"Delving Into Democracy's Shadows"

Scott McLemee, Chronicle of Higher Education

The sociologist Michael Mann took a detour from his epic study of
power in human history. It led him straight to the horrors at the
center of modern life.

Scholarly books often resemble the pyramids erected for minor
officials in ancient Egypt. Impressive in their way — and built to
last — they are, nonetheless, difficult to tell apart. By contrast,
The Sources of Social Power, by Michael Mann, a professor of
sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles and a
visiting research professor at Queens University Belfast, is
"audacious in scope, ambitious in objective, and provocative in
challenge," as the American Sociological Association put it in
presenting Mr. Mann its 1988 award for distinguished scholarly
publication.The work begins with the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia,
charting the emergence of four distinct forms of power (ideological,
military, economic, and political) that Mr. Mann finds operating
throughout recorded history. The second volume, appearing in 1993,
extended the analysis up to the outbreak of the First World War. A
review in The Journal of Economic History began, simply, "Colossal!"
Scholars often mention Max Weber's Economy and Society (1914),
another work routinely called monumental, when discussing Mr. Mann's
work.

But the edifice remains, as yet, unfinished — because the 20th
century turned out to be a nightmare. "As soon as I completed volume
two," Mr. Mann says, "I began to write volume three, which continues
the story from 1914 up to the present day. I spent a year in Spain,
working at an institute with a wonderful library on fascism," he
recalls. "So I began to write a chapter on fascism. That turned into
a book in its own right."

He refers to Fascists, published by Cambridge in July, a comparative
analysis of how fascist movements developed in half a dozen European
countries between the World Wars. His research also drove Mr. Mann
"to write about the Holocaust, about what the worst fascists did when
in power" — which led him, in turn, to study the more recent killing
fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Balkans. His contribution to the
field of study now known as "comparative genocide" is forthcoming
from Cambridge in November as The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining
Ethnic Cleansing.

At a time when pundits wax at length on the idea that economic
globalization has undermined the old ideal of national sovereignty,
Mr. Mann offers a very different view of the world. The ideal of the
nation-state crystallized over the course of centuries, he says, and
has taken root everywhere. It will not soon vanish. Mr. Mann
interprets fascism as "merely the most extreme form" of
"nation-statism."

His thesis in The Dark Side of Democracy is, if anything, more
troubling: the extension of democracy throughout the world carries
the seeds (if by no means the certainty) of mass murder.

Order, but No Law

Mr. Mann's sweeping vision of historical sociology does not boil down
to formulas about the rise and fall of civilizations. (Any
resemblance between his books and Oswald Spengler's Decline of the
West or Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History is strictly at the level
of ambition and heft.)

"No laws are possible in sociology," he wrote in the first volume of
his magnum opus, "for the number of cases is far smaller than the
number of variables effecting the outcome." But Mr. Mann imposes some
analytic order on what he calls "the patterned confusion" of human
history by distinguishing four general categories of power operating
at any given time — the ideological, economic, military, and
political forms.

Economic power derives from, as Mr. Mann puts it, "the human need to
extract, transform, distribute, and consume the resources of nature
for sustenance." It is distinct from political power ("the control of
the state") and ideological power (basically, the myths and rituals
that give human beings access to a sense of ultimate meaning). Each
form of power is channeled through its own network of institutions.
"In particular historical phases or periods," says Mr. Mann, "one
source of social power may well be primary. "But over all, I don't
think that general relations of primacy can be asserted. In that
sense, I'm Weberian, rather than Marxian."

Mr. Mann goes one step beyond Max Weber, however — questioning the
German theorist's classic definition of the state as the institution
possessing "a monopoly on legitimate violence." For Mr. Mann
distinguishes military power ("the social organization of physical
violence") as a distinct force, with its own institutions and norms.
"In principle, all well organized militaries could seize state
power," he notes, "but only a few actually do."

The ordinary citizen may be justifiably relieved to hear that.
Sociologists would do well to ponder it as an intriguing paradox. Mr.
Mann complains, however, that they have tended to neglect the
military and warfare as important factors in social structure. Until
the rise of industrialism, he notes, economic exchange usually
occurred over short geographical distances. "Large areas and diverse
peoples" became integrated largely through the force of arms. Other
scholars commenting on Mr. Mann's work have pointed to his emphasis
on military power as one of his most important contributions.

The Grid and the Cage

A four-dimensional model of power sounds abstract, even rather
bloodless. In practice, though, Mr. Mann is unrelentingly empirical.
He wields "the IEMP grid" (as some have dubbed his four-pronged
approach) to integrate a wide range of specialist work by other
scholars — to which he adds his own crunchings of econometric data,
for centuries for which it was available. Each of the forms of power
he studies corresponds to networks of institutions that interlink
with, struggle against, and shape one another. The result is a set of
grand narratives of history that Randall Collins, a professor of
sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, has called "our
contemporary standard of knowledge" on several topics.

The energy really starts to flow through the IEMP grid when Mr. Mann
analyzes the rise of the nation-state. It was not simply a matter of
local markets integrating, over time, into national economies
— which then (under catchy slogans like "no taxation without
representation!") reshaped the state to defend the interests of
business. All of that did happen. But at the same time, new forms of
military organization required the integration of large numbers of
conscripts. People whose sense of identity once came from belonging
to a particular village came to understand themselves as citizens of
the same nation.

As each form of social power in his theoretical grid developed, says
Mr. Mann, it generated its own vested interests. The revenues raised
through taxation could be used not only to finance the military but
to build roads, schools, and other public services — giving the
state "infrastructural power" in addition to its military control
over territory. That growing infrastructure then reinforced economic
growth. Meanwhile, the sense of national identity itself became a
kind of ideological power, embodied in education, media, and the
political organizations that sought to control the state.

As a result, all of these interests increasingly intersect to create
what he calls the "cage" of the nation-state. It is a term with
important overtones in classic social theory, calling to mind Weber's
sense that modern life unfolds within an "iron cage of bureacracy."

By the early 20th century, nation-statism was an almost unquestioned
fact of life in Europe and the United States. And the emergence of
numerous successful anti-colonial movements showed that it had been
exported throughout the world as well.

Street Fighting Men

In Fascists, Mr. Mann contends that the rise of right-wing
authoritarian movements between the world wars can best be understood
as, in effect, nation-statism forging not a cage but a concentration
camp. His analysis puts him at odds with the Marxist interpretation
of fascism, which treats it as a violent effort to preserve
capitalism from the challenge of left-wing mobilizations following
World War I. Mr. Mann also rejects efforts to treat fascism as a
totalitarian "political religion" emerging in reaction against
modernization and democracy.

All of Europe underwent severe economic crisis in the period between
the wars, he notes. But fascists made no serious bid for power in
countries where the state had both well-established institutions of
representative democracy and a solid basis of infrastructural power.
In England, for example, the black-shirted members of Oswald Mosley's
British Union of Fascists were exotic and attention-grabbing, but
ineffectual at much besides outbursts of street hooliganism.

Mr. Mann focuses on the countries where fascism did become a mass
movement that either took control or strongly influenced the state:
Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Spain. In each case,
he contends, state power was divided between an established and
narrowly based group (for example, landowners) and a new, relatively
inexperienced set of parliamentary institutions. Mr. Mann calls this
formation a "semi-authoritarian, semi-liberal state." Fascist
movements were similarly hybrid. While the cult of national glory and
calls for organic community might sound conservative, Mr. Mann
observes that fascist movements also recruited on the basis of
frustration with the slow pace of political elites in creating the
infrastructure to provide basic services to the population.

Proto-fascist ideas began circulating among small groups of
intellectuals throughout Europe in the late 19th century, but the
movement took off in the 1920s, pulling in young men who had gone
through the experience of "total war." Fascist movements always
created paramilitary organizations, Mr. Mann says. But most of them
also placed great emphasis on electioneering — and proved very good
at it. The fascists were enemies of democracy in the abstract, but
devoted to mobilizing mass participation in ways that were often
anathema to old-fashioned "conservative authoritarians."

Mr. Mann also says that "the degree of capitalist support for fascist
movements varied considerably between the different countries."
What was consistent, however, was that the core fascist
constituencies had strong vested interests in the growth and dynamism
of the nation-state. "Soldiers and veterans above all, but also civil
servants, teachers, and public-sector manual workers were all
disproportionately fascist in almost all the countries of mass
fascism," he writes. Students, too, were always heavily represented.

Hungary vs. Romania

Mr. Mann contends that, important as economic factors were, they are
insufficient to understanding the movement. Consider the contrast
between Hungary and Romania. "Hungary had probably the worst
middle-class job prospects, Romania the best," writes Mr. Mann, "yet
both produced fascism among those most affected, students and
public-sector workers." He also notes that in both countries fascists
"recruited more from proletarian than bourgeois backgrounds."

In Mr. Mann's analysis, fascism appealed not only to people seeking
to preserve the status quo, or retreat to an early form of social
order, but also to those who wanted modernization to continue under
the firm hand of the nation-state.

The defeat of fascism on the battlefield in 1945 also meant its
demise as a political force in Europe, says Mr. Mann. Authoritarian
and xenophobic parties have sometimes won parliamentary
representation. But no movement has had the combination of
paramilitary and electoral support typical of fascism in the 1920s
and '30s. "Institutionalized liberal democracy," as he puts it, "is
proof against fascism." While currents embodying aggressive strands
of nation-statism may yet emerge in Eastern Europe or the Russian
federation, the requirement of democracy for entry into the European
Union "has remained influential."

But that does not mean that Mr. Mann is quite ready to join Francis
Fukuyama in celebrating liberal democracy as the end of history. In
his forthcoming book, The Dark Side of Democracy, Mr. Mann contends
that nation-statism and ethnic cleansing are intertwined in ways that
make the spread of democracy problematic.

Ethnic violence existed before the rise of the nation-state. Still,
Mr. Mann says it tended to be limited and instrumental. Killing was a
means by which one group subjugated another, whether to enslave it
(thereby integrating it into the conqueror's economic system) or to
convert it (thus extending a religion's ideological power grid).

He sees violence used to drive an ethnic group out of a state, or to
destroy it, as a relatively new thing in history — and one closely
associated with the emergence of democratic forms of political
organization.

He points to the contrast between European colonies under
authoritarian rule and those in which the settlers could control
local institutions. In Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the use of
violence by authoritarian governments tended to be limited. "Stable
authoritarian regimes," says Mr. Mann, "tend to govern by divide and
rule, balancing the demands of powerful groups, including ethnic
ones." But the transition to democracy tends to unleash ethnic
cleansing. "When settlers in North American and Australian states and
colonies acquired de facto and de jure self-government," he says,
"murder also increased."

Mr. Mann makes a similar point about Rwanda. Between 1973 and 1994,
the dictatorship of President Habyarima, a Hutu, was certainly
oppressive to the Tutsi minority. But it also "somewhat restrained
ethnic violence." In the early 1990s — amidst an influx of Tutsi
from Uganda — the Rwandan government moved toward a multiparty,
constitutional democracy. This shift accelerated the transformation
of ethnic tensions into attempted extermination. In April 1994, Hutus
were slaughtering Tutsis in an organized campaign of genocide at a
rate of almost 300 per hour.

Power to the People

The problem, says Mr. Mann, comes from a fateful ambiguity at the
heart of democracy — "rule by the people," as the Greek source of
the term has it. But within a nation-state, "the people" tends not to
mean simply "the ordinary citizens," but those sharing a distinct
culture — an "ethnos." In a nation-state that is authoritarian but
stable, ethnic violence may be routine, but it tends not to involve
struggle for control of political power.

With democratization, however, the stakes increase. Ethnic
nationalism proves strongest, and most deadly, when one group feels
economically exploited or threatened by another. (In Rwanda, for
example, Tutsis tended to be more prosperous than the Hutus.) Mr.
Mann lists a series of steps through which the tensions may reach a
brink — at which point, in the name of democracy, ordinary people
seek to purify the nation-state of any ethnic "contamination."

In calling genocidal violence "the dark side of democracy," Mr. Mann
says he is not denouncing the institutions of the democratic
nation-state itself. The demos need not be confused with, or limited
to, one ethnos. The diversity of citizens is something, he writes,
"which liberalism recognizes as central to democracy."

But according to David D. Laitin, a professor of political science at
Stanford University, Mr. Mann "uses his erudition and keenness of
subtle argument to cloud social reality rather than to clarify it."
In a paper to appear in An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of
Michael Mann, forthcoming next year from Cambridge University Press,
Mr. Laitin contends that "the culprit" in genocide "is not democracy,
but a form of politics that uses words similar to [those employed by]
democrats, but in a different semantic sense."

Mr. Laitin also suggests that the argument of The Dark Side of
Democracy itself rests on a kind of basic confusion. "Mann implies
that because democracy and genocide are both modern, they implicate
one another," he writes. "Logically, Mann is incorrectly linking two
phenomena that are temporally but not causally linked. This type of
reasoning would make democracy culpable for world war, AIDS, and rap
music."

Striking Back at the Empire

Mr. Mann is now back to work on The Sources of Social Power. His long
march through fascism and ethnic cleansing has transformed his sense
of how to approach the 20th century. "I realized, through that, that
I could not write volume three in the same detailed, empirical way
that I'd written the first two. There's too much material, too much
scholarship. Fascism was only one of a half-dozen topics for the 20th
century, and I'd ended up writing a whole book about it."

Instead, he says, the third volume will offer "a mixture of
historical narrative and conceptual analysis. There's a section on
empire. There's one on the development of capitalism, and on the
difference that wars and ideologies have made to it. The theme of
globalization has always been there, and it comes to fruition in a
section on the post-World War II period." In fact, the third volume
will be called Globalizations. (Mann is considering a fourth volume
in the series, which he describes as a theoretical summation of the
project.)

The plural in that title is in keeping with the IEMP framework — for
Mr. Mann is very skeptical of ideas about a monolithic "world system"
of capitalist development. "The expansion of the economy," he says,
"has been paralleled by the expansion of the nation-state system, of
wars, and of ideologies. These are not the same thing. They don't
link together to form a global system." The different forms of
globalization "sometimes produce major contradiction," he says. "More
often, they produce disjunctions, because they're completely
different, rather than contradictory."

In the months leading up to the Iraq war, Mr. Mann took another
detour from the third volume — long enough to write Incoherent
Empire (Verso, 2003), a scathing criticism of the idea that the
United States can impose a Pax Americana upon the world. Quoting the
White House's oft-repeated estimate that 100,000 international
terrorists were trained by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Mr. Mann points
out that most radical Islamists concentrate on struggles to dominate
their own countries, rather than on exporting terrorism.

"The age of empires is over," says Mr. Mann. "We're in the age of
nation-states, for better or worse."

A MANN AND HIS WORK

Michael Mann, who holds dual British and U.S. citizenship, received
his B.A. in modern history from the University of Oxford in 1963 and
his D.Phil. in sociology from the same institution in 1971.

A professor of sociology at the University of California at Los
Angeles since 1987, Mr. Mann was a reader in sociology at the London
School of Economics and Political Science from 1977 to 1987.

In addition to the first two volumes of The Sources of Social Power
(which appeared in 1986 and 1993), Mr. Mann's books include:

* Workers on the Move: The Sociology of Relocation (Cambridge
University Press, 1973)

* States, War, and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology
(Blackwell, 1988)

* Incoherent Empire (Verso, 2003)

* Fascists (Cambridge University Press, July 2004).

His next book, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic
Cleansing, will be published by Cambridge University Press in
November 2004. He is also the editor of A Student Encyclopedia of
Sociology (Macmillan, 1983), to which he contributed 20 entries.