THE LIFE AND WORKS OF RAPHAEL LEMKIN: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF GENOCIDE IN THEORY AND LAW By Douglas Irvin-Erickson A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-Newark Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program, Division of Global Affairs written under the direction of Dr. Stephen Eric Bronner and approved by __________________________ Dr. Stephen Eric Bronner __________________________ Dr. Alexander Laban Hinton __________________________ Dr. Alexander J. Motyl __________________________ Dr. Norman Naimark Newark, New Jersey October 2014 © 2013 Douglas Irvin-Erickson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT THE LIFE AND WORKS OF RAPHAEL LEMKIN: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF GENOCIDE IN THEORY AND LAW by Douglas Irvin-Erickson Dissertation Director: Stephen Eric Bronner Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide and led a movement in the United Nations to outlaw the crime in the 1940s. During the 1920s and 1930s, Lemkin worked to establish an international criminal court at the League of Nations, and to criminalize state terror and the repression of national minorities. After the Second World War, Lemkin worked to enshrine the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which is now a cornerstone of international humanitarian law. For several decades after the 1940s, however, Lemkin’s accomplishments were ignored, partly because he left nearly 20,000 pages of writings on genocide unpublished, and partly because, in the context of the Cold War, global politics did not value humanitarian law. With the outbreak of genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, the Genocide Convention became relevant to world affairs and Lemkin studies enjoyed a renaissance. Yet, until 2007, there were only two monographs written about Lemkin, and one was authored by a Holocaust denier. This dissertation is the first intellectual biography and political history of Lemkin. The argument begins by examining Lemkin’s Polish writings in the 1920s and 30s, and demonstrates that Polish legal, social, and political theory influenced Lemkin’s work on genocide in the 1940s and 1950s. Secondly, the thesis also presents the first scholarly ii analysis of Lemkin’s magnum opus, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, placing the book in the context of contemporary theorists and into the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies. The third part of the dissertation uses Lemkin’s nearly 20,000-page archive to show his influence at the Nuremberg trials. Lemkin’s memoirs and papers are used to present a new account of the diplomatic history of the UN Genocide Convention drafting processes, arguing that the US, UK, France, South Africa, Belgium, and Canada, opposed the convention but were out-maneuvered politically by a coalition of smaller states and former colonies, and global social movement Lemkin inspired. The final chapter then uses Lemkin’s manuscripts to elucidate his social and political theory of genocide that he worked on while teaching at Yale and Rutgers universities, but died before he could publish. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply thankful to all of the people who contributed to making this dissertation possible. I have benefitted greatly from the mentorship of Dr. Alex Hinton and Dr. Alex Motyl, who invited me to apply to the Division of Global Affairs in 2008 and nurtured my intellectual growth as my professors and, finally, as my dissertation advisors. Dr. Hinton’s support of his graduate students at the DGA is extraordinary, securing funding sources and working to establish the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights to nurture the growth of his students. Dr. Stephen Bronner, my committee chair, deserves a special thanks for his generosity with his time and energy, and with his ideas. As a political theorist, Professor Bronner helped set my intellectual horizons in more ways than I could ever explain. As a mentor, Dr. Bronner reminded me that scholarship and social science should never abandon ethical ideas and basic human values, nor scholars their students. Lastly, I would like to thank my external reader, Dr. Norman Naimark, a historian whose work I greatly admire. I am honored to have him on my committee. I have benefitted greatly from our conversations at conferences, and from the energy he spent helping to improve this dissertation. I presented early versions of my dissertation chapters at the Comparative Political Theory Conference at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan in December 2011, and at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College in February 2012. Melissa Williams, Rogers Smith, Jeremy Webber, Ken Tsutsumibayashi, Robert Culp, and David Kettler provided helpful insights during the early stages of my research. My colleagues Gennadi Poberezny and Lubomyr Hajda at the Harvard University Ukrainian Research Institute were tremendously helpful, hosting workshops where I could share and iv improve my work. Lubomyr Luciuk has also provided me with great insights, at conferences and as an editor with Kashtan Press. Marcello Raffin, my professor at the University of Buenos Aires and a dear friend, has given me the gift of hours of conversation discussing whether or not a Kantian conception of international law could support Lemkin’s position of national cultural autonomy. And many of my own thoughts on Lemkin find their origins in my conversations with Daniel Feierstein. Dirk Moses’s many path-breaking journal articles and books form the foundation of Lemkin studies, charting course for future Lemkin scholars. To anyone familiar with his work, his influence upon me will be clear. Along the way, Joyce Apsel, Ernesto Verdeja, Melanie O’Brien, Kjell Anderson, Anthonie Holslag, Ugur Ümit Üngör, Lionel Wynter, Nemoto Masaya, Yehonatan Alsheh, Steven Jacobs, Jim Fussel, who maintains the very valuable website preventgenocide.org that houses many translations of Lemkin’s works, and my new colleagues at George Mason, Tetsushi Ogata and Gregory Stanton, all read and discussed portions of my research on Lemkin and the UN Genocide Convention. Elaine Padilla was always supportive. And, lastly, the project would have been impossible without the guidance of Donna-Lee Frieze, perhaps the foremost expert on Lemkin, who knows Lemkin’s archival writings better than anyone in the world. This dissertation was only possible because of the archivists and librarians at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio; the American Jewish Historical Archives at the American Jewish Historical Society in New York; and the New York Public Library, where Thomas Lannon provided incredible support. Devon Maeve Nevola of the Columbia University Library provided me with digital images of their Lemkin papers. v The entire faculty and staff at the Dana Library at Rutgers University, Newark spent hours of their time locating and retrieving Lemkin’s Polish, Swedish, and French books from libraries scattered across Europe and Israel. The Rutgers community deserves a special thanks as well. The faculty members at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights helped me secure research and teaching assistantships from the Rutgers-Newark graduate school. Tom La Pointe, co- director of the Center for Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation at Bergen Community College, and Nela Navarro, Associate Director of the CGHR, have been champions of my work since the beginning of my undergraduate studies at Rutgers, giving me more than a decade’s worth of friendship and guidance. Jeff Benvenuto, my colleague in the DGA, has a tremendous knowledge of Lemkin and helped make me a better student of Lemkin’s works. Brain Ferguson and Richard Langhorne’s courses provided me with a cultural and political understanding of war, peace, and international relations that were necessary for me to conceptualize this project. Jean-Marc Coicaud and Kurt Schock also contributed to my knowledge of international law and the human rights social movements. Andrew Murphy helped me to understand the importance of placing the writings of political theorists within their intellectual and historical contexts. My friendship with Jonathan Hall was a benefit to me, especially our discussions on the role of language in shaping political movements and ideals. Jack Lynch and Janet Larson provided me with a firm understanding of Romanticism in literature, art, and intellectual history, which I put to great use in deciphering Lemkin’s thoughts on how art, language, and the law could provide an aesthetic ideal capable of transforming the way human beings treated each other. Robert Snyder and Bruce Franklin were also important for vi shaping my early graduate training, and Dr. Franklin reminded me that the genocide idea finds its antecedents to the critique of colonialism and imperialism, in theory and literature from around the world. Sherri-Ann Butterfield, Jennifer Arena, and Marne Benson helped me throughout the years, and Dawn Wilson, Ann Martin and Desirée Gordon made it a pleasure to be around campus. Lastly, I want to thank my family in the US and in Turkey. My mother and father, Victoria Erickson and Dale Irvin, read my entire manuscript. My brother Andrew developed a love of Lemkin, too, and offered his support and thoughts. My most important source of strength over these last two years of researching and writing has been my wife Yasemin, my best friend, who wrote her dissertation next to me for weeks on end. Together we endured late nights of writing,