State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples

Abstract

Why are forced displacement, ethnic cleansing and genocide an enduring feature of state systems? In this book, Heather Rae locates these practices of 'pathological homogenisation' in the processes of state building. Political elites have repeatedly used cultural resources to redefine bounded political communities as exclusive moral communities, from which outsiders must be expelled. Showing that these practices predate the age of nationalism, Rae examines cases from both pre-nationalist and nationalist eras: the expulsion of the Jews from fifteenth century Spain, the persecution of the Huguenots under Louis XIV, and in the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide, and ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia. She argues that those atrocities prompted the development of international norms of legitimate state behaviour that increasingly define sovereignty as conditional. Rae concludes by examining two 'threshold' cases - the Czech Republic and Macedonia - to identify the factors that may inhibit pathological homogenization as a method of state-building.

Social Boundary Mechanisms

“…Open physical attack, in contrast, identifies ethnic cleansing for what it is. Norman Naimark has written a somber, wellinformed account of major European episodes during the twentieth century: Armenians and Greeks of Anatolia around World War I; Nazi extermination of Jews; the Soviet Union's forced deportation of Chechen, Ingush, and Crimean Tatars in 1944; expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II; and Yugoslavia's successive episodes of the 1990s (Naimark 2001; see also Bax 2000, Petersen 2002, Rae 2002. Ethnic cleansing, for Naimark (2001, 3), involves a deliberate program "to remove a people and often all traces of them from a concrete territory."…”

Spaces of Global Security: Beyond Methodological Nationalism

“…Contemporary nation-states are the historical products of the use of large measures of violence to set and maintain state borders, to produce and reproduce national identities, and to define and control populations, who become understood as "nationals" (Weber 1978;Tilly 1990;Torpey 1998, 241). The emergence of modern nation-states has been accompanied, in many cases, by ethnic cleansing, population exchanges, genocide, and programs of assimilation and homogenization (Arendt 1948(Arendt [1973Zolberg 1983;Rae 2002;Mann 2005). Furthermore, the project of national state-building itself was motivated in large part by the need to mobilize resources and human capital to support large-scale warfare (Tilly 1990;Spruyt 1994).…”

O baile do monstro: o mito da paz de vestfália na história das relações internacionais modernas

“…Com o enfoque na definição de fronteiras políticas a partir de práticas internas de homogeneização, Rae (2002) ilumina a operação do processo disciplinador da subjetividade baseado na manipulação e reprodução de referenciais simbólicos, em que os métodos para a definição do Estado, como ordem normativa central, viabilizam a identificação ao autorizar o tratamento discriminatório dos outsiders. Torna-se patente a multiplicidade de estratégias excludentes empregadas pelas elites construtoras do Estado para conquista da homogeneização populacional e a legitimação de autoridade, desde políticas de assimilação até práticas refinadas de extermínio e expulsão.…”