The Auschwitz Analogy: Holocaust Memory and American Debates over Intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s

Abstract

This article examines the use of analogies to the Holocaust in debates over the propriety and morality of American intervention in the Balkan crises of the 1990s. Both the proponents and the opponents of intervention invoked the Holocaust precedent, drawing very different conclusions about its applicability to Bosnia and Kosovo. The debates demonstrate how ostensible lessons from the Holocaust experience were deployed to mobilize public opinion behind a humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, they also show how the application of Holocaust analogies to a controversial public policy often resulted in gross simplification of a complex past. Consciousness of the Holocaust rose dramatically in the United States during the decade of the 1990s. This cultural shift was reflected in several developments: the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and formidable (if smaller) Holocaust museums in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities; the popularity of high-profile Holocaust-related films—most notably Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful; the broad media attention accorded Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s sensationalistic and controversial book Hitler’s Willing Executioners; 1 the establishment of university professorships specializing in the history of the Holocaust; and the creation of high-school and college-level Holocaust studies curricula. The reasons for this general trend, which has been labeled the “Americanization of the Holocaust,” are numerous and complicated, deriving from social and cultural developments within American Jewry as well as within the broader American public. A substantial scholarly literature has emerged to examine this phenomenon. 2 The present contribution explores one particular dimension of Holocaust consciousness in America: the use of comparisons and analogies with the Holocaust in debates over foreign policy, and, more specifically, in debates over the wisdom and morality of American and NATO intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s. Scholars of the history of American foreign relations have observed that Americans have a tendency to interpret complex situations around the world as confrontations between good and evil. One historian has characterized the predicament arising