Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis - Volume 124, Issue 4, 2011

Genocide can be defined as a process of systematic persecution and annihilation of a group of people by a government. In the twentieth century approximately 40 to 60 million defenseless people have become victims of deliberate genocidal policies. In genocides individuals are persecuted and murdered merely on the basis of their presumed membership of a group rather than on their actual beliefs, character, or actions. Genocide is particularly malicious and destructive because it is directed against all members of a group, mostly innocent and defenseless people who are persecuted and killed regardless of their behavior. This thematic issue of the Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis includes original contributions on mass violence in Argentina during the military dictatorship, Yugoslavia during its wars of dissolution, the Netherlands during World War II, Poland after World War II, the Soviet Union under Stalin, and the western Indian state of Gujarat in 2002.

This article approaches Serbian integral nationalism as an historical phenomenon spanning the entire first half of the twentieth century, a phenomenon that repeatedly influenced the internal developments of the Serbian and Yugoslav states. Serbian integral nationalism refers to the strain of Serbian nationalism that called for the integration of all Serb-populated lands into one national state. The author shows how a line of continuity can be traced from military and political elites in the pre-1918 Serbian nationalizing state through nationalist circles in interwar Yugoslavia and finally to the ideology of the Yugoslav army in the Homeland (the Chetniks) in the Yugoslav civil war of 1941-5. The existence of this nationalist impulse, and of its opponents, most notably those in the Austro-Hungarian army during 1903-18 and in the Croatian Ustasha fascist organization, created a ‘dynamic of destruction’ in the South Slav lands which led to repeated instances of mass violence during the period in question.

India’s Hindu-Muslim violence is rarely spontaneous, as this violence is usually fomented by politicians who aim to reap electoral benefits from the ensuing polarisation. This article aims to explain the capacity of politicians to instigate violence, by relating Gujarat’s 2002 violence to the way Gujarat’s state has developed over the last 200 years. As new state institutions developed their capacity to deliver various public services, older public institutions like the guilds (the mahajans) and the neighbourhood committees (the pol panch) gradually lost their functions and authority. As local communities became more integrated in a broader public sphere, they gradually became politicised, since they became more dependent on political patronage channels to gain access to the budding state. This dependency facilitated violence: the need for political intermediaries generated incentives for local inhabitants to contribute to the violence, while it gave politicians the necessary local authority and local contacts to foment violence. This makes Hindu-Muslim violence a modern phenomenon: the preconditions for violence discussed in this article – democratic political competition, the dependence of citizens on political mediation, and the politicization of neighbourhood life – are all by-products of the development of modern state institutions.

The opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s has offered historians of Stalinism unprecedented opportunities to research and understand the violence of the regime. The discovery of key documents and publication of revealing memoirs have shed light on four important genocides: the man-made famine of 1931-3, the Great Terror of 1937-8, the deportations of ethnic groups in 1939-45, and the mass forced labour in the Gulag. This article discusses three major shifts in the nature of Stalinist repression and examines how the historiography of Stalinist mass violence has changed over the past two decades.

The differences between rescue in the Netherlands when compared with Belgium and France are primarily in the structures of the organisations involved. In both France and Belgium the extent of Jewish self-help generated from migrant political and welfare groups at an early stage in the occupation helps to explain the speed of reaction when the deportations began. The degree of integration with wider non-Jewish welfare and resistance movements that had emerged before and during the ‘phoney war’ also reduced some of the practical problems in helping those in hiding at an early stage of the occupation. Jews under threat had the prospect of a source of assistance beyond the German-coordinated ‘official’ Jewish AJB or UGIF. This is in stark contrast to the Netherlands, where there was no such alternative, and where Jewish self help could not develop in the same way. While all countries produced individual rescuers and rescues, organisation took much longer to develop in the Netherlands. It is also worth noting that in the case of rescuing children – who were considered a special case in every country – there was a greater proliferation of organisations in the Netherlands because these were instigated by non-Jewish networks rather than by existing Jewish groups. A further contrast can be seen in the attitudes of leading churchmen. At first glance, their public statements were not particularly different, but it seems to have been their private advice and guidance to their subordinates that harnessed the power of the churches in specific areas to help Jews in hiding.

In post-communist Poland the Second World War is still capable of rousing intense emotions. Issues such as the killing of Jews in Jedwabne, the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers in Katyń, the clash with Ukrainians in Volhynia, the Soviet role during the Warsaw Uprising, and the appropriation of Auschwitz regularly cause public debate and political tension. This is not surprising: Poland suffered more than any other country during the war and was not allowed to discuss this openly during the communist era. However, a closer analysis of the major Polish weeklies after 1989 shows that the Polish relationship with the past is not as unusual as often thought. Several aspects of the war, including the role of Germany, are no longer debated. Most other issues are dealt with in a nuanced way, with much criticism of nationalistic and one-dimensional approaches.

Three decades of memory politics about the collective violence, military rule, and disappearances in Argentina during the 1970s and early 1980s have led to shifting interpretations of this traumatic past. This article demonstrates that the politico-discursive confrontation between adversarial groups, and the unwillingness of the military to resolve the disappearances, have caused a cultural trauma. Unable to mourn an incomprehensible past, Argentine society continues to relive painful past experiences in a contested search for meaning and justice. Dirty war and state terrorism have been key explanations for the mass violence. Genocide is the most recent concept used to understand this historical phenomenon. Its political, judicial, and moral implications have brought the human rights movement and military solidarity organizations into conflict, and have added collective responsibility to individual culpability.

Genocide studies is a highly interdisciplinary field of research which has grown significantly in the last few decades. This article opens with a short note on recent developments in the academic debate. Thereafter five major topics in this field are discussed: the emergence, development, and end of genocidal processes; the situation in postgenocidal societies; and the prevention of genocide. The last part of the article summarizes some of the main issues. It is argued that an understanding of genocide has not only historical value, but also social relevance, since it can help us to prevent mass violence in the future.