. "The US, EU and the other states who still play a major role in Bosnia, should ensure the ruling is put into immediate effect by backing a change in the constitution."

The ruling today was issued by the Grand Chamber of the Court in the case of Sejdic & Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina, and concerned the exclusion from the Bosnian presidency and the upper house of parliament of a Bosnian Jew and a Bosnian Roma. The Bosnian Constitution, drafted by negotiators during peace talks in Dayton, Ohio in 1995, restricts the highest offices of state - the upper house of parliament and the presidency - to members of Bosnia's three main ethnic and religious groups - the Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims).

Members of smaller groups (such as the Jewish and Roma communities), those from ethnically mixed backgrounds and those who do not wish to declare themselves members of the three main groups are banned from running for office. Despite the extensive involvement of the international community, in particular the US and the European Union, in the governing of Bosnia since 1995, these discriminatory provisions in the constitution have never been amended.

This ruling is the first under the recent Protocol 12 to the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits discrimination in all rights "set forth by law," a much wider scope than previously existed under the convention.

Jakob Finci, the successful applicant, was born in a transit camp during World War II after his parents, Bosnian Jews, had been deported from the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. Returning to Bosnia after the war, he has had a distinguished career in public life and is now Bosnian ambassador to Switzerland. But his ethnicity and religion prevented him from the possibility of seeking election to the highest offices of state.

"I am delighted that the European Court has recognized the wrong that was done in the Constitution 14 years ago," Finci said. "The Bosnian politicians need to right the wrongs in the Constitution quickly."

Bosnia's next presidential and parliamentary elections are due in October 2010.Constitutional reform has been under discussion in Bosnia since 2005 but so far has not produced any change.

"This landmark ruling clearly establishes that there is no scope for second-class citizenship in Europe," said Cynthia Morel, who also served as legal counsel in the case. "The court's finding will play an important role in strengthening Bosnia's young democracy." The case was supported throughout by Minority Rights Group International and the Human Rights and Genocide Clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Spain on High Alert after Bombs

Police in Spain are on heightened alert after two bomb attacks in 48 hours blamed on the Basque separatists, Eta.

On Thursday, two Civil Guard officers were killed when a car bomb exploded outside a base in the resort town of Palmanova on the island of Majorca.

Another car bomb blast on Wednesday destroyed much of a police barracks in the northern city of Burgos and left more than 50 people slightly wounded.

The attacks coincide with the 50th anniversary of Eta's founding.

They also come at a time when police resources are stretched because of the start of the holiday season.

Map of where the bomb struck

Following Thursday's bombing, the authorities temporarily closed ports and airports on Majorca as part of a security operation to prevent those responsible from escaping, causing travel chaos for tourists.

Eta has been held responsible for more than 820 deaths during its campaign for an independent homeland in Spain's Basque region.

'Vile murderers'

The two Civil Guards who were killed in Palmanova - Carlos Saenz de Tejada Garcia and Diego Salva Lesaun - had been inside a patrol car parked outside the El Foc barracks when a bomb planted underneath exploded it, security officials said.

Several people were injured by the powerful explosion on the busy road, which sent the vehicle flying through the air and set it on fire.

Police later defused a second explosive device placed under another civil guard vehicle at a different base on Majorca, officials said.

There has been no claim of responsibility for the attack yet, but Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said it bore all the hallmarks of Eta.

A memorial ceremony has been held at Palma's cathedral for the two officers

"I want to condemn this new low blow with much rage and pain, but also with much determination," he said in a televised address.

"The criminal attack comes at a time when the civil guards and national police, with the co-operation of French security forces, are striking against the terrorist group as never before," he added.

Mr Zapatero said Eta members were being "arrested earlier and in greater numbers, and this is the way it will continue to be".

"The government has given orders to the security forces to be on maximum alert, to double their work, to increase even more their efforts and to protect themselves from these vile murderers," he added.

"They have absolutely no chance of hiding. They cannot escape. They cannot avoid justice. They will be arrested. They will be sentenced. They will spend the rest of their lives in prison."

ANALYSIS Steve Kingstone, Madrid correspondent The charred wreckage of a patrol car in Majorca, and the shattered facade of a police barracks on the mainland represent a grim birthday message from Eta, as the Basque militant group marks the 50th anniversary of its founding. In the wake of the Mallorca killings, a stern-faced Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero again spoke of defeating ETA "definitively". But after the bloodiest week in months, Spaniards may wonder whether he was speaking more out of hope than expectation. Eta's anniversary calling card Majorca bomb: Your stories

On Friday morning, Mr Zapatero and members of the Spanish royal family attended a memorial ceremony at Palma's cathedral for the two civil guards, during which he placed medals of honour on their coffins.

Thursday's attack was the deadliest since two Spanish undercover policemen were shot during an operation in south-western France in December 2007.

The BBC's Steve Kingstone in Madrid says that for many months Spaniards have been told by their government that Eta is historically weak, following the arrest of a string of alleged commanders of its military wing, but the past 48 hours have provided chilling evidence to the contrary.

Exactly 50 years after it was founded by a small group of radical Basque students, Eta appears to be making a statement - that it has the capability to strike anywhere, our correspondent says.

With the country in its peak tourist season, and with thousands taking to the roads this weekend for their holidays, police resources will be stretched - amid genuine fears of more attacks, he adds.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8177839.stm

Greece: Halt Crackdown, Arrests of Migrants

July 27, 2009

Greek authorities are arresting large numbers of migrants and asylum seekers in the country's cities and islands and moving many of them to the north, raising fears of illegal expulsions to Turkey, Human Rights Watch said today.

Human Rights Watch received reports from a credible source that, in mid-July 2009, police transferred a group of Arabic-speaking people from Chios Island to the Evros border region, where they were secretly forced to cross the border into Turkey. On July 23, local human rights activists prevented authorities from transferring 63 migrants from Lesvos Island to the north by blocking access to the ferry. On July 25, the police took most of them to Athens under heavy police escort.

"These operations and transfers are very worrying," said Bill Frelick, refugee policy director at Human Rights Watch. "We fear that people are being prevented from seeking asylum, that children arriving alone are not being protected, and that migrants are kept in unacceptable detention conditions and possibly even being secretly expelled to Turkey."

In another recent episode, in a large-scale police operation from July 16 to 18, police in Athens surrounded what appeared to be several hundred migrants and locked them inside an abandoned courthouse. The police arrested anyone who left the building. It is feared that some of them may have needed protection and did not have a chance to file a claim for asylum, the police prevented Human Rights Watch from speaking to the people held inside, and Human Rights Watch does not know the whereabouts of those who were arrested when they tried to leave.

In a November 2008 report, "Stuck in a Revolving Door: Iraqis and Other Asylum Seekers and Migrants at the Greece/Turkey Entrance to the European Union," Human Rights Watch documented how Greek authorities have systematically expelled migrants illegally across the Greece-Turkey border, in violation of many international legal obligations. These "pushbacks" typically occur at night from detention facilities in the northern part of the country, close to the Turkish border, and they involve considerable logistical preparation. Human Rights Watch at that time interviewed 41 asylum seekers and refugees - all privately and confidentially - in various locations in both Greece and Turkey, who gave consistent accounts of Greek authorities taking them to the Evros River at night and then forcing them across.

Human Rights Watch also documented how Greek authorities miscategorize unaccompanied children as adults and detain them for prolonged periods of time in conditions that could be considered inhumane and degrading. (See the December 2008 report, "Left to Survive: Systematic Failure to Protect Unaccompanied Migrant Children in Greece.")

In yet another recent incident, on July 12, police destroyed a makeshift migrant camp in Patras, on the Peloponnese peninsula. In the days before the camp was destroyed, the police reportedly arrested large numbers of migrants there, and according to credible sources, transferred an unknown number to the northern part of the country. On July 17, Human Rights Watch met with several Afghans in Patras, including 12 unaccompanied migrant children now homeless as a result of this operation, who were in hiding in abysmal conditions out of fear of being arrested.

A 24-year-old man told Human Rights Watch: "We're living like animals in the jungle ... we can't take a shower and we don't have proper food ... before I lived in the camp, but all of my things and clothes were burned. Now I have a shirt and a pair of pants, nothing else."

A 14-year-old Afghan boy who arrived in Greece one year earlier said: "The worst situation during the past year is now, in Patras - now that I'm living in this forest .... There's not enough food and we only eat bread with water."

Human Rights Watch also observed on July 17 how more than 1,000 migrants lined up all night, largely in vain, trying to file asylum applications at Athens' main police station. Greece recognizes as few as 0.05 percent of asylum seekers as refugees at their first interview and passed a law at the end of June that abolishes a meaningful appeals procedure, making it virtually impossible for anyone to obtain refugee status. It also extended the maximum length of administrative detention for migrants to 12 months - and under certain circumstances, up to 18 months - from previously 90 days.

"It appears Greece is doing everything it can to close the door on persons who seek protection in Europe, no matter how vulnerable they are," said Frelick. "The European Union must hold Greece accountable for acts contrary to international and European human rights and refugee law, and it needs to act fast, as the lives of many are at risk."

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality

By Timothy Snyder

Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass death, particular humans into quotas of those to be killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark woods and falsified the records of regions in which they had starved people to death; the Germans had slave laborers dig up the bodies of their Jewish victims and burn them on giant grates. Historians must, as best we can, cast light into these shadows and account for these people. This we have not done. Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come.

The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.

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This form of survivors' history, of which the works of Primo Levi are the most famous example, only inadequately captures the reality of the mass killing. The Diary of Anne Frank concerns assimilated European Jewish communities, the Dutch and German, whose tragedy, though horrible, was a very small part of the Holocaust. By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.

Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden —were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today's Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.

An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived. About a million more Polish Jews were killed in other ways, some at Chelmno, Majdanek, or Auschwitz, many more shot in actions in the eastern half of the country.

All in all, as many if not more Jews were killed by bullets as by gas, but they were killed by bullets in easterly locations that are blurred in painful remembrance. The second most important part of the Holocaust is the mass murder by bullets in eastern Poland and the Soviet Union. It began with SS Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jewish men in June 1941, expanded to the murder of Jewish women and children in July, and extended to the extermination of entire Jewish communities that August and September. By the end of 1941, the Germans (along with local auxiliaries and Romanian troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics. That is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war. By the end of 1942, the Germans (again, with a great deal of local assistance) had shot another 700,000 Jews, and the Soviet Jewish populations under their control had ceased to exist.

There were articulate Soviet Jewish witnesses and chroniclers, such as Vassily Grossman. But he and others were forbidden from presenting the Holocaust as a distinctly Jewish event. Grossman discovered Treblinka as a journalist with the Red Army in September 1944. Perhaps because he knew what the Germans had done to Jews in his native Ukraine, he was able to guess what had happened there, and wrote a short book about it. He called Treblinka "hell," and placed it at the center of the war and of the century. Yet for Stalin, the mass murder of Jews had to be seen as the suffering of "citizens." Grossman helped to compile a Black Book of German crimes against Soviet Jews, which Soviet authorities later suppressed. If any group suffered especially under the Germans, Stalin maintained wrongly, it was the Russians. In this way Stalinism has prevented us from seeing Hitler's mass killings in proper perspective.

In shorthand, then, the Holocaust was, in order: Operation Reinhardt, Shoah by bullets, Auschwitz; or Poland, the Soviet Union, the rest. Of the 5.7 million or so Jews killed, roughly 3 million were pre-war Polish citizens, and another 1 million or so pre-war Soviet citizens: taken together, 70 percent of the total. (After the Polish and Soviet Jews, the next-largest groups of Jews killed were Romanian, Hungarian, and Czechoslovak. If these people are considered, the East European character of the Holocaust becomes even clearer.)

Yet even this corrected image of the Holocaust conveys an unacceptably incomplete sense of the scope of German mass killing policies in Europe. The Final Solution, as the Nazis called it, was originally only one of the exterminatory projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. Had things gone the way that Hitler, Himmler, and Göring expected, German forces would have implemented a Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941–1942. As Ukrainian and south Russian agricultural products were diverted to Germany, some 30 million people in Belarus, northern Russia, and Soviet cities were to be starved to death. The Hunger Plan was only a prelude to Generalplan Ost, the colonization plan for the western Soviet Union, which foresaw the elimination of some 50 million people.

The Germans did manage to carry out policies that bore some resemblance to these plans. They expelled half a million non-Jewish Poles from lands annexed to the Reich. An impatient Himmler ordered a first stage of Generalplan Ost implemented in eastern Poland: ten thousand Polish children were killed and a hundred thousand adults expelled. The Wehrmacht purposefully starved about one million people in the siege of Leningrad, and about a hundred thousand more in planned famines in Ukrainian cities. Some three million captured Soviet soldiers died of starvation or disease in German prisoner-of-war camps. These people were purposefully killed: as with the siege of Leningrad, the knowledge and intention to starve people to death was present. Had the Holocaust not taken place, this would be recalled as the worst war crime in modern history.

In the guise of anti-partisan actions, the Germans killed perhaps three quarters of a million people, about 350,000 in Belarus alone, and lower but comparable numbers in Poland and Yugoslavia. The Germans killed more than a hundred thousand Poles when suppressing the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Had the Holocaust not happened, these "reprisals" too would be regarded as some of the greatest war crimes in history. In fact they, like the starvation of Soviet prisoners of war, are scarcely recalled at all beyond the countries directly concerned. German occupation policies killed non-Jewish civilians in other ways as well, for example by hard labor in prison camps. Again: these were chiefly people from Poland or the Soviet Union.

The Germans killed somewhat more than ten million civilians in the major mass killing actions, about half of them Jews, about half of them non-Jews. The Jews and the non-Jews mostly came from the same part of Europe. The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.

Auschwitz is only an introduction to the Holocaust, the Holocaust only a suggestion of Hitler's final aims. Grossman's novels Forever Flowing and Life and Fate daringly recount both Nazi and Soviet terror, and remind us that even a full characterization of German policies of mass killing is incomplete as a history of atrocity in mid-century Europe. It omits the state that Hitler was chiefly concerned to destroy, the other state that killed Europeans en masse in the middle of the century: the Soviet Union. In the entire Stalinist period, between 1928 and 1953, Soviet policies killed, in a conservative estimate, well over five million Europeans. Thus when one considers the total number of European civilians killed by totalitarian powers in the middle of the twentieth century, one should have in mind three groups of roughly equal size: Jews killed by Germans, non-Jews killed by Germans, and Soviet citizens killed by the Soviet state. As a general rule, the German regime killed civilians who were not German citizens, whereas the Soviet regime chiefly killed civilians who were Soviet citizens.

Soviet repressions are identified with the Gulag, much as Nazi repressions are identified with Auschwitz. The Gulag, for all of the horrors of slave labor, was not a system of mass killing. If we accept that mass killing of civilians is at the center of political, ethical, and legal concerns, the same historical point applies to the Gulag as to Ausch-witz. We know about the Gulag because it was a system of labor camps, but not a set of killing facilities. The Gulag held about 30 million people and shortened some three million lives. But a vast majority of those people who were sent to the camps returned alive. Precisely because we have a literature of the Gulag, most famously Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, we can try to imagine its horrors—much as we can try to imagine the horrors of Auschwitz.

Yet as Auschwitz draws attention away from the still greater horrors of Treblinka, the Gulag distracts us from the Soviet policies that killed people directly and purposefully, by starvation and bullets. Of the Stalinist killing policies, two were the most significant: the collectivization famines of 1930–1933 and the Great Terror of 1937–1938. It remains unclear whether the Kazakh famine of 1930–1932 was intentional, although it is clear that over a million Kazakhs died of starvation. It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932–1933. Soviet documents reveal a series of orders of October–December 1932 with evident malice and intention to kill. By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died.

What we read of the Great Terror also distracts us from its true nature. The great novel and the great memoir are Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Alexander Weissberg's The Accused. Both focus our attention on a small group of Stalin's victims, urban Communist leaders, educated people, sometimes known in the West. This image dominates our understanding of the Great Terror, but it is incorrect. Taken together, purges of Communist Party elites, the security police, and military officers claimed not more than 47,737 lives.

The largest action of the Great Terror, Operation 00447, was aimed chiefly at "kulaks," which is to say peasants who had already been oppressed during collectivization. It claimed 386,798 lives. A few national minorities, representing together less than 2 percent of the Soviet population, yielded more than a third of the fatalities of the Great Terror. In an operation aimed at ethnic Poles who were Soviet citizens, for example, 111,091 people were shot. Of the 681,692 executions carried out for alleged political crimes in 1937 and 1938, the kulak operation and the national operations accounted for 633,955, more than 90 percent of the total. These people were shot in secret, buried in pits, and forgotten.

The emphasis on Auschwitz and the Gulag understates the numbers of Europeans killed, and shifts the geographical focus of the killing to the German Reich and the Russian East. Like Auschwitz, which draws our attention to the Western European victims of the Nazi empire, the Gulag, with its notorious Siberian camps, also distracts us from the geographical center of Soviet killing policies. If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag, we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today's Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. More generally, when we contemplate Auschwitz and the Gulag, we tend to think of the states that built them as systems, as modern tyrannies, or totalitarian states. Yet such considerations of thought and politics in Berlin and Moscow tend to overlook the fact that mass killing happened, predominantly, in the parts of Europe between Germany and Russia, not in Germany and Russia themselves.

The geographic, moral, and political center of the Europe of mass killing is the Europe of the East, above all Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States, lands that were subject to sustained policies of atrocity by both regimes. The peoples of Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not only, suffered the most, since these lands were both part of the Soviet Union during the terrible 1930s and subject to the worst of the German repressions in the 1940s. If Europe was, as Mark Mazower put it, a dark continent, Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness.

Historical reckonings that can be seen as objective, such as the counting of victims of mass killing actions, might help to restore a certain lost historical balance. German suffering under Hitler and during the war, though dreadful in scale, does not figure at the center of the history of mass killing. Even if the ethnic Germans killed during flight from the Red Army, expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945–1947, and the firebombings in Germany are included, the total number of German civilians killed by state power remains comparatively small (for more on that, see the box below).

The main victims of direct killing policies among German citizens were the 70,000 "euthanasia" patients and the 165,000 German Jews. The main German victims of Stalin remain the women raped by the Red Army and the prisoners of war held in the Soviet Union. Some 363,000 German prisoners died of starvation and disease in Soviet captivity, as did perhaps 200,000 Hungarians. At a time when German resistance to Hitler receives attention in the mass media, it is worth recalling that some participants in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler were right at the center of mass killing policies: Arthur Nebe, for example, who commanded Einsatzgruppe B in the killing fields of Belarus during the first wave of the Holocaust in 1941; or Eduard Wagner, the quartermaster general of the Wehrmacht, who wrote a cheery letter to his wife about the need to deny food to the starving millions of Leningrad.

It is hard to forget Anna Akhmatova: "It loves blood, the Russian earth." Yet Russian martyrdom and heroism, now loudly proclaimed in Putin's Russia, must be placed against the larger historical background. Soviet Russians, like other Soviet citizens, were indeed victims of Stalinist policy: but they were much less likely to be killed than Soviet Ukrainians or Soviet Poles, or members of other national minorities. During World War II several terror actions were extended to eastern Poland and the Baltic states, territories absorbed by the Soviet Union. In the most famous case, 22,000 Polish citizens were shot in 1940 at Katyn and four other sites; tens of thousands more Poles and Balts died during or shortly after deportations to Kazakhstan and Siberia. During the war, many Soviet Russians were killed by the Germans, but far fewer proportionately than Belarusians and Ukrainians, not to mention Jews. Soviet civilian deaths are estimated at about 15 million. About one in twenty-five civilians in Russia was killed by the Germans during the war, as opposed to about one in ten in Ukraine (or Poland) or about one in five in Belarus.

Belarus and Ukraine were occupied for much of the war, with both German and Soviet armies passing through their entire territory twice, in attack and retreat. German armies never occupied more than a small portion of Russia proper, and that for shorter periods. Even taking into account the siege of Leningrad and the destruction of Stalingrad, the toll taken on Russian civilians was much less than that on Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews. Exaggerated Russian claims about numbers of deaths treat Belarus and Ukraine as Russia, and Jews, Belarusians, and Ukrainians as Russians: this amounts to an imperialism of martyrdom, implicitly claiming territory by explicitly claiming victims. This will likely be the line propounded by the new historical committee appointed by President Dmitri Medvedev to prevent "falsifications" of the Russian past. Under legislation currently debated in Russia, statements such as those contained in this paragraph would be a criminal offense.

Ukrainian politicians counter Russia's monopolization of common suffering, and respond to Western European stereotypes of Ukrainians as Holocaust collaborators, by putting forward a narrative of suffering of their own: that millions of Ukrainians were deliberately starved by Stalin. President Viktor Yushchenko does his country a grave disservice by claiming ten million deaths, thus exaggerating the number of Ukrainians killed by a factor of three; but it is true that the famine in Ukraine of 1932–1933 was a result of purposeful political decisions, and killed about three million people. With the exception of the Holocaust, the collectivization famines were the greatest political disaster of the European twentieth century. Collectivization nevertheless remained the central element of the Soviet model of development, and was copied later by the Chinese Communist regime, with the predictable consequence: tens of millions dead by starvation in Mao's Great Leap Forward.

The preoccupation with Ukraine as a source of food was shared by Hitler and Stalin. Both wished to control and exploit the Ukrainian breadbasket, and both caused political famines: Stalin in the country as a whole, Hitler in the cities and the prisoner-of-war camps. Some of the Ukrainian prisoners who endured starvation in those camps in 1941 had survived the famine in 1933. German policies of starvation, incidentally, are partially responsible for the notion that Ukrainians were willing collaborators in the Holocaust. The most notorious Ukrainian collaborators were the guards at the death facilities at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. What is rarely recalled is that the Germans recruited the first cadres of such men, captured Soviet soldiers, from their own prisoner-of-war camps. They rescued some people from mass starvation, one great crime in the east, in order to make them collaborators in another, the Holocaust.

Poland's history is the source of endless confusion. Poland was attacked and occupied not by one but by both totalitarian states between 1939 and 1941, as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, then allies, exploited its territories and exterminated much of its intelligentsia at that time. Poland's capital was the site of not one but two of the major uprisings against German power during World War II: the ghetto uprising of Warsaw Jews in 1943, after which the ghetto was leveled; and the Warsaw Uprising of the Polish Home Army in 1944, after which the rest of the city was destroyed. These two central examples of resistance and mass killing were confused in the German mass media in August 1994, 1999, and 2004, on all the recent five-year anniversaries of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and will be again in August 2009.

If any European country seems out of place in today's Europe, stranded in another historical moment, it is Belarus under the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko. Yet while Lukashenko prefers to ignore the Soviet killing fields in his country, wishing to build a highway over the death pits at Kuropaty, in some respects Lukashenko remembers European history better than his critics. By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.

Belarusian memories of this experience, cultivated by the current dictatorial regime, help to explain suspicions of initiatives coming from the West. Yet West Europeans would generally be surprised to learn that Belarus was both the epicenter of European mass killing and the base of operations of anti-Nazi partisans who actually contributed to the victory of the Allies. It is striking that such a country can be entirely displaced from European remembrance. The absence of Belarus from discussions of the past is the clearest sign of the difference between memory and history.

Just as disturbing is the absence of economics. Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union followed a path to economic self-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balance industry with an agrarian utopia in the East, the USSR wishing to overcome its agrarian backwardness with rapid industrialization and urbanization. Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe. Both of them saw the Polish state as a historical aberration; both saw Ukraine and its rich soil as indispensable. They defined different groups as the enemies of their designs, although the German plan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Soviet policy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic develop-ment. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning.

They did so in ways that seem appalling and obscene to us today, but which were sufficiently plausible to motivate large numbers of believers at the time. Food is no longer scarce, at least in the West; but other resources are, or will be soon. In the twenty-first century, we will face shortages of potable water, clean air, and affordable energy. Climate change may bring a renewed threat of hunger.

If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.

The Europe of today is remarkable precisely in its unity of prosperity with social justice and human rights. Probably more than any other part of the world, it is immune, at least for the time being, to such heartlessly instrumental pursuits of economic growth. Yet memory has made some odd departures from history, at a time when history is needed more than ever. The recent European past may resemble the near future of the rest of the world. This is one more reason for getting the reckonings right.

The Expulsion of Germans from the East

Of the 12 million or so Germans who fled or were expelled from Eastern Europe at the end of the war, the vast majority came from Czechoslovakia (3.5 million) or Poland (7.8 million). Most of the second group came from lands taken from the defeated Reich and assigned to Poland by the Allies. About half of the 12 million fled, and about half were deported—though a neat division is impossible, since some of those who fled later returned and were then deported.

In late 1944 and early 1945 some six million Germans fled before the Red Army; it was then that most of the 600,000 or so fatalities among German refugees took place. Many of these were simply people who were caught between armies; some were purposefully massacred by Soviet soldiers or died in Soviet camps. Murders were also committed by Czechs and Poles. Hitler shares responsibility for these deaths, since German authorities failed to organize timely evacuations.

The postwar deportations of Germans, a direct result of Hitler's war, were a Czechoslovak-Polish-Soviet-British-American project. During the war, the exiled leaders of occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia expressed their wish to keep their postwar German populations small, and the Allies agreed that German populations would be removed after victory. Winston Churchill recommended a "clean sweep," and the Allied Control Council issued the official plan for the transfer of six million Germans.

The (non-Communist) Czechoslovak government had Stalin's approval to expel its Germans, but also Churchill's and Roosevelt's. Poland was under Soviet control, though any Polish government would have expelled Germans. Polish Communists accepted Stalin's proposal that Poland should be moved very far to the west, which implied expelling more Germans than democratic Polish politicians would have wished. (It also entailed the deportation of Poles from the eastern half of pre-war Poland, which the Soviets annexed. About a million of these Polish expellees settled the lands from which Germans were expelled.)

From May to December 1945 Polish and Czechoslovak authorities dumped about two million Germans over their borders. From January 1946, Polish and Czechoslovak authorities continued to force Germans to leave, while British, Soviet, and American forces arranged their reception in their occupation zones in Germany. In 1946 and 1947, the Soviets received slightly more than two million Germans in their zone, the British some 1.2 million, and the Americans some 1.4 million. Deportations continued at a slower pace thereafter.

Although the expulsions were a case of collective responsibility, and involved hideous treatment, mortality rates among German civilians—some 600,000 out of 12 million—were relatively low when compared to the other events discussed here. Caught up in the end of a horrible war fought in their name, and then by an Allied consensus in favor of border changes and deportation, these Germans were not victims of a calculated Stalinist killing policy comparable to the Terror or the famine.