The First World War as a Caesura? Demographic Concepts, Population Policy, and Genocide in the Late Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg Spheres by Christin Pschichholz

Abstract

Reviews 203 The First World War as a Caesura? Demographic Concepts, Population Policy, and Genocide in the Late Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg Spheres. (Gewaltpolitik und Menschenrechte, vol. 3). Edited by christin pschichholz. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2020. 247 pp. €49.90. ISBN 978–3-428–18146–9. This thought-provoking volume is the product of a 2016 conference organized by Christin Pschichholz in conjunction with the University of Potsdam and the Lepsiushaus Potsdam. Its aim is to place the 1915–16 Turkish genocide against the Ottoman Armenians in a broader regional context while also examining the cross-border connectedness of radical population policies during what Ronald Suny, borrowing from Domenico Losurdo and Enzo Traverso, calls the ‘international civil war’ that began in 1914 (p. 13). All of the contributors — with the partial exception of Peter Holquist, who identifies 1905–07 as a significant moment linking Tsarist population policy and revolutionary, classbased violence in Russia in 1917–21 — agree implicitly or explicitly that the First World War was a caesura. Yet by comparing the ‘unprecedented dimensions of demographic engineering’ (p. 7) in the late Ottoman, Tsarist and Habsburg empires, they also tease out important differences between them. For Ottoman Turkey, as both Hans-Lukas Kieser and Oktay Özel show, the year 1913/14 was critical in terms of setting the political goal of ethnic homogenization of Anatolia as the heartland of a new, regenerated empire following the loss of the Sultan’s last remaining territories in North Africa and Europe (with the exception of Edirne, recovered from Bulgaria in July 1913 after the Second Balkan War). Talk of ‘microbes’ that needed to be ‘removed’ from the empire’s territorial ‘body’ emerged in 1913 and fed directly into the 1915–16 genocide. By then the entire Armenian population — women, children and older men as well as younger males — were identified as an internal enemy or ‘fifth column’ (pp. 89–90). In Tsarist Russia, there was no actual genocide, although Holquist mentions the Imperial army’s suppression of the 1916 Central Asian uprising as getting close to this. There were also the mass deportations of various population groups — Jews, Germans, Baltic peoples and others — from the western borderlands to the interior in 1914/15. What this had in common with policy in the Ottoman empire was the identification of particular ethnic communities as a permanent security threat, thereby legitimizing ‘exceptional’ state action, and — in wartime — the extension of violence to the entire ‘enemy’ civilian population, whether that population was to be found in home or occupied territory. This was as much a ‘western’ as an ‘eastern’ phenomenon, as Mark Levene, Arno Barth and other contributors stress. When British diplomats sought to restrain Russian violence against Jews in 1915, this was not a straightforward public-spirited gesture (as western criticisms of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 perhaps had been) but became entangled with narrative strategies that ‘securitized’ the Jewish question, in other words, turned it into a security Reviews 204 issue not just internally for Russia, but internationally too. New demographic concepts of borderland protection, cultural identity and world order — ‘often [expressed] in the most phobic and paranoid terms’, to quote Levene (p. 41) — meant that Jewish (and German) populations globally could now be seen and spoken of as a potential threat to the unity of the Allied cause. A similar dynamic was at work in the anti-German riots that took place in Moscow, in the UK and in many parts of the British empire, again in 1915. Where does this leave Austria-Hungary? Certainly the behaviour of the empire’s military leadership towards border populations in East Galicia and Bukovina, annexed Bosnia-Hercegovina and occupied Serbia, and on the frontiers with the Kingdom of Italy, especially in 1914–15, evinces a similar pattern of sanctioning ethnic violence under the guise of defending imperial territory. Internment camps such as Thalerhof near Graz, mentioned by Serhiy Choliy in his contribution, are a case in point. However, compared to the Ottoman and Russian spheres, there was no drive towards full-scale national/ cultural homogenization in the Dual Monarchy. True, as Hannes Leidinger argues, there was a ‘systematization of hatred’ against Serb ‘terrorists’, Ukrainian ‘russophiles’ and Italian...