Conclusion
This book's central question has been "Why did Serbia support ethnic cleansing in Bosnia during 1992, whereas Israel engaged in ethnic policing in Palestine during 1988?" My answer has focused on the importance of context or "institutional setting." Bosnia and Palestine were structured as different types of institutional environments, channeling repertoires of nationalist state violence in different directions. By spring 1992, Bosnia had become a frontier vis-à-vis Serbia, whereas Palestine (in 1988) was a ghetto within Israel. These different institutional configurations shaped Serbia's and Israel's repertoires of violence and responses to challenges by ethno-national rivals. The more a specific territory and population were openly and fully controlled by the state, the more security forces relied on methods of ethnic policing, rather than ethnic cleansing. Paradoxically, in other words, Serbia's and Israel's "national enemies" were shielded from the most intense forms of violence when they were firmly wedged within the dominant state's grasp. At the margins of Serbian and Israeli state power, by contrast, these enemies tended to face more intensely despotic patterns of state violence.
To some, the very nature of my question might have seemed strange. On what grounds do I compare Bosnia's atrocities with Palestine's experience? It is precisely those varying patterns of behavior, however, that should be explained. In investigating whether a comparison of Bosnia to Palestine is legitimate, we need to explore nationalist beliefs and tendencies within Serbia and Israel, and to analyze other instances of Serbian
In this book, I have argued that such an overlap does indeed exist. Exploring Serbian public opinion on questions of nationalism, Serb-Muslim relations, and Bosnia, we found that while Serbs may have been vaguely committed to a narrow notion of collective identity emphasizing ethnic Serb-ness, there was no clear consensus on how best to deal with non-Serb outsiders in Bosnia and elsewhere. Like most nationalist ideologies, Serbian nationalism set general goals for itself, including the unification of all Serbs under one state, but was not always clear on the means by which that goal was to be achieved. Serbia had its moderates and radicals, and while both may have been Serb nationalists, they offered different schemes for resolving acute political, demographic, and military dilemmas.
Empirically, the Serbian state deployed different styles of violence, and these varied by institutional setting. In Bosnia, the most extreme versions of Serbian nationalism were realized by crisis committees and paramilitaries, but in Vojvodina and the Sandžak, somewhat more moderate visions won out. Serbian police kept a nascent crisis committee in Vojvodina in check, and local Croats were not killed or expropriated out-right. Instead, they were clandestinely harassed and intimidated, leading to "soft" ethnic cleansing. A similar process occurred in the Sandžak, used by Serbian paramilitaries as a rear base for their Bosnian operations. When the paramilitaries seemed poised to launch a rampage against Sandžak's own Muslim community, however, the authorities intervened. This was particularly noteworthy given that the same officials helped the paramilitaries in their nearby Bosnian ethnic cleansing activities. In Kosovo, moreover, ethnic policing, rather than cleansing, prevailed until 1998–99, when Serbia's grip over the region began to weaken. As parts of Kosovo escaped Serbian control, the most virulent strains of nationalism found expression.
The overall Serbian record, therefore, is mixed. Ideologically, ethnic Serbs were nationalistic but not uniformly committed to ethnic cleansing. Empirically, the Serbian state deployed different styles of repression, depending on whether it was acting in central or peripheral regions. Overall, Serbian nationalism was more destructive at the margins of the state's zone of control.
The Israeli case was similarly complex. Ideologically, Zionists were a mixed bag of nationalist radicals and moderates, and while both held exclusionary
THE IMPORTANCE OF INSTITUTIONAL SETTING
Conventional wisdom suggests that when faced with a threat, states use the most efficient methods to get the job done. This book has suggested an alternative approach, emphasizing the role of institutional settings, legality, and norms. Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was feasible in 1992–93 because of the region's frontier-like qualities. Ethnic policing was a more viable approach for Palestine in 1988, conversely, because of its ghetto-like status. Rather than closely analyzing day-to-day politics in Belgrade and Jerusalem, I have focused on actual methods used in distinct territorial regions, believing that only detailed examinations of concrete instances of violence can explain broader macro-level trends.
As we have seen, institutional settings interacted with nationalist ideologies in important ways. Conventional wisdom as well as some scholarly analysis begins with the content of nationalist ideology, examining public or elite support for this or that policy, and then using those findings to explain state behavior.[1] This book, by contrasts, argues for an interaction effect between ideology and institutional setting. As the empirical record demonstrates, both Serbia and Israel were capable, contextual conditions permitting, of embarking on either radical or more moderate violent strategies. Both were Janus-faced entities, containing the potential for both ethnic cleansing and more subtle methods of domination.
Frontiers and ghettos are specific types of institutional settings, representing different points on continuums of state violence and power. Frontiers are outlying territories where central political authority is thin, formal rules don't apply, and states maintain their power through despotic methods. Ghettos, by contrast, are ethnic or national enclaves securely trapped within the dominant state. While ghetto populations are oppressed and disadvantaged, they enjoy some basic protections, enduring in a strange netherworld in which they are neither fully in, nor fully out of, the dominant polity. Shielded from utter destruction, they are exposed to more subtle and infrastructural methods of control.
INTERNATIONAL NORMS:
SOVEREIGNTY AND HUMAN RIGHTS
In both the Serbian and Israeli cases, it was not obvious which areas would ultimately wind up in or outside the dominant state. We tend to accept boundaries as given, barely noticing their presence. This may often be justified, since most states have clearly defined boundaries, but others do not, including both Serbia and Israel. In the periods under discussion, these states were still defining their borders and engaging in bitter territorial struggles with national rivals.
When socialist Yugoslavia began to collapse in 1990, it was clear that the question of boundaries would be highly problematic, as different ethnic groups were scattered across the federation's internal boundaries. As the federation broke apart, all areas, in theory, were up for grabs. The legacy of socialist Yugoslavia's internal borders, coupled with international intervention, transformed Sandžak, Vojvodina, and Kosovo into internal provinces of Serbia, but made Bosnia an external frontier. Powerful Western countries decided that only republican boundaries would become sovereign, investing the Bosnia/Serbia border with an importance it had not hitherto enjoyed. At this point, different styles of Serbian state coercion emerged, transforming internal areas into zones of policing, and external areas into arenas of destruction. International forces had hoped to protect Bosnia by recognizing its sovereignty, but had instead helped unleash the most horrendous forms of Serbian nationalist violence.
In the Israel/Palestine case, questions over what was truly internal
International forces played a key role in Palestine's ghettoization. When Serbia objected to Bosnian independence, Western powers threatened it with attack and sanctions, but Israel's disrespect for Palestinian sovereignty was treated with feeble criticism and tacit compliance. Paradoxically, however, the greater support Western powers gave to Bosnia resulted in greater levels of destruction, since nationalist states use more despotic violence at the margins of power. The more Palestine was ensnared within Israel's bureaucratic grip, the more Israel was obliged to treat it as an object of policing, not war.
Part of this is attributable to the increased salience of human rights norms. States are increasingly pressed to demonstrate a modicum of care and responsibility for their populations, risking censure and stigmatization when they kill or forcibly expel their citizens. This has become especially true since the 1970s, when an explosion of human rights organizations, discourse, and networking began. A global regulatory system monitoring state violence has come into being, influencing the ways in which states behave. The clearer the state's responsibilities and the more pervasive its control in a given region, the more it will seek to curb "excesses" by its coercive forces when fighting civilian populations. The greater the state's infrastructural power, the more it will try to curb the most blatantly despotic behavior of its security forces. Not all states care equally about their international legitimacy, however, and not all states exercise infrastructural powers over their de jure territories. Those that do tend to be in the core or semi-peripheral regions of the globe, suggesting a trend in the global organization of state violence: the more states control their own territory and the closer they are to international flows of legitimacy, the more they will resort to police-style behavior in areas over which they exercise empirical and juridical control.
THE LIMITS OF WORLD POLITY ANALYSIS
The spread of international norms has attracted increasing scholarly interest, especially among analysts working in the world polity tradition.[2]
Such studies typically involve large-sample studies that persuasively document processes of global convergence, showing that structural homogenization is sweeping the world as more states sign international treaties and hook up to global flows. This diffusion process is accelerated by the work of intergovernmental bodies such as the International Monetary Fund, as well as nongovernmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Transparency International, and Human Rights Watch.
States now broadly conform to a small number of generic models, adopting constitutions that define the relationship between citizens and the state, valuing education and economic development, and creating bureaucratic machineries to promote women, science, the environment, and education. Although homogenization has escalated dramatically since the Cold War's end, the process was first initiated by European colonialism. Decolonization shrugged off overt Western political domination, but retained many Western structures and narratives. Like scholars of cultural globalization, world polity theorists see an increasingly homogenous globe imitating a handful of Western-devised models.[3]
World polity scholars rarely explore local variations on global themes, however, and as one leading ethnologist notes, often have little to say about the "link between models or norms on the one side and concrete practices on the other."[4] On the ground, after all, the practice of liberal democracy in Sweden, the United States, and Russia is remarkably different, as savvy local actors devise their own unique paths through globally mandated rules. As a result, local variations on global themes are best explored through detailed investigations of individual cases. The ethnic cleansing and ethnic policing efforts described in this book are examples of such innovations, as Serbian leaders and Israeli decision makers manipulated the global rules of sovereignty and human rights to further their own agendas. Bosnian sovereignty was not supposed to provoke Serbian ethnic cleansing, while Palestinian human rights lobbying efforts were not intended to encourage Israeli ethnic policing. In each case, nationalist states both conformed to and violated international norms.
EXTENDING THE ANALYSIS,
CONTROLLING FOR OTHER VARIABLES
Qualitative, case-oriented explanations of state behavior are supposed to accomplish two tasks. First, they must account for empirical variation within the cases under consideration. On that count, this study, structured explicitly as an explanation of both Serbian-Israeli variations and varying patterns within each case, has, hopefully, proved its worth. Using the concepts of ghetto, frontier, core, and institutional setting, this book has provided a plausible account of varying Serbian behavior in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Sandžak, and Vojvodina, and of Israeli behavior in Palestine and Lebanon.
At the same time, our explanations are also expected to provide generalizeable tools—frameworks or arguments for a broader universe of cases. This task, however, is far more complex, as it becomes difficult to control for other important variables. For sure, a cursory glance at recent conflicts demonstrates the importance of institutional settings and boundaries. Apartheid South Africa, for example, used graphic methods of destruction to combat enemies in Mozambique and Angola, but used police-style tactics to suppress challengers within its own boundaries. Although the latter were harsh and discriminatory, they were less drastic than the warlike methods used beyond South Africa's international boundaries.[5] In Russia, troops used awful violence in Chechnya, but shifted to less destructive methods in neighboring Ingushetia, despite the presence of Chechen rebels there.[6] In Croatia, violence against Serbs in the contested Krajina region was far harsher than against Serbs living in Zagreb. It seems likely that these variations can be explained by the concept of institutional setting, norms, and empirical and juridical sovereignty.
Because of my focus chiefly on Serbia and Israel, however, a number of other variables faded into the background. Take, for example, the importance of international norms. In both cases under consideration, I have argued for the importance of world opinion, both on issues of sovereignty and on respect for human rights. Not all states, however, are as concerned as Serbia and Israel about their global image, nor do all states care about their prospects for inclusion within the Western-dominated "international community." In the late 1980s, for example, Iraq flouted virtually every human rights norm possible during its repression of northern Kurds, and its behavior may not be explainable with the tools provided here.[7] Yet even if this is true, it does not invalidate the argument
Another variable controlled for in the Israel-Serbia comparison is state strength. In both cases, the state in question was internally coherent, had a tradition of law and order, and had the capacity to enforce its sovereignty over its territory. Many states, however, are not as strong as that. In Africa, the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere, many states are weaker, largely because of the end of Cold War patronage.[8] In these cases civil war, warlord politics, and internal strife are not produced by the exclusionary intentions of strong states such as Serbia and Israel, but by the lack of any coherent state structure at all. The analysis advanced in this book does little to explain these sorts of violent conflict.
Finally, both the Serbian and Israeli cases took place in the same moment in world historical time, the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a result, my analysis effectively controlled for variations in international tolerance of norm violations, especially in the arena of human rights. As noted earlier, international human rights monitoring grew increasingly aggressive in the 1970s. By the end of the Cold War, the international human rights norm and its organizational carriers had become remarkably effective at stigmatizing and shaming strong, Western-oriented governments such as Serbia and Israel that abused human rights. As noted in the Introduction, the density of the human rights movement makes the difference between "ghetto" and "frontier" particularly important. This scrutiny would not have happened thirty or forty years ago. Thus the argument I developed here is especially useful for analyzing current conflicts. To be sure, some states get away with greater human rights violations than others, even at the same point in the historical development of the global human rights system of norms, activist networks, and information flows. All states at a given point in history will have to contend with the same broad global human rights conditions, but each state's particular relationship to those conditions may vary.
This book's main contribution is to underline the importance of bureaucratic inclusion or exclusion during times of violent conflict. In the contemporary era, strong, capable states immersed in a nationally exclusive ideology are not likely to use ethnic cleansing against "outsider" populations that are partially included within the polity. This is true even when important segments of the state, its military, and the majority population favor drastic measures. In frontier-style regions, by contrast, states are more likely to resort to extreme repertoires. In making this argument,
BINARY OPPOSITIONS OR A CONTINUUM OF VIOLENCE?
My analysis has implicitly relied on a series of binary oppositions: ghetto vs. frontier, ethnic cleansing vs. ethnic policing. I used these binaries because such stark contrasts are useful in helping us generate interesting theories and categories of social action. Binary oppositions underscore the characteristics of each case, helping us comprehend that which is most significant about different categories of social action. At the same time, however, these oppositions can also distort our perception of reality, forcing messy, complex events into inappropriately constraining boxes.[10]
Looking back on the cases discussed in this book, I would say that the binary comparisons of ghetto/frontier, ethnic cleansing/policing are relevant chiefly to the Bosnia/Palestine comparison. When we examine internal variations within the Serbian and Israeli cases, by contrast, the outlines of a more nuanced continuum of violence emerge. Israeli repertoires of violence in Lebanon, for example, are by no means identical to those used in Bosnia, although there is some interesting overlap. Importantly, I used the term "counterinsurgency frontier" to describe Lebanon's status. Israel had no intention of ethnically cleansing all of southern Lebanon and replacing its Arab population with Jews. Another intermediary set of sub-cases appeared in the discussion of Sandžak and Vojvodina, where Serbian repertoires of violence resembled in some aspects Israel's methods in Palestine, but also differed substantially. Serbia's measures were not nearly as harsh or as controlling as those of Israel, and thus I labeled them "ethnic harassment," rather than "ethnic policing."
Kosovo presents an interesting combination of the ethnic policing and cleansing models. Here, the same geographic area went from one binary category to another in a very short time as institutional conditions changed from ghetto to frontier. From 1989 to 1997, Serbian forces adopted a straightforward ethnic policing repertoire in Kosovo, much as Israel did in Palestine. The year 1998 was one of transition, and in 1999, Serbia resorted to full-scale ethnic cleansing, much as it had done in 1992 in Bosnia. Although Palestine, as we saw in Part II, went through a similar radical transformation, its metamorphosis took decades. If we were to rearrange the cases in this book along a continuum of state violence, the cases of ethnic harassment in Sandžak and Vojvodina would be situated
PREDICTING FUTURE CONFLICTS
My initial explanatory framework was developed in the mid-1990s, some years before Serbia's ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. When the Serbian repertoire shifted in 1998 and 1999, however, its trajectory was consistent with my explanation. As Serbia had demonstrated early on in the Sandžak and Vojvodina, it would not resort to ethnic cleansing in territories under its empirical and juridical sovereignty, nor would it permit paramilitary freelancing. As the Bosnian case demonstrated, however, the most radical tenets of Serbian nationalism were bound to emerge in areas where Serbian power was least secure. As Kosovo moved from center to the margins of Serbian state power, the danger of outright destruction mounted. When NATO launched its air war in March 1999, therefore, Serbia's ethnic cleansing effort was, unfortunately, to be expected. Kosovo was on the verge of escaping Serbian domination, the West had turned against Serbia, and international human rights sensitivities no longer mattered. When NATO resolved to send no ground troops to physically protect Albanian civilians from Serbian assault, the Bosnian tragedy repeated itself once again. This time, however, the West was more committed to reversing ethnic cleansing, and Kosovo's refugees did eventually return home. Their homes and lives had been shattered, but reconstruction was a real possibility.
Israel's recent interventions in the West Bank and Gaza are also consistent with this book's explanatory framework. The 1993 Oslo declaration of principles created islands of Palestinian sovereignty, and these expanded as Israel withdrew from a handful of densely populated towns, as well as some 70 percent of the Gaza Strip. Oslo, in other words, had begun to reverse Palestine's ghetto status. As Palestinians increasingly moved to the margins of Israel's zone of control, however, the threat to their physical security worsened. When the second Palestinian uprising erupted in fall 2000, the implications of their transformation from ghetto to frontier became clear. Today, Israeli commandos mount shoot-to-kill raids in regions controlled by the Palestinian authority, missiles strike Palestinian towns, and helicopters use machine guns
HAS PALESTINE BECOME "LEBANONIZED"?
The extent to which Israeli commentators now speak of the West Bank and Gaza as "foreign" and "hostile" lands is quite remarkable.[11] Israeli discourse in the 1980s spoke of law-and-order, police-style enforcement in Palestine, but now the language has shifted to that of war and counterinsurgency. The region has been reconstructed, both discursively and in practice, as an object of war. In the immediate future, this is bound to produce Israeli escalation. Once Lebanon was viewed as an object of counterinsurgency, Israel pounded it with artillery, airplanes, and commandos, leading to tremendous destruction and loss of life. At the same time, however, Lebanon was never smoothly integrated into the Israeli zone of control, and Israel's Lebanon presence was never routinized to the same extent as in the West Bank and Gaza. Lebanon, moreover, was never perceived by Jewish Israelis as a natural extension of the Israeli state. Although Greater Israel proponents sporadically argued for a Lebanese colonization effort, they have never pursued it in a politically serious fashion. As a result, Israeli forces could eventually withdraw from Lebanon in the year 2000 virtually overnight without triggering a crippling internal political crisis.[12] Lebanon's "foreign" and "warlike" designation resulted in great suffering but also helped it escape colonization and full-scale subordination.
Until the 1990s, Israel's attempt to incorporate Palestine through policies of creeping annexation enormously complicated the notion of Israeli withdrawal. Jewish settlement activities were an important part of this process, but were not the only factor. Jewish youth groups organized field trips through Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza were included as parts of Israel on most maps, and Palestine was given Jewish biblical names—Judea and Samaria—to symbolize its status as part of Greater Israel. Some even began to believe the region was slated for permanent Israeli control and that the struggle for a Palestinian state would necessarily give way to struggles for Palestinian civil rights within Israel.
With this in mind, one of the most significant outcomes of the first Palestinian uprising was its ability to blunt this process of ideological and
In this respect, the increased popular support for transfer among Israeli Jews in 2001 and 2002 is particularly noteworthy. Support for expulsions dipped in the 1990s, but has returned to near-record highs in recent years. In 1991, according to a Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies survey, 38 percent of Israeli Jews supported transfer for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, while 24 percent supported the same for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. In 2002, by contrast, 46 percent supported transfer for the population of Palestine, with 31 percent in favor of similar measures for Israel's Palestinian citizens. The latter figure climbed to 60 percent when the survey question was worded in a more "roundabout" way.[13] As one leading liberal commentator suggested in spring 2002, "the spirit of expulsion" was increasingly "infiltrating public discourse" in Israel.[14] Other analysts disagreed with this assessment, however, noting the existence of polls suggesting that the Israeli public was moving in a more liberal direction overall, despite periodic tactical moves rightward at times of acute crisis.[15] One possible interpretation of these apparently contradictory findings is that Jewish Israelis are so deeply frustrated that they are desperate for a solution of any kind, including either transfer or a political solution.
The analysis advanced here suggests that one useful response to national exclusion is to work for a more inclusive definition of the "nation." That is, groups excluded from a dominant nationality—for example, Palestinians, Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, or Sandžak's Muslim Slavs—could focus their political energies on forcing their oppressors to grant them an equal footing through democratization, de-nationalization, or consociational constitutional agreements. Rather than tacitly acquiescing in efforts by Serbian or Jewish nationalists to define the "nation" in exclusionary ways, oppressed ghetto groups could mount movements for civil and political equality, as did blacks in the United States or South Africa. Sadly enough, however, few of the excluded populations
Do Palestinians have similar options? Unlike ethnic Albanians, Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza have never been considered citizens of the state controlling their lives, even during their tacit incorporation into the Israeli state. As a result, they did not enjoy the same electoral opportunities as did ethnic Albanians and had fewer legal means to contest their exclusion. At the same time, however, Palestinian efforts remained uniformly focused on securing an independent, sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza; they rarely considered the option of building upon the advantages offered by their quasi-inclusion within Israel. Although such efforts would have been enormously complex, they cannot have been more difficult or dangerous than the attempt now under way to create a viable and sovereign Palestinian state through diplomatic and military means. Indeed, for many Zionists, the notion of several million civil-rights-seeking Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza is far more threatening to the Jewish national agenda than an independent Palestinian state. Both Zionist hawks and doves are eager to maintain Israel's predominantly Jewish character, and most recognize that this requires ensuring a Jewish demographic majority. As Aryeh Naor, a former cabinet secretary, said in spring 2002, Israel's greatest nightmare is that "one day, there will appear a Palestinian Nelson Mandela in the West Bank who will demand ‘one man, one vote.’ That will be the end of Israel as a Jewish democracy."[16] Yet today it seems more unlikely than ever that Palestinians will seek inclusion within Israel, or that Israelis would ever entertain such an idea. Although a "one state" solution with a civil rights agenda might have been feasible in the late 1970s, long before the first Palestinian uprising, it does not seem to have any chance of attracting significant support from either Jewish left-wing figures or Palestinian political leaders. All that remains to hope for is a stable two-state solution, but it seems equally likely that the West Bank and Gaza will become a semi-permanent counterinsurgency frontier for