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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