Robert Bideleux, University of Wales Swansea (r.j.bideleux@swansea.ac.uk)

Dark Shadows of European History and Identity: Xenophobia and Religious, Racial and Ethnic ‘Cleansing’

The aim of this project will be: (i) to undertake (in collaboration with scholars from other European countries) a comprehensive assessment of the changing nature, scope and motivations of the all too numerous occurrences of religious, racial and ethnic ‘purging’ or ‘cleansing’ in Europe from the 11 th to the 20 th centuries; and (ii) to relate these dark phenomena to changing conceptions of Europe and European religious, racial and ethnic identities, which have been constructed and maintained through acts and structures of exclusion as well as inclusion and have sometimes resulted in large-scale persecution, purges, repression or even annihilation.

Europe has for centuries been a major site of ‘purificatory’, ‘purging’ or ‘cleansing’ atrocities and mindsets, at least in part because no other continent has been so determined to construct an overarching identity for itself. During the medieval and early modern epochs, when Europeans mainly conceptualized Europe in religious terms (as ‘ Christendom’ or the ‘ Christian commonwealth’), acts of ‘purging’or ‘cleansing’ seem to have been motivated not merely by commonplace xenophobia, but also by religious beliefs and religiously-motivated feelings of insecurity or paranoia – Christian anti-semitism, Islamophobia, the Crusades, Turkophobia, and witch-hunting spring most readily to mind. Indeed, Christendom was recurrently perceived to be under external and/or internal threat.

The Renaissance and the increase in European awareness of other peoples and continents following the 15 th and 16 th-century ‘voyages of discovery’ seem to have been major factors in the subsequent development of more secular conceptions of Europe and ‘Europeanness’, including the emergence of Enlightenment conceptions of ‘European Civilization’. European extermination of aboriginal peoples in the ‘New World’ and the almost concurrent rise of the Atlantic slave trade and the slave plantation economies in the Americas, coupled with the rise of secular biological and social sciences, greatly strengthened the ascendancy of supposedly scientific racial conceptions of ‘Europeanness’ during the 18 th and 19 th centuries, which in turn prepared the way for the rise of Nazism and some other fascist conceptions of a racially and/or religiously purified pan-European ‘New Order’ in the early 20 th century. The post-1947 East-West partition of Europe into two mutually opposed armed camps, both of which were avowedly based upon secular, cosmopolitan, anti-fascist and anti-racist value systems, obscured, camouflaged or even put a lid on the continuing potential for racist and/or religiously-inspired xenophobia in Europe from 1954 (the end of the major Stalinist purges in the East) until the 1970s. However, even before the demise of Communist rule in Europe, the ‘urge to cleanse’ reared its ugly head again in former Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria, while unsavoury manifestations of xenophobia against longstanding minority communities also (re)emerged in post-1989 Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Latvia and Estonia. More recent conceptions of Europe as a pan-European civil order rooted in cosmopolitan liberal values, beliefs and practices have also failed to prevent (and may even have contributed to) the rise of anti-immigrant xenophobia, Islamophobia, new forms of ‘Euro-racism’ and a ‘Fortress Europe’ mentality in western Europe since the early 1980s.

Some works, most recently Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge University Press, 2005), have maintained that we should draw a clear distinction between the supposedly religious sources and motivations of pre-modern xenophobia and ‘cleansing’ and the supposedly modern and secular sources and motivations of the even more murderous 20 th-century manifestations of xenophobia and ‘cleansing’. However, my own work on the history of east-central, south-eastern and eastern Europe causes me to doubt the validity of such distinctions. Extreme nationalism, fascism, the Holocaust against the Jews, the Croat Ustase atrocities against the Serbs during the 1940s, the Serb, Montenegrin and Bulgarian atrocities against Kosovars and other Muslim groups between 1912 and 1920, and the Serb atrocities against Croats and Kosovars during the 1990s, as well as other manifestations of religious, racial and ethnic ‘cleansing’ and extreme xenophobia in the Balkans and east-central Europe during the 19 th and 20 th centuries, continued to be pervaded by Christian ideas, language, imagery and (presumably) motives, and were often aided and abetted by Christian churches, as I have emphasized in A History of Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 481-96). The religious-secular distinction is very difficult to sustain in practice. The very notions of ‘cleansing’ or ‘purification’ and the associated notions of ‘renewal’ and ‘rebirth’ originated in certain forms of religious fervour, fanaticism and millenarianism and seem never to have lost their originally religious or eschatological characteristics, even if the modern decline of religion has resulted in considerable secularization of ‘cleansing’and ‘purificatory’ mindsets.

A related theme meriting more comprehensive investigation concerns the relationships between the chief perpetrators of atrocities and the rest of the population, as well as the subsequent apportionment of ‘blame’. Like the contributors to The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath (Princeton University Press, 2000, edited by Istvan Deak, Jan Gross and Tony Judt), I think that it is difficult to maintain sharp distinctions between ‘resistance’ and ‘collaboration’ and hence between ‘resisters’ and ‘collaborators’ and between the decades preceding and following 1945). As a consequence, the simplistic ‘black-and-white’ moral judgements and the crude apportioning of blame in books such as Daniel J. Goldhagen’s A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust …(London: Little, Brown, 2002) ought to be regarded as quite untenable, not to say preposterous. Instead, we need to try to understand and explain more fully the very difficult pressures and predicaments which turned large numbers of not especially nefarious or malevolent people into minor accomplices of some very unsavoury movements, tendencies and regimes. As Vaclav Havel has often emphasized in relation to life under Europe’s Communist regimes, for most people minor acts of complicity were part of their daily lives and their struggles to do the best they could for themselves and/or their families. At the same time, it is important to give due recognition to the ways in which many of the same sorts of people and even the most unlikely regimes (such as that of Admiral Horthy in Hungary or that of King Boris in Bulgaria) took considerable risks or held out against considerable pressure, in order to save large numbers of people from racial and/or religious ‘cleansing’. Human behaviour is often morally ambiguous and seldom unambiguously good or evil.

This project will seek to explain and understand more fully why people (including regimes) behaved as they did, to explore the ways in which such behaviour expressed or was conditioned by conceptions of European identity, to delineate Europe’s changing structures and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, to investigate the persistence of ideas, attitudes and practices informed by religion in supposedly secular societies, and to highlight the pitfalls of unduly cut-and- dried and judgements.