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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
It's a mistake to endow the Holocaust or any other massive case of crimes against humanity with cosmic significance. We want to do it because we think the moral enormity of the events should be balanced by an equally grand theory. But it's not. The attempt to do so is poignant.
Alain Finkielkraut
Savage ethnonationalism, dating back to the end of the eighteenth century, and violent ethnic conflict, as ancient as history, are sometimes viewed as if for the first time in the post-Cold War era. Still, it is the case that the end of the discipline imposed by the bipolar international system has permitted temporarily repressed ethnic and nationalist passions to reassert themselves. In response, a vast literature has sprung up discussing what states should do about genocide and ethnic cleansing, the gravest human rights abuses. In what follows I will consider barbarous nationalism in the context of the liberal international order put into place at the end of the Second World War, the roles of politics, law and morality forming a sub text to that discussion.
1 Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity (New York: Columbia University Press 1992)
2 Notwithstanding the general persuasiveness of Liah Greenfeld's contrary position, I shall treat ethnic conflict and nationalism as if they were more or less synonymous. They are not, of course, but they do derive from kindred emotions, representing more or Jess similar challenges to the international order. It is possible to think of barbarous nationalism as a more evolved form of ethnic conflict. See Greenfeld, Liah, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992), 12Google Scholar. But cf. Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993), 197Google Scholar.
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