Matthew Levinger

Myth and mobilisation: the triadic structure of nationalist rhetoric

Drawing on the theory of collective action frames, this essay analyses the use of images of a primordial ‘golden age’ in the rhetoric of national mobilisation. Such idealised images of the past, juxtaposed with exaggerated depictions of a degraded present and a utopian future condition, constitute a rhetorical triad that is an effective instrument for motivating mass political movements. The model developed here emphasises the links between identity formation and political mobilisation, analysing how narratives of communal decline and redemption play a central role in defining the agendas of nationalist movements.

Forging Consensus for Atrocity Prevention: Assessing the Record of the OSCE

This essay examines the record of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in fostering norms and collaborative practices for preventing mass atrocities in Eurasia. Comprising fifty-seven participating states “from Vancouver to Vladivostok,” the OSCE is the sole regional security organization spanning all of the members of NATO and the former Warsaw Pact. Its consensus-based approach to advancing “common and comprehensive security” has proved successful in preventing escalation or containing levels of violence in various conflicts in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Southeastern Europe, and the Caucasus. Since the late 1990s, however, rising geopolitical tensions between NATO and the Russian Federation have undermined the effectiveness of the OSCE’s conflict prevention initiatives. In order for the OSCE to play a more robust role in enhancing human security in Eurasia, it will need to find a path toward rebuilding the normative consensus between Russia and its Western participating states.

Why the U.S. Government Failed to Anticipate the Rwandan Genocide of 1994: Lessons for Early Warning and Prevention

During the months leading up to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, cognitive biases obstructed the capacity of U.S. government analysts and policymakers to anticipate mass violence against the country’s Tutsi minority. Drawing on recently declassified U.S. government documents and on interviews with key current and former officials, this essay shows that most U.S. government reporting on Rwanda before April 1994 utilized a faulty cognitive frame that failed to differentiate between threats of civil war and genocide. Because U.S. officials framed the crisis in Rwanda as a potential civil war, they underestimated the virulence of the threat to Tutsi civilians and discounted the risk of catastrophic violence. The “civil war frame” also justified rigid U.S. policy guidance that may have exacerbated ethnic and political conflicts in Rwanda on the eve of the genocide. The phenomenon of faulty cognitive framing remains a challenge for contemporary atrocity prevention and response efforts in countries including Libya, South Sudan, and Syria.

THE BIRTH OF MODERN MEMORY

John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. pp. xxiv + 466. George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. pp. xiv + 428. Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. pp. 268. Each generation chooses its own objects of historical inquiry. Over the past decade or two, many historians have moved away from perennial topics in social and political history, turning their gaze on more ethereal questions in the realm of “memory studies.” The three splendid books under review here examine elusive phenomena in nineteenth-century Europe: the transformation of historical consciousness, the invention of national myths, and the emergence of nostalgia as a prominent element of European culture after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic age. Taken together, these works vividly illustrate both the value and the challenges of scholarship on the modern historical imagination.

Beyond the bourgeois revolution

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE CREATION OF MODERN POLITICAL CULTURE, Vol. I. THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF THE OLD REGIME edited by Keith Michael Baker Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987. 559 pp.,

Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806-1848

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