72 The Economist January 8th 2022
Books & arts
PolarisationandconflictHow things fall apart
I
t is hardto overstate the danger Donald
Trump poses to America and the world,
but Barbara Walter manages it. Mr Trump
scorns democratic norms, stirs up racial
division, propagates the big lie that he won
reelection in 2020, encouraged a coup at
tempt on January 6th 2021—and might win
the presidency again in 2024. Ms Walter, a
political scientist at the University of Cali
fornia, San Diego, rightly decries these
sins. But she goes further. Thanks partly to
Mr Trump, and partly to the underlying
trends he has exploited, she claims Ameri
ca is at risk of civil war.
This farfetched conclusion spoils an
otherwise interesting book. Or rather,
“How Civil Wars Start” is really two books:
a wellargued one about what caused past
civil conflicts around the world, and a
tendentious one maintaining that the
same factors may soon result in war in the
United States.
The wellargued part goes something
like this. Countries are most vulnerable to
civil war when they are somewhere be
tween dictatorship and liberal democracy.
In a functional democracy, people have no
cause to take up arms. In a fullblowndictatorship,theyarelikelytobelockedup
or killed the moment they do so. The dan
ger zone opens up when a dictatorship
gives way to a looser form of government,
but the new regime has not yet found its
feet. “Given a choice between democracy
and dictatorship, most will gladly take de
mocracy,” Ms Walter writes. “But the road
to democracy is a dangerous one.”
A second risk factor is factionalism.
Since the end of the cold war, perhaps 75%
of civil wars have been fought between
ethnic and religious groups, rather than
political ones. Here what matters is not
how diverse a country is, but whether poli
tics revolves around identity.Political leaders who stir up fear of
another group to win support from their
own are often especially dangerous.
Consider (as Ms Walter does) the former
Yugoslavia. As the cold war ended, it cast
off communism and began to move to
wards democracy. It promptly fell apart,
goaded by “ethnic entrepreneurs” such as
Slobodan Milosevic.
He was not a true believer. A former
communist, he switched to Serbian na
tionalism because it was the easiest way to
win support. In speeches, he duly celebrat
ed Serbia’s historical greatness and
“reminded listeners of past atrocities per
petrated against Serbs”. His path was
smoothed by his enemy, Franjo Tudjman, a
Croatian bigot. The more Tudjman picked
on Serbs, the more they turned to Milos
evic for protection, and vice versa.Home truths
The most effective grievancemongers are
creative liars. Serbian television, for in
stance, once claimed that Serb children
were being fed to lions in Sarajevo Zoo.
They also recognise no statute of limita
tions. “For five centuries they violated our
mothers and sisters,” said one Croat
nationalist of Bosnian Muslims.
Complacent cosmopolitans did not see
war coming. They lived in cities where
Serbs, Croats, Muslims and others freely
intermingled and intermarried. They did
not imagine those groups would start kill
ing each other. Even when they knew that
Serb militias were forming in the hills,
they dismissed them as yokels. One localAn expert argues that America could have another civil war. She exaggerates→Alsointhissection
73 A journalist’sapprenticeship
74 Theliteratureofclimbing
75 A 50-year-old art-pop sensationHow Civil Wars Start. By Barbara Walter.
Crown; 320 pages; $27. Viking; £18.99