Cathie Carmichael, The Violent Destruction of Community during the ‘Century of Genocide’, 395-403. Abstract: Much of the early criticism of colonial genocide and genocidal practices elsewhere came from Marxists such as August Bebel, Antonio Gramsci and Ho Chi Minh. The German Left were strong critics of the colonial policy that led to the genocide against the Nama and Herero peoples. When Marxist regimes came to power after the First and Second World Wars, they initiated population politics which were highly detrimental to historical ethnic communities. This has led to a serious crisis of legitimacy on the Left. Clearly, the legacy of debates of the early inter-nationalists is still relevant as we discuss genocide as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon, but it is also essential that we use the full range of new analytical approaches as well as the comparative approach to understand and even begin to prevent this phenomenon.
T. David Curp, ‘Roman Dmowski Understood’: Ethnic Cleansing as Permanent Revolution, 405-427. Abstract: Poland’s postwar political consensus rested upon a mutual understanding between the communists led by Wladyslaw Gomulka and the extreme nationalists, who represented the legacy of Roman Dmowski in Polish political life. First and foremost this involved the physical and cultural exclusion of Germans and the rewriting of key elements in Polish history so that the ethnic cleansing of Germans was depicted as the culmination of hundreds of years of mutual struggle and antipathy. This in turn fed the anti-Semitism that became a feature of Polish political life in the 1950s and 1960s. As relations with Germany improved, Poles could begin to look at this episode in their history with more honesty.
Benjamin Madley, From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe, 429-464. Abstract: The German terms Lebensraum and Konzentrationslager, both widely known because of their use by the Nazis, were not coined by the Hitler regime. These terms were minted many years earlier in reference to German South West Africa, now Namibia, during the first decade of the twentieth century, when Germans colonized the land and committed genocide against the local Herero and Nama peoples. Later use of these borrowed words suggests an important question: did Wilhelmine colonization and genocide in Namibia influence Nazi plans to conquer and settle Eastern Europe, enslave and murder millions of Slavs and exterminate Gypsies and Jews? This article argues that the German experience in Namibia was a crucial precursor to Nazi colonialism and genocide and that personal connections, literature, and public debates served as conduits for communicating colonialist and genocidal ideas and methods from the colony to Germany.
Dorde Stefanovic, Seeing the Albanians through Serbian Eyes: The Inventors of the Tradition of Intolerance and Their Critics, 1804-1939, 465-492. Abstract: The rise of the modern national states in the post-Ottoman Balkans was accompanied by coercive assimilation, deportation, and even extermination of ethnic minorities, especially the local Muslims. In the formative periods of the Serbian state and Royal Yugoslavia, ethnic Albanians were repeatedly subjected to most exclusionary and discriminatory policies. While these actions of the Serbian élite were guided by the geopolitical security pressures and the coercive utopia of homogeneous nation-state, Serbian policy makers were also influenced by a strong intellectual tradition of intolerance towards Muslim Albanians. While some members of the Serbian élite were planning and implementing repression and expulsion of Albanians, others were calling for tolerance and inclusion of Albanians in a wider Balkan union. The analysis of Serbian policies towards Albanians in the Balkan context enables us to reformulate and extend Miroslav Hroch’s influential theory of minority nationalisms.