Daily Mail (London)
May 27, 2006 Saturday
Century of genocide;
The 20th centurywas an era of unparalleled progress yet it was also
the most violent in history. What’s trulyworrying is that the causes
of that mass bloodshed are all too prevalent today
by NIALL FERGUSON
IT WAS the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was the
century when human beings got richer than previous generations could
possibly have imagined. It was the century when, on average, people
lived longer, too.
Breakthroughs in science and technology transformed the quality of
life on earth.
The average person became better fed, healthier and taller. A much
smaller proportion of the world’s population was chained to the
precarious drudgery of subsistence agriculture. People had roughly
treble the amount of leisure time.
Moreover, thanks to the remarkable spread of the democratic form of
government, people were also more free.
Yet – and this is surely one of the greatest of history’s paradoxes –
the 20th century was also by far the most violent era mankind has
experienced since the dawn of civilisation, far more violent in
relative as well as absolute terms than any other in history.
Significantly larger percentages of the world’s population were
killed in the two world wars that dominated the century than had been
killed in any previous conflict of comparable geopolitical magnitude.
By any measure, World War II was the greatest manmade catastrophe of
all time, killing something like 60 million people, nearly 3 per cent
of the world’s population in 1938.
Moreoever, the world wars were only two of many 20th century bouts of
lethal organised violence.
Death tolls quite probably passed the million mark in at least a
dozen other wars, as well as the campaigns of extermination waged
against ethnic or social minorities by the Turkish regime during
World War I, the Soviet regime from the 1920s until the 1950s and the
National Socialist regime in Germany between 1933 and 1945, to say
nothing of the tyrannies of Mao Zedong in China and Pol Pot in
Cambodia.
There was not a single year between 1900 and 1999 that did not see
large-scale organised violence in one part of the world or another.
Estimates for the century’s total body count attributable to violence
range from 167 million to 188 million – perhaps as many as one in
every 22 deaths.
So why were those 100 years the century of mass destruction as well
as the century of mass consumption?
Why did murder rates rise almost in step with living standards?
To resolve this great paradox, it is not enough just to say that
there were more people living closer together, or more destructive
weapons.
NO doubt it was easier to perpetrate mass murder by dropping high
explosives on crowded cities than it had once been to put dispersed
rural populations to the sword. But if those were sufficient
explanations, the end of the century would have been more violent
than the beginning and middle.
In the 1990s the world’s population for the first time exceeded six
billion, more than three times what it had been when World War I
broke out.
Moreover, weaponry was vastly more destructive. But there was
actually a marked decline in the amount of armed conflict in the
century’s last decade.
In any case, some of the worst violence of the century was
perpetrated in relatively thinly populated countries with the crudest
of weapons: rifles, axes, knives and machetes.
When I was a schoolboy, the textbooks offered a variety of
explanations for 20th century violence. Sometimes they blamed
economic crises, as if depressions and recessions could explain
political conflict.
Then there was the dreary old Marxist theory that the century was all
about class conflict – that revolutions were one of the main causes
of violence.
A third argument was that the 20th century’s problems were the
consequences of extreme versions of political ideologies, notably
communism and fascism, as well as earlier evil ‘isms’, notably
racism.
The trouble with all of these theories was that they could not tell
me the answer to two simple questions. Why did extreme violence
happen in some places – Poland and the Ukraine, for example – but not
in others, like Sweden and New Zealand?
And why did it happen at certain times – the early 1940s, especially
– but not at other times, like the early 1960s?
For the most striking thing about 20th century violence was how
localised it was in both space and time.
It really was tremendously bad luck to be born in Byelorussia or
Serbia in around 1904; your chances of dying a violent death were
probably 50:50. But if you had the luck to be born, as I was, in
Western Europe in the early Sixties, you were quite likely never to
hear a shot fired in anger.
The Depression was more or less a global phenomenon – but only a
minority of countries became warmongering dictatorships as a result
of it.
THERE were social inequalities more or less everywhere. But only in
some times did these give rise to bloody revolutions.
As for the ideologies which men used to justify violence in the 20th
century, all of these were the inventions of earlier periods.
Biological racism, the nastiest of all justifications for mass
murder, was a 19th century idea.
Why was it in Europe between 1939 and 1945 that this idea became the
basis for a systematic policy of genocide waged against the Jewish
people and other groups deemed by the Nazis to be ‘subhuman’?
Why did the Germans – who in the 1920s had been perhaps the best
educated people on the planet – commit the century’s most hateful
crime?
It is much too easy to pile all the blame on a few wicked dictators:
Hitler, Stalin and Mao in particular. But as Tolstoy long ago pointed
out in War And Peace, you have to explain not only why megalomaniacs
order men to invade Russia, but also why the men obey.
In short, we need some better way to explain why the 20th century, in
so many ways a time of unparalleled progress, was also a time when
millions of men (and it was mainly men) felt motivated to engage in
lethal organised violence against their fellow human beings – not
just in more or less equal battlefield struggles, but also in
horribly unequal massacres perpetrated against defenceless civilians.
And that explanation has to pinpoint both the location and the timing
of the bloodshed.
It turns out that for violence to explode into the million-plus
casualty range, three things need to coincide: ethnic disintegration,
economic volatility and empires in decline.
By ethnic disintegration, I mean breakdowns in the relations between
certain ethnic groups, specifically the breakdown of sometimes quite
faradvanced processes of assimilation in multiethnic societies. It
was no coincidence that the worst violence of the 20th century
happened in countries that were ethnically heterogeneous
as a result of complex patterns of migration and intermarriage.
Look at an ethno-linguistic map of Europe in around 1900 and you can
quickly identify the future killing fields of the century. In
particular, that triangle of territory between the Baltic, the
Balkans and the Black Sea stands out as a kind of patchwork of
different nationalities.
In the north there were Lithuanians, Latvians, Byelorussians and
Russians; in the middle, Czechs, Slovaks and Poles; in the south,
Italians, Slovenes, Magyars, Romanians and, in the Balkans, Slovenes,
Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians, Greeks and Turks.
Scattered all over the region were German-speaking communities. And
language was only one of the ways the different ethnic groups could
be distinguished.
Some of those who spoke German dialects were Protestants, some
Catholics and some Jews.
The striking thing is that these different groups were not strictly
segregated. On the contrary, from 1900 onwards there was a remarkable
blurring of ethnic lines as traditional religious communities
weakened and the number of mixed marriages rose.
By the 1920s, in many Central and East European cities, one in every
two or three marriages involving a Jew was to a non-Jew.
So the question becomes: what made so many of these multiethnic
societies blow apart in the 1930s and 1940s?
Why did neighbours quite literally murder one another in so many
different places, when it had seemed that the processes of
integration and assimilation would actually dissolve the differences
between Germans and Jews, Poles and Ukrainians, Serbs and Croats?
HERE is where economic volatility comes in – by which I mean the
frequency and amplitude of changes in the rate of growth, prices,
interest rates and employment.
The world had never experienced so many economic ups and downs as it
did during the first half of the 20th century, from the boom years
that ended in 1914 and 1929 to the catastrophic Depression of the
Thirties.
The effect of these ups and downs was deeply divisive in the
multiethnic societies of Central and Eastern Europe.
For it seemed to many people that the fruits of the good times were
disproportionately accruing to certain ethnic minorities – not only
Jews, but also Armenians. And when the bad times came, there was
already some predisposition to target those minorities for compulsory
redistribution – and retribution.
The third, fatal ingredient was provided by declining empires.
The world of 1900 was a world of empires. More than 80 per cent of
the world’s population lived in one empire or another.
But the empires that ruled Central and Eastern Europe – the Ottoman,
Austro-Hungarian, Russian and German – were fragile entities, whose
rivalries ultimately blew Europe apart in World War I.
It was in the wake of this first wave of imperial crises that the
question of ethnic minorities became acute, for in the new nation
states created after 1918 – particularly in Czechoslovakia,
Yugoslavia and Poland – there were numerous minorities who felt
distinctly vulnerable to the newly empowered majorities.
The Germans, in particular, who had once been so dominant in the
Austro-Hungarian empire, found themselves living as second-class
citizens.
Their feelings of post-imperial insecurity were a lethal ingredient
in the distinctly Austrian cocktail that became National Socialism.
The decline and fall of empires was a recurrent leitmotif of the 20
century.
It was not only these Central and East European empires that
collapsed; the new empires that sprang up in the 1930s – the Soviet,
the Italian, the Japanese and the Nazi – also proved ephemeral.
World War II was ultimately just as fatal for the West European
overseas empires of Britain, France and the Netherlands, which fell
apart inexorably in the 1950s and 1960s.
And precisely this pattern of imperial disintegration is another
reason why the 20th century was so violent. For violence tends to
peak when empires decline.
It is not during their rise and zenith that empires generate the most
conflict, but when they dissolve – for it is at the moment of
dissolution that indigenous peoples have the strongest incentive to
engage in civil war, in the knowledge the post-imperial spoils of
independence will go to the victor.
The potential instability of assimilation and integration; the
combustible character of ethnically mixed societies; the chronic
volatility of economic life; the convulsions that marked the decline
of Western dominance – these were the true causes of what I have
called The War Of The World.
If I am right about what made the 20th century so violent – ethnic
disintegration, economic volatility and empires in decline then what
are the implications for this still new century we live in today?
I am afraid to say that they are profoundly alarming. For there is
one region of the world which already has all these ingredients in
abundance.
That region is the Middle East.
AS I write, the evidence mounts that Iraqi society is descending into
a potentially terrible civil war between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, a
war which could all too easily escalate beyond Iraq’s borders into a
major regional conflict.
As I write, the world economy seems to be teetering on the brink of a
new era of volatility, after what has been a remarkable period of
stability and prosperity. Nowhere is that volatility more acute than
in the Middle East, where $70a-barrel oil enriches a tiny elite while
a youthful populace frets in idleness and poverty.
And, as I write, there is every reason to think that the last great
empire of the Western world – that informal American empire which has
so dominated the world in our lifetimes, and which this country has
perhaps too loyally supported – is losing its grip on the foreign
territories it has recently sought to control: not only Iraq, but
also Afghanistan.
The danger is very real that conflict in the Middle East could
escalate in the years ahead to levels we have not seen in the region
since the Iran-Iraq war; perhaps to levels we have not seen in the
northern hemisphere since the 1940s.
Nor is it clear to me that our multi- ethnic societies in Western
Europe, which are being so rapidly transformed by Muslim immigration,
would remain untouched by such a conflagration.
Once again, I fear, what has seemed like the best of times – this
fledgling 21st century, with its high-speed connections and its hedge
funds – could turn very suddenly into the worst of times.
Niall Ferguson’s new book, The War Of The World: History’s Age of
Hatred, is published by Penguin on June 1.
GRAPHIC: THE NAZI DEATH CAMP AT BELSEN: JUST ONE HORROR IN A HUNDRED
YEARS OF HORRORS