Fear and Loathing: The Impact of Groupwide Emotions

Abstract

With the possible exception of Africa, no area of the world has seen more upheaval, war, and ethnic violence than Eastern Europe has. Moreover, although these scourges have been prevalent over time, the twentieth century was a particularly bloody period in the region's history. This violence is the focus of Roger Petersen's new book: Understanding Ethnic Violence. Petersen uses the history of Eastern Europe to test four emotion-based theories of ethnic conflict. In this respect he is less concerned with providing a new explanation for ethnic conflict in the region than he is in using the region to test the theories of ethnic conflict themselves. Petersen divides the four emotion-based theories into rational and irrational categories. The first three sources of conflict-fear, hatred, and resentment-are considered rational, whereas the fourth-rage-is considered an irrational, emotional reaction. The beginning of the book looks at each of these four emotions and at the past literature that best illustrates the theory. Thus, the work of Donald Horowitz (1985) and James Scott (1990) are linked to theories of resentment. Although the concept of ancient hatred is essentially dismissed, Petersen links past work on manipulated emotion to theories based on hatred. The concept of fear is associated with the work of Russell Hardin (1995), David Lake and Donald Rothchild (1996), and others concerned with the concept of the security dilemma. Finally, Petersen discusses rage in terms of Ted Gurr's (1970) relative deprivation theory and the need to lash out at another group. After explaining the main tenets of each of these theories, Petersen looks at Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. He concentrates on three subregions: the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; Czechoslovakia; and finally Yugoslavia. For each subregion, six separate time periods are discussed: (1) the period under imperial control, (2) the World War I years and the end of the empires, (3) the interwar years; (4) the occupation period during World War II, (5) the years of Communist rule, and (6) the period since the collapse of Communism. As Petersen shows, it is necessary to divide the century into these specific periods because the players change over time. Those who were victims of ethnic violence in one time period are often the instigators in another. Some groups, such as the German population in the Baltic countries, who were dominant at the beginning of the century, are almost nonexistent at the end. Petersen presents the history of each subregion at each time period in a clear and interesting manner. Relying on both historical analysis and firsthand accounts, he is able to show how the groups were related to one another in regard to power, how the ethnic conflicts occurred, and how these events were interpreted by the people at the time. At the end of each segment, Petersen analyzes which of the four theories best explains the cause of the violence.