60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

136 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
in the twentieth century, states and bureaucracies, while of course
having their own important…dynamics, can also be viewed as
functions of broadly political currents, the state is transformed into
a key agent of large parts of the population for violence, and state
violence could become, sadly, a cause of the people, though far
from everybody in society (Gerlach 2006: 463).
This, in essence, is what Arendt argues. However, whereas Gerlach
refers to ‘broadly political currents’ that transform the state into a ‘key
agent’, Arendt instead stresses the subordination of the state to a dynamic
totalitarian movement, which engages popular energies for the
purposes, inter alia, of violence, terror and destruction: ‘That is, people
can identify with mass violence, demand it, fi nd it necessary or
even urgent’ (Gerlach 2006: 463). This was a novel and unprecedented
form of what Gerlach terms ‘political participation’, one Arendt elected
to term ‘totalitarian’. This does not mean to suggest that all manifestations
of participatory ‘mass violence’ in the 20th century involved
totalitarian movements nor that totalitarian societies are necessarily
genocidal. Rather it is to suggest that Arendt, to paraphrase Gerlach’s
over-deterministic statement, provides at least part of the answer to
the problem identifi ed by Gerlach of ascertaining ‘under which specifi
c conditions modern participatory societies’ might become vulnerable
to forms of ‘mass violence’ (Gerlach 2006: 463). Totalitarianism
was one such ‘condition’. Thus Gerlach is right to argue that ‘broad
participation in violence…could work outside of a state apparatus or
through it’ (Gerlach 2006: 462), moreover that what he terms ‘extremely
violent societies’ are usually characterised by ‘utmost political
mobilization’. However, Arendt, rather than suggesting merely a
process through which ‘longer-term negative attitudes and prejudices
are radicalized’ and ‘diverted toward groups only indirectly involved
in long range struggles’ (Gerlach 2006: 461), instead argues that ‘all
that matters is embodied in the moving movement itself: every idea,
every value has vanished into a welter of superstitious pseudoscientifi c
immanence’ as individuals are ‘submerged in the stream of dynamic
movement of the universal itself’ (Arendt 1979: 249).
We may now briefl y summarise the key points of Arendt’s theory of
totalitarianism as against Gerlach’s critique of ‘the totalitarian model’.
As we have seen Arendt rejects the notion, fi rstly, of a single, centralised
and ‘absolute’ or ‘monolithic’ structure of government; secondly,
of a simple mirrored ‘duality’ of party and state; thirdly, of coherence,
stability, order and effi ciency; and hence fi n ally, of hierarchical topdown
control. Above all, however, Arendt rejects a state-centric conception
of totalitarianism, instead stressing the political primacy of a
dynamic totalitarian movement and the progressive dissolution of the