Download MANUS I. MIDLARSKY. Origins of Political Extremism: Mass

Featured Reviews
150
MANUS I. MIDLARSKY. Origins of Political Extremism: Mass
Violence in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. New York:
Cambridge University Press. 2011. Pp. xii, 429. Cloth
$99.00, paper $36.99.
Manus I. Midlarsky tackles a most difficult issue: how
to understand political extremism across widely varying
forms, geographies, and chronologies. He is on the hunt
for an overarching thesis that enables us to understand
communism, fascism, Islamic radicalism, and extreme
nationalism. Midlarsky is a political scientist with a difference (these days): he takes history seriously and
quickly dispenses with the idea that cross-national studies will tell us much of significance. Instead, he proposes
to explore the interface between individuals and their
historically formed social conditions. If one wants to
understand political extremism, he contends, one needs
first to get a handle on the political extremists.
For Midlarsky, the four forms of extremism share a
common, totalizing view of the individual and society.
The regimes and movements that embody extremism
have a singular view of the world. They are anti-pluralist to the core; all individuals have to follow in lockstep the prevailing ideology, and enemies—current,
imagined, or potential—have to be purged in one fashion or another.
Midlarsky is too aware of historical particularities to
glide over different trajectories. States and societies
with similar pasts may chart different political courses.
In the introduction, he cites Serbia and Bulgaria as examples. Both emerged out of the Ottoman Empire,
both had a common religious past in Eastern Orthodoxy. Yet Bulgaria, although far from being a political
democracy, never descended into extremism and even
protected many Jews during World War II, while Serbia
in the late twentieth century became a paragon of radical population politics. Under Slobodan Milosevic, it
engaged in both ethnic cleansing and genocide. What
accounts for the difference between Serbia and Bulgaria?
The main reason, the author suggests, is the “contraction of authority space” (pp. 10–13). Those countries that have suffered serious territorial and population losses become fertile soil for the nurturing of
extremists. The loss of the homeland provides a constant source of aggrievement, which political leaders
easily mobilize for extremist politics. Many of the cases
are well known—Germany after World War I, the
Western powers lopping off Ottoman territory, Western incursions into the Middle East, irredentist claims
on the part of Serbia or Italy. In all these places, the
losses were seared deeply into the consciousness of the
population, or at least of those who became extremists.
Their sense of aggrievement was felt all the more
deeply because the contraction followed a period of
great ascendancy. Midlarsky is, then, interweaving the
history of emotions, in specific, of emotional loss, with
the critical category of political space.
Midlarsky draws on the literature in social psychol-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
ogy to elaborate the emotional side of his argument.
“Ephemeral gain” is his term of choice, and it underscores the severe insecurity and pain that accompanies
an advantage or accomplishment that is then lost. The
psychological mechanism can be in play even during the
period of ascendancy if those gains are seen as fragile,
constantly threatened by some external power or enemies within. At the same time, the surprise at a loss—
and here it is easy to see post–World War I Germany
as an ideal typical case—can greatly intensify the emotion and result in the search for the traitors, because the
event should not have happened. Even worse is a series
of losses, a syndrome that pushes the defeats even more
deeply into consciousness. In fact, everything associated with loss has a more powerful impact than the joy
that comes with gain, Midlarsky tells us by drawing
again on the findings of social psychology and cognitive
science. He elaborates the important emotional components of honor, shame, and humiliation both on an
individual and a societal level. All these emotions are
further heightened by “mortality salience,” the understanding that one’s life is finite and the sources of shame
and humiliation need to be overturned in the here and
now, even if the collective, the nation, race, or religious
community has an eternal life.
All of this is very promising, and Midlarsky’s own
knowledge of a variety of disciplines is quite impressive.
But a certain unevenness of execution arises when Midlarsky tries to substantiate his approach, and some serious methodological and topical issues emerge as well.
As the author ranges over an almost astonishing number of cases, he moves back and forth between individual biographies and societal analyses. For fascism,
including Nazism, he writes more generally about the
real and perceived national defeats and humiliations.
For Russian radicalism, he focuses on Konstantin
Pobedonostsev, the defender of czarist autocracy and
Russian Orthodoxy, and then on Joseph Stalin’s personal experiences of humiliation both as a young man
and in the Russian Civil War. Midlarsky sees a certain
symmetry in the singularity of Pobedeonostsev’s worldview, his fierce hostility toward pluralism of any sort,
and Vladimir Lenin’s communism (pp. 119–120). Going even further afield, Midlarsky brings into this same
realm Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood, and
Chechen extremism.
This is precisely where one senses a certain unevenness of analysis. Why do some historical cases warrant
a particular focus on the leader, as with Russia and the
Soviet Union, while in others, Sri Lanka, for example,
Midlarsky has little to say about the individual leaders?
This is left unclear. Moreover, to move from an individual’s psychology to the societal level requires an array of explanations. Scholars may differ on the partic-
FEBRUARY 2014
Featured Reviews
ular factors, but the mediation between the two levels
has to be present if the argument is to be convincing.
Whatever humiliations Stalin had suffered in his youth
and young adulthood, these only became historically
relevant because of the character of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, and the institutional nature of the Soviet state.
Here again, historians and social scientists argue extensively about the particular factors and how each should
be weighed. But for a work that seeks to place particular
leaders—those who are the generators of mass violence—in their historical context, it is unfortunate that
the mediating factors are largely absent.
Midlarsky is true to his discipline in at least one fundamental regard: the search for parsimonious explanation, for the one concept that will answer the problem
at hand. But this is where many historians (or at least
this historian) want to get off the train. Why should we
even imagine that one answer will cover all the cases at
hand? If political extremism has multiple forms, then it
follows that it can also have multiple causes. It is not at
all clear that we achieve greater understanding by associating the Stalinist terror or Nazi atrocities with contemporary Islamic terrorism, even though some overlaps in the political forms do exist, not least the willing
and even joyous recourse to violence as the means of
societal transformation. Nazi Germany, the Stalinist
Soviet Union, and people in some parts of the contemporary Muslim world share the sensibility of a glorious
past followed by humiliation and a dramatic fear of additional territorial losses. Thankfully, Midlarsky avoids
the politically charged and vacuous term “Islamofascism.” Still, any understanding of Muslim extremism
would have to take into account aspects of the religious
tradition of Islam, the forms of authority that developed historically in the Islamic world, the incorporation
into the Western-dominated global economy, the Palestine-Israel conflict, and no doubt many other factors.
And we need to understand better how political actors
mobilize selective aspects of received structures, traditions, and ideologies when they engage in extremist
acts. The argument about humiliation and ephemeral
gain is effective but by no means comprehensive. Historians (again, at least this one) may prefer sinking into
the complexities and particularities that we relish.
Midlarsky is certainly erudite and the range of cases
is instructive. As he explores the problem of political
extremism and mass violence more deeply in the conclusion, he suggests a two-stage explanation. But here
again, complexity rather than singular explanations offer us greater possibilities of understanding. The Italian
fascists, to take one example, “rose to power on feelings
of injustice, anger, and the placing of blame, the actual
later descent into extremist behavior in the form of
mass murder [in Ethiopia] was to be facilitated by . . .
the threat and fear of reversion (or ‘relegation’), and a
sense of humiliation over past defeats” (p. 310). The
past humiliation to which Midlarsky refers was the Italian defeat in Ethiopia in 1895–1896. But many questions emerge at this point. How, exactly, did the mech-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
151
anism of humiliation leading to extremism work? Did
the Italian soldiers in the 1930s think at all about the
1890s? How do we know that the statements by Benito
Mussolini and others summoning up the past had an
impact? Beyond that, while such ideological and propaganda efforts could have been significant, how do we
know that they were the motivating factors in the commission of atrocities in Ethiopia? A panoply of other
factors are at least as possible as explanations, starting
with the legitimation crisis of the fascist regime in the
mid-1930s, which led Mussolini to escalate all sorts of
policies as a way of mobilizing the population and regenerating support. The hegemony of racial thinking in
the West by the turn of the twentieth century was no
doubt also a factor, since nowhere in Europe did Italian
troops exercise brutality on the scale of their actions in
Africa.
The same sort of questions arise when Midlarsky discusses Nazi Germany. He is certainly correct that the
shame and humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles
(1919), followed by the 1923 French-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, were “prominent in the rise of the
Nazis to power” (pp. 310–311). The onset of the Holocaust, he suggests, was precipitated by the “threat and
fear of reversion to the status of a defeated power” (p.
311). No doubt that is also correct. But is it the only
explanation? The ideological force of antisemitism, the
structure of the National Socialist state, the reinscription of authoritarian patterns in German society across
successive political regimes—all the issues that historians have spent decades formulating and debating—
were also causative factors. Shame, humiliation, and
fear only get us so far in understanding the shift in the
regime from discriminatory policies against Jews to
mass murder.
Nor can the complex character of the Soviet terror,
with its many layers of victims, be explained simply by
humiliation. That approach drastically diminishes the
nature of the Stalinist revolution, with its fundamental
drive to transform the society, economy, and polity of
the Soviet Union. Political, psychological, and strategic
factors were all in play, and resulted in purges of particular nationalities, peasant opponents, real and apparent, of collectivization, so-called asocials, party
members, veteran party leaders, and many others simply caught up in the vortex of terror. Stalin’s sense of
personal humiliation no doubt played a role here. His
references, in a famous speech of 1931, to the legion of
invaders who had occupied Russia—Mongol khans,
Turkish beys, Swedish feudal lords, Polish and Lithuanian gentry, British and French capitalists, Japanese
barons—was a masterstroke of political propaganda
that probably resonated with the population, or at least
those who heard or read it. But the complexity of terror
as a total societal operation requires attentiveness to
many more factors than Midlarsky offers.
Finally, the relationship between the title and subtitle
of the book, between political extremism and mass violence, requires sustained analysis. The question is really about how we define mass violence. All of the cases
FEBRUARY 2014
152
Featured Reviews
the author details involve regimes that exercised massive violence against civilian populations and engaged
in warfare. That much is clear. But liberal states in the
international sphere are also fully capable of committing massive acts of violence against civilians. That, indeed, is the nature of counterinsurgency warfare, from
Malaya to Algeria to Vietnam. Those regimes, British,
French, and American—and many others—may not
have been extreme at home, but they most certainly
were in their larger imperial realms. And even in the
domestic realm, the extreme violence of slavery and Jim
Crow, to use two examples, would certainly need to be
taken into account in any analysis of the United States.
It is a little too easy to discuss mass violence as if it were
only a characteristic of extremist regimes.
In the end, we are left with a learned but complicated
book. In my reading, the interdisciplinary approach,
and the social psychological orientation in particular, is
revelatory. But two general problems remain. One is
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
the methodological divide between historians and political scientists, the one preferring complex causation
and singularities, the other parsimonious explanation
and generalizations covering many cases. There was a
time when the divide was not as great, but now—with
notable exceptions, needless to say—it is a gulf that appears unbridgeable as American political science bows
to the intellectual domination of economics. Second is
the very definition of extremism and mass violence.
Some regimes may be homologous in their domestic
and international politics. But there is no necessary correlation here, and some systems that may prove liberal
at home are fully capable of exercising extremist policies abroad. At the very least, we need to take account
of a much broader field of actors and policies if we want
to arrive at a general understanding of mass violence in
the twentieth century.
ERIC D. WEITZ
City College of New York
FEBRUARY 2014