Abstract
Contrary to the common promise of the UN Charter, mass atrocities continue to be committed as the wars in Yemen and South Sudan or the fate of the Rohingya in Myanmar demonstrate. Using Germany as an example, this article examines the thesis that mass atrocity situations are silenced which inhibits their politicisation. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature on silencing and theoretical approaches (agenda-setting, desecuritisation, discourse-bound identity theory) a working definition of silencing in foreign policy is proposed. Silencing appears to be a structural feature of ‘identity mismatch’ characterised by three modes: non-mentioning, trivialisation and framing. A rhetoric-analysis of speech acts by the German chancellor, foreign ministers and leaders of the parliamentary groups on the aforementioned cases shows in which way the German political elite in fact silences mass atrocities.
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Notes
Admittedly, supporters of the realist school of International Relations may add that silencing mass atrocities would be the reasonable thing to do for small and middle powers. But great powers may do otherwise if they see the chance to win a power game (one may think of the recent US reaction to the Uyghurs’ fate). Yet, our interest here is to make a 2nd-image argument on how silencing takes place.
It should be noted that even for supporters of the civilian power theory, abandoning ‘civilising international relations’ appears to be a tough nut to crack, see the section on ‘Germany’s silencing of mass atrocities’ below.
Intentionality, however, might be used to cluster the theoretical perspectives from different disciplines on ‘silencing’, cf. our subsequent theoretical part.
We assume that the legal concepts are known in the German political elite as they were used in the past (i.e. in the Kosovo case), are prominently codified in German domestic criminal law (‘Völkerstrafgesetzbuch’) and, obviously, play an essential role in German history. Given this background, not knowing these specific concepts would be telling in itself.
Of course, operational foreign policy does not demand legitimation debates and so governments usually do not say much about it. Yet, the term ‘operational’ means that a country has some SOP in place. This is not the case for dealing with mass atrocities and silencing as non-politicisation inhibits any debate about such an operationalisation.
‘Privileged storytellers’ are actors who hold a prominent position in (foreign) policy discourse, due to the constitution or to political practices (Milliken 1999: 236). ‘Privileged’ already refers to a hierarchy in public discourse, where the prerogative of interpretation is a struggle of power (Torfing 2005: 15, 23).
Here, an important caveat is that we are omitting the media. We do so for pragmatic conceptual reasons. While this might be problematic for certain medialisation theories, in a liberal understanding of the media’s function in political systems, the assumption could be made that it is only ‘mirroring’ the agenda set by political actors. Empirically, we included the media in another study on the historical patterns of Germany’s mass atrocity reactions and demonstrated that the media does not strongly politicise mass atrocities (Hering and Stahl 2022, forthcoming).
Many scholars differentiate ‘silence’ from ‘silencing’ (see e.g. Thiesmeyer 2003: 1f.). Subsequently, we focus on the term ‘silencing’.
For a most recent take by communication studies and linguistics cf. Schröter and Taylor (2018).
‘Agenda-setting’, defined by Kingdon (2014: 3), means: ‘The agenda […] is the list of subjects or problems to which governmental officials, and people outside of government closely associated with those officials, are paying some serious attention at any given time. […] Out of a set of all conceivable subjects or problems to which officials could be paying attention, they do in fact seriously attend to some rather than others. So, the agenda-setting process narrows this set of conceivable subjects to the set that actually becomes the focus of attention.’
For a recent collection of interdisciplinary approaches on political silencing and agency, see Dingli and Cooke (2019).
‘Securitisation’ is understood as a politicisation beyond the usual way of politicising issues. The theory’s main thread entails the bottom-up argument, i.e. how single speech acts (dealing with a threat) may become highly relevant for politics and even justify extraordinary measures for countering the threat.
It should be noted, however, that we do not focus primarily on the normative dimension of the term ‘trivialisation’, rather we emphasise the relative, down-playing aspect, which is more salient in the German meaning of Relativierung.
The quote is attributed to the British Prime Minister Chamberlain during the political crisis regarding Czechoslovakia in 1938 (Brainyquote 2019).
In German: ‘[…] in einer Situation in der im Busch gekämpft wird […]’.
By doing so, we assume that we covered actor statements in all kinds of fora, be it, for instance, in media outlets or at the Bundespressekonferenz.
Ertüchtigung cannot be easily translated into English. As a verb ertüchtigen means to encourage others to keep themselves physically fit. In this spirit, the German political elite made considerable use of mass atrocities arguments in the debate on arms delivery to the Kurds in 2014 (Stahl 2017).
Even without detailed, case-specific analyses, based on Smith (2009: 1) and others it seems safe to state that most states in fact silence mass atrocities.
Former president Saleh was killed in late 2017 after he ended the alliance with the Houthis and declared his openness to negotiations.
It is noteworthy that, possibly due to the existence of a judicial authority (the ICC) and the on-going nature of the events, many immediate reactions of (UN) officials use terms such as ‘possible’, ‘may’ and ‘could’ when referring to war crimes, whereas many NGOs are much more direct. In the political discourse, however, this legal precaution should not be mistaken for actual uncertainty regarding the factual existence of war crimes.
The German news outlet Spiegel Online (2017) even produced the headline ‘Yemen: Angela Merkel calls for end of Saudi bombing warfare’, while all that Merkel publicly stated was that there is only a political and no military solution to the conflict.
Interestingly, despite countless media articles on this important foreign policy incident, no reference, transcript, record, video or audio exists within the public online archives of the German governmental authorities. Videos of the press conference are, however, provided by media close to the Russian government such as RT and Sputnik.
In German: ‘Es gab weit über 100 Tote; Kinder und Frauen waren darunter. Was aber machen wir? Wir liefern Waffen an Saudi Arabien.’
Possibly, the opposition’s pressure affected the governing parties as they included a restriction, not to approve defence exports to countries immediately involved in the Yemen war, in their new 2018 coalition agreement. Interestingly, since the government has not been clear as to what ‘immediately involved’ (‘unmittelbar beteiligt’) means, almost all Yemen-related opposition queries since March 2018 have dealt with defence exports.
On average around 15 German soldiers; at times also up to a dozen police officers.
In German: ‘Südsudan ‒ Hungersnot abwenden, Völkermord verhindern’.
In German: ‘Deutschland muss als Teil der internationalen Gemeinschaft dazu beitragen, Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit, Kriegsverbrechen und Völkermord zu verhindern.’
The mandated strength of Germany’s military and police contribution at the time was 50 military and 20 police officers.
We follow Kratochwil (1989: 36) in his understanding of ‘reason’ as not ‘causing’ political action.
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Our thanks go to the research team on mass atrocities and silence at the University of Passau for their support and to the anonymous reviewers of the journal.
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Hering, R., Stahl, B. When mass atrocities are silenced: Germany and the cases of Yemen, South Sudan, and Myanmar. J Int Relat Dev 25, 608–634 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-022-00254-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-022-00254-2