The Historiography of the Holocaust

464 Florin Lobont
unlike in the interwar period...when the region was the hotbed of fanatical
antisemitism and criminal movements...nowadays the deeply rooted racist
feelings are not shared by the most important opinion leaders and political
elites, but are left with the marginal demagogues. The political elites did not
revert to the interwar politics of exclusion [with a few exceptions in former
Yugoslavia] when governments considered the persecution of Jews and
other minorities a respectable means of legitimation. 87
Yet, the region, described by many as an ethnic shatter zone, has seen national
(and other) myths used to justify the creation of nation-states, based on the
alleged superiority of a particular group, entailing deep and enduring tensions
between individual national ideologies. And as the building or reasserting of
the nation-state justifies efforts to render the national territory ethnically
homogeneous, so nations’ self-determination has ethnic cleansing as a logical
corollary in situations in which ‘the existence of a minority may be presented
as potentially threatening to the national state of the majority.... The logic of
the nation-state precludes the existence of national minorities within it.’ 88
In the context of widespread identity crises and/or the need of proving the
legitimacy of the new states, ethnonationalism tends to prevail over civic
nationalism. As a consequence, ‘the totalising socialist state is in danger of
being replaced by a totalising nationalist one’, in the name of sovereignty, seen
as a value in itself, as the highest value in whose name no cost is too high. 89
The weight and popularity of antisemitism and Holocaust denial are signs of
the precarious democratization of society. Throughout the former Eastern Bloc,
there are notable differences in the pace and depth of liberal democratic
achievements. Regarding this complex landscape Tismaneanu noted in 1998
that democracy seemed to have consolidated in the Baltic states, the Czech
Republic, Poland and Hungary, whereas the situation was ‘still unstable in
Russia, the Ukraine and in most Balkan countries...[where] liberal democracy
remains questionable and one can notice an advancement towards a nationalpopulist
consensus’. Yet the resurgence of far right nationalism and its growing
electoral success in the West – which can only encourage its counterparts in
east-central Europe – suggest that the evolution of democracy is not necessarily
an irreversible process. As Dan Stone insightfully remarks, although
Europe does not today face the threat of ‘imminent annihilation’ . . . fascism
appears ready to burst out in certain quarters despite the fact that it is by no
means on the verge of disintegration.... The rise of the far right is intimately
connected to the end of the Cold War and the demise of the post-war consensus.
The exhuming of the European nations’ suppressed wartime pasts
also permits the voicing of resentments kept in check by the post-war official
narrative of anti-fascism. 90