Personality And Political Behavior Chapter 7

The Loss Of Enemies, Fragmenting Identities And The Resurgence Of Ethnic/Nationalist Hatred
In Eastern Europe
The Loss Of Enemies, Fragmenting Identities And The Resurgence Of Ethnic/Nationalist
Hatred And Anti-Semitism In Eastern Europe1
Jerrold M. Post, MD

The Need For Enemies

How rapidly-and tragically-the celebration of freedom occasioned by throwing off the yoke
of Communist rule in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was succeeded by a wave of
ethnic nationalist conflicts, expressed at its violent genocidal extreme in the identity war in Bosnia,
in which ethnic cleansing became policy. Tragic, but predictable, for the loss of enemies is
destabilizing, and the chaos left in the wake of the departing Communist enemy provided fertile soil
for hate-mongering demagogues to exploit centuries-old hostilities.
The revival of hostility among existing groups with a history of conflict is not surprising.
Nor, given the long-standing history of anti-Semitism in these nations, would it be surprising to see
the revival of anti-Semitism in post-Communist eastern Europe, if there were Jews there. The fact
that anti-Semitism has revived so powerfully in the absence of Jews demonstrates the power of the
paranoid dynamic and the associated need for enemies. When the real enemy disappears, the need
for enemies becomes intensified, and in the absence of real enemies they will be created.
There is a readiness in the human psyche to fear strangers and seek comfort with the
familiar. Under duress, stranger anxiety and fear of the other mount, and the paranoid capacity to
project hatred is mobilized. Such anxiety is produced not only by unknown persons, but also by
unfamiliar places, foods, and sounds. Significant others-parents, teachers, peers-sponsor "suitable
targets of externalization" for the developing child, and "group-specific externalizations" tie the
children together (Volkan 32). The strangeness of some things (and the comforting familiarity of
others) take on political significance as the child grows into adulthood.
This fear of the stranger and projection of hatred upon the other are the psychological

foundation of the concept of the enemy.2 The crystallization of the shared comfort of the familiar is
the psychological foundation of nationalism.
Vamik Volkan has drawn on both his psychoanalytic training and his own life history to
illustrate this process, constructing a bridge from the family to the nation and the development of
the sense of national identity:
In Cyprus [Volkan's birthplace], although Greeks and Turks lived side by side for centuries
until 1974, when the island was divided, they remained-and still remain-mutual antagonists. A
Greek child learns from what his mother says and does that the neighborhood church is a good
place; he unconsciously invests in it his unintegrated good aspects and feels comfortable there. The
same mechanism, fueled by his mother's influence, makes him shun the Turkish mosque and
minaret, in which he deposits the unintegrated bad aspects of himself and important others. He is
more himself when playing near his church and distancing himself from the mosque. . . . Although
the child would have his own unique individualized psychological makeup, he would be allied to
other children in his group through the common suitable target of externalization . . . that affirms
their ethnic, cultural, and national identity. (32-33)
As personal identity is consolidating, it incorporates elements of national identity. The sense
of comfort-and belonging-spreads to the national flag. Those who oppose the nation, or desecrate
the flag, may threaten one's sense of self This helps explain the rage engendered in the United
States, for example, by flag burning, and the emotional force behind the proposed constitutional
amendment making desecration of the flag a federal crime. So it is, especially under stress, that we
cling all the more tightly to those symbols of our national, racial, ethnic, or religious identity that
have become incorporated as part of our self-concept. They are in effect self-objects. This is
graphically illustrated by the talismans with ethnic symbols worn by Palestinians living in the Gaza
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Strip:
Like songs often repeated among the Arabs, they are shared only within the in-group,
providing a magical [psychological] network for maintaining group narcissism under adverse
conditions as well as contributing to the self-esteem of individual Arabs. It is not enough for
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip simply to be aware of their Arabic identity; they need to exhibit its
symbols in order to maintain their self-esteem. (Volkan 36)
We are comforted by familiarity and cling tightly to those like us. This contributes to a
sense of group and selfcohesion.
But this requires differentiating ourselves from strangers. They are necessary for our process
of self-definition. To say that "these things are specially good and are specially part of me" is to say
that "those other things are specially bad and not part of me, are part of others." The self, and
objects3 with which the self has identified (such as one's ethnic group or political party), are
idealized; other objects (such as historical adversaries of one's ethnic group or political party) are
viewed as dangerous persecutors and are demonized. The absorption ("introjection") of the good
cultural symbols is expressed thus: "I must be good because my people's history-which is part of
me-is good, our food is delicious, our religious buildings are impressive, our architecture is
beautiful," and so on. The converse also occurs: "All those others, especially those I see around me
and with whom my group has lived, are bad-their history is one of deception and violence, their
food is inferior, their architecture is ugly," and so on. All badness is outside, all goodness inside.
There is an idealization of the self and the familiar group; there is a demonization of the stranger.
Such racial or ethnic or religious identifications have helped produce great poetry and music, and
have stimulated self-sacrifice in the interest of fellow group members. But such group identification
has also formed the fertile field from which wars and massacres
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have grown. Pride in one's heritage often manifests itself as destructive narcissism and political
paranoia. It is a world of friends and enemies, where there is a splitting of good and evil, of self and
not-self
This tendency to idealize the in-group and demonize the out-group can never be eradicated.
The germs of that more primitive psychology remain within the personality, ready to be activated at
times of stress. Otherwise psychologically healthy individuals can be infected by paranoid thinking
when the friendly group with which they are identified is attacked or when economic reversals
occur.4
Thus enemies are necessary for self-definition, which makes it necessary to have enemies in
our midst. Creating bad others is a necessary part of a child's acquiring a distinct identity, but
insofar as a national identity becomes part of one's personal identity, deep-seated feelings that
transcend childhood become fixed within one's social personality. For some people, the bad objects
remain true enemies. A mature, integrated person learns that those enemy objects are at most
adversaries, or things which are distasteful, and not objects to be hated or destroyed, but under
overwhelming social stress, even mature individuals and groups can return to the paranoid position,
and experience these internalized bad objects as true enemies.
A "good enough enemy" (Stein 188-189) is an object that is available to serve as a reservoir
for all the negated aspects of the self In so doing, the enemy provides the valuable function of
stabilizing the internal group by storing group projections. The enemy thus provides cohesion for
the social group, especially the social group under stress. Since it is representations of the self
which are being projected, there must be a recognized kinship at an unconscious level. We are
bound to those we hate.
Yet at the same time there must be a recognizable difference, a distinct gap to facilitate the
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distinction between "us" and "them." An important aspect of the development of group identity is
shared symbols of difference, symbols on which to project hatred. The more "different" the stranger
in our midst, the more readily available he is as a target for externalization.5 The enemy whom we
are certain is a despicable "other" is littered with parts cast out from the self (Stein 193). We project
into "them" what we disown in ourselves. It becomes a part of their projected identity.
The requirement for an unconscious kinship is responsible for the phenomenon of the
Familiar Enemy. The Greeks and the Turks, as Volkan points out, have lived near each other for
centuries. So have India's Sikhs and Hindus; Bosnia's Serbs, Croats, and Muslims; Northern
Ireland's Catholics and Protestants; Israel's Arabs and Jews. They remain feared-but familiarstrangers. Thus those groups from which we most passionately distinguish ourselves are those with
which we are most inseparably bound. We end where they begin (Stein 103).
This identity-creating process-a psychological necessity-results in the world being divided
among groups with varying degrees of animosity, excessive self-regard, and fear of others. We need
enemies to keep our treasured-and idealized-selves intact. Enemies, therefore, are to be cherished,
cultivated and preserved, for if we lose them, our self definition is endangered and our cherished
group is threatened.
The Psychopolitics Of Hatred In Central And Eastern Europe: Searching For New
Enemies, Reviving Old Hatreds

The events in Eastern Europe since the collapse of Communist rule bear tragic testimony to
this need for enemies. Even some hardened observers of Balkan politics believed that the
antagonisms among Croats, Serbs, and Muslims had been permanently blunted by the decades of
peaceful Communist rule. The revival of ferocious ethnic wars in the early 1 990s demonstrated
that deep-seated fears and anger had not died, but had merely been suppressed by the powerful
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leaders of the socialist state. When the outside enemy disappeared, the need for enemies produced a
bloody revival of ancient hatreds. The revival of age-old tensions in Eastern Europe in the wake of
the dissolution of the Soviet empire is a special case of the destabilizing consequences of losing
one's enemy.
Lenin saw the inculcation of loyalty to the Soviet Union as a crucial task in
institutionalizing the revolution. To develop an identity as new Soviet man required suppressionindeed destruction~f other loyalties and identities, nationalistic and religious.
Even family loyalties were seen as reactionary vestiges, a view carried to its most dreadful extreme
with the celebration of Pavel Morozov as a hero of the Soviet Union for denouncing his family.
This ruthless stamping out of national identity was extended to the socialist nations of
Eastern Europe in the wake ofWorld War II. In the pursuit of the new socialist man, for forty years
expressions of nationalist identity were forbidden to the people of Central and Eastern Europe-the
intensely nationalistic Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Rumanians, the Czechs and Slovaks of
Czechoslovakia, and the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims ofYugoslavia. In this exaggerated emphasis of
one identity, and attempted forcible elimination of other identities, the essential quality of identitydifference-was attacked. Such destruction nearly always fails, and it did in Eastern Europe. In
totalitarian regimes this leads to a duality of identity-the publicly espoused identity (new socialist
man) and the private identity (see Eros). The regime's intense pressure on private life led to an
extensive erosion of private identity, which can occur in three ways:

1. through repression of identity elements that have been deemed undesirable;

2. through the transformation of undesirable identity elements into negative identity fragments
(the "self-criticism" in Communist China is an example of such enforced ransformations);
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and
3. through marginalization of private identity, "squeezing certain identity elements to the
margins of awareness, thereby rendering them seemingly insignificant" (Eros).

Thus the Communist regime's attack upon these private identity elements did not destroy
them. Rather, the social basis of private identity was forced underground. Allusion became "the
mother tongue of collective experience.
In the fall of 1989, that most remarkable season of freedom, with bewildering rapidity the
Communist empire collapsed, and in Eastern Europe, one socialist government after another was
displaced, as the long-suppressed peoples rose up in democratic protest. It was an exultant moment.
Free at last!
Within a few years, however, that spirit of exultation was replaced by the revival of age-old
hatreds in exaggerated form, as Serbs slaughtered Croats, Slovaks asserted their individual
autonomy and split from the Czech lands, and free expression was given to hatred of minorities,
often becoming a major theme in political campaigns.
This result is not surprising, for after forty years of enforced suppression of nationalist
identity, at last these intensely nationalistic people were free, free to express in intensified form the
core of their identity--difference--and with it expressions of hatred of the "other." As one mocking
poem put it,

Free at last
Free to choose
To eat at MacDonalds
And hate the Jews.
(Anonymous)
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More than difference was expressed, for the intensity with which hated groups were blamed
for the troubles of the in-group was remarkable. A particularly painful example is found in Poland.
Before World War II, Poland was the center of world Judaism, with a population of over three
million Jews. About 2.9 million perished in the Holocaust. Today less than 10,000 of the estimated
38 million population are Jewish, and their average age is seventy. This annihilation of Jewry was
particularly severe in Poland's capitol Warsaw. Approximately 30 percent of the population of
Warsaw was Jewish when the Nazis invaded. As a consequence of the Holocaust, there are now
only about 300-400 Jews in Warsaw.
Poland not only has fewer Jews than in 1939, it also has fewer other minorities. Hitler's
murder of the Jews, the expulsion of the Germans from East Prussia and Silesia, and the shift
westward of the Ukrainian border have resulted in Poland becoming perhaps the most ethnically
and religiously homogeneous country in eastern Europe. Although Poland retains its historical
memory of "enemy" minorities, it has almost none within its borders. Absent the Communist
leaders, absent traditional enemies, who could be blamed when things went wrong-and initially they
went very badly indeed? The answer was, of course, Jews! Reports of anti-Semitism surfaced
almost immediately after 1989. Monuments and cemeteries were desecrated, with swastikas painted
on gravestones (Harden Al, A19). On the monument to the ghetto fighters who fought against the
Nazis was inscribed, "The only good Jew is a dead Jew" (Brumberg 72). The largely non-existent
Jewish population was blamed for Poland's economic distress, with an invocation of the
international Zionist conspiracy. A Polish academic, Krystyna Kersten, characterized this as "the
anti-Semitic paranoia" in a country where practically no Jews are left but where "the public
imagination" is nonetheless "obsessed by the Jewish presence in the government, in parliament, in
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the press, in television, and God knows where else" (Shafir 9). A poll conducted in the early 1 990s
indicated that a quarter of the Polish population believed that although the respondents recognized
that Jews constituted only a small part of the population, they nevertheless maintained that Jews
exercised too much influence. Only three percent of those interviewed found it acceptable to have
Jewish neighbors.6 The pollster, Slawomir Nowotny, commented on the intensity of the antiSemitism in the face of the virtually absent Jewish population.7 He dubbed the phenomenon,
"Platonic Anti-Semitism," observing that if love without sex is platonic love, then anti-Semitism
without Jews is platonic anti-Semitism. Nowotny saw the power attributed to the Jews as a
reflection of the powerless-ness of the populace, and the need for someone to blame.
Having difficulty coping with massive socioeconomic dislocation and widespread
discontent, the Polish leadership played an active role in fanning the flames of anti-Semitism. In
August 1990, Walesa clarified that his earlier charge that a gang of Jews "had gotten hold of the
[country's] trough and is bent on destroying us" applied not to "the Jewish people as a whole" but
only to those "who are looking out for themselves while not giving a damn about anyone else"
(Gazeta Wyborcza, June 24, 1990, cited in Brumberg.) In the 1990 election campaign, Walesa
asserted he was "clean" because he had no Jews among his ancestors. He said he was "100 percent
Pole" (Brinkley A5). During the 1991 political campaign, Lech Walesa's main opponent was
Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who was "accused" of being Jewish (Foreign Broadcast Information Service,
Eastern European Report, 18 March, 1991). Not recognizing the anti-Semitism in their response,
the Catholic Church defended Mazowiecki, asserting that they had gone back through 200 years of
church records of Mazowiecki's family and found "not a drop of Jewish blood."
In Romania too there is anti-Semitism without Jews. Before World War II, it is estimated
that there were upwards of one million Jews in Romania. Today there are 17,000, most of them
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elderly. More than 400,000 Rumanian Jews were killed during World War II by Germans and
Rumanian security forces, and the climate under President Nicolai Caeucescu fostered a large
emigration to Israel.
Rumanian politics were distinctly anti-communist in the interwar period. Most of the
Communist Party's support thus came from the disaffected minorities, including Jews, Hungarians,
and Bulgarians. Hostility toward the now departed Communist leaders has been accompanied by
blaming Jews and Hungarians as Communists. This "Communist equals Jew" as rationalization for
anti-Semitism was demonstrated in the manifesto of "the National Defense League," made public
during a violent demonstration in April, 1990 (Shafir 24). The leaflet began with a declaration that
the Communists had "sown only blood and woes" and that "blood calls for blood." It then went on
to attack the National Salvation Front as having been "bought by the Bolsheviks and the
international Jewish conspiracy." The manifesto declared that the Jews, under the direction of Chief
Rabbi Moses Rosen, have a "secret mission . . . in your new communist government. . . of setting
up a new form of communism and socialism for the benefit of the Jewry."
Anti-Semitic articles have appeared in national newspapers, reviving the anti-Semitic
organization, the Legion of the Archangel Saint Michael, later renamed the Iron Guard. In one
message, reported to be from the Anticommunist Iron Guard Army, the goals were declared to be
to save the country and to reconstruct it on the sound basis of the purity of the Rumanian soul,
which has been poisoned then just as it is being poisoned now. . . . The crucifixion of the Legion
was followed by the crucifixion of Romania itself Students! Today, when Romania's desperation
is almost as great as Christ's desperation on the Golgotha. . .. (Shafir 27)
The pamphlet ended with the words, "Our time has finally come. Heil Hitler. We shall be
victorious." There were swastikas in all four corners. An article by a former submarine commander,
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Captain Nicolac Radu, claimed that Israel planned to turn Romania into a Jewish colony, that Jews
were plotting with the International Monetary Fund to turn Rumanians into street sweepers," that
the Jews control the Rumanian government, and that they brought Communism to Romania
(Champion Al 4).
Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize winning chronicler of the Holocaust, was taunted at a talk in lasi,
Romania, commemorating the deaths of 8,000 Jews at the hands of the Rumanian Army and police
in 1941. Before the war, of the 90,000 population of lasi, 40,000 were Jews. Today only 900
remain. A woman disrupted the meeting, sh~uting "It's a lie. The Jews didn't die. We won't allow
Rumanians to be insulted by foreigners in their own country" (Kamm Al). In April, 1991, the
Romanian chamber of deputies rose in a minute of silence in tribute to the memory of Marshal Ion
Antonescu, the dictator executed as a war criminal who allied Romania with Germany and ordered
the deportation and killing of thousands of Jews.
Similar tribute to an architect of the Holocaust was paid to Father Tiso; a Catholic priest, and
President of Slovakia during the one period of its functioning as an autonomous nation, 1939-1945.
Under Tiso's leadership, Slovakia was allied with Germany, and paid the Germans 500 crowns for
each Jewish man, woman, and child deported to the death camps. Tiso was convicted of war crimes
and executed. A cross was consecrated and erected on his grave in March 1991 on the occasion of
the fifty-second anniversary of the independent and sovereign Slovak Republic by a new intensely
nationalist political force, the Slovak National Unity, which had declared as its central goal the
establishment of an independent Slovak state (Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 19 March,
1991). "It was not the first time in history when power humiliated the law and justice and an
innocent man had to die," the eulogist said. During the rally, the eulogy was interrupted by cries of
"Glory to Tiso," "Long Live Slovakia," and "Enough of Havel." On a visit to Bratislava, Havel had
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been attacked by a crowd who called him "King of the Jews." On the occasion of the visit to
Czechoslovakia of Chaim Heizog, the President of Israel, the Slovak fascist party erected a plaque
on Tiso's birthplace. The resurgence of nationalism was coupled with an intense resurgence of the
feelings associated with the brief period of national independence-fascism and anti-Semitism.
In reflecting on the suppression of identity, Peter Huncik, a psychiatrist who served as Special
Assistant to President Havel of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, has observed that more
than identity was suppressed. He has written of the "deformation of personality" after forty years of
socialism. Huncik observes that the socialist masters systematically extinguished initiative and in
emphasizing the primacy of state authority created a climate which socialized a passive dependent
populace who expected the state to take care of them. The populace blamed the omnipresent
authority for society's shortcomings, with a marked atrophy of individual responsibility. With the
disappearance of that authority, the resentful dependent populace had to find a target to blame.
The readiness to externalize blame is another social psychological consequence of forty years
of Communist rule. For one of the legacies of Communism was societal paranoia (see Schifter).
The massive security organizations throughout the Communist bloc led to pervasive fear and
distrust and an erosion of communality. The inability to trust friends and even family had led to
deep scars and an atrophy of mutuality and sharing.
What happens when that all-powerful authority disappears, when the caretaking enemy is
gone? As Communist governments were overthrown, leaving social economic chaos in their wake,
it was at last safe to express the long pent-up anger at the Communist leaders. For many,
Communist equals Jew was an equation in the collective psychology.8
Anger and blame went to the departing enemy. But new enemies must be found as well, and
old enmities were revived. A Czech journalist asserted, "the politics of Slovakia is looking for an
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enemy-everybody who is different."

In the Czech lands-Bohemia and Moravia-there is some anti-Semitism, but the most intense
feelings are directed at Gypsies. Indeed it has been suggested that the intense resentment of the
large Gypsy population had defused feelings that otherwise might have targeted Jews. The Gypsies
have been the object of brutal attacks by young toughs, but the
attitudes of ethnocentric resentment are maintained by Czech intelligentsia as well. A Czech
diplomat, shaking his head in disgust, stated:
They, the Gypsies] are responsible for most of the crime. They are lazy, and shiftless, and don't
hold regular jobs. And they have all of these children. It makes me angry that there are these
special welfare programs for them, when the money should be going to the hard working
people of this country.9
Similar feelings were voiced in Hungary where there is also strong anti-Gypsy feeling. When the
main opposition party in Hungary called attention to the plight of the gypsies, they were
characterized in leading newspapers as "the party of the gypsies and the Jews," and they
demonstrably lost standing in the polls because of their principled stand.
The intensity of the nationalistic passions and associated violence has several roots. In the first
place, after decades of suppression under socialist rule, the intense expression of nationalism
represents an exaggerated search for identity, which, as we have seen, depends fundamentally upon
difference. At the same time, the forty years of socialist rule did indeed lead to "a deformation of
personality," characterized by societal paranoia, an atrophy of personal responsibility and initiative
and an expectation of being cared for, however badly, by the totalitarian leadership. With the
disappearance of that leadership, the populace is floundering. The long-sought freedom is
frightening, as it emphasizes individual identity and responsibility, long suppressed qualities.
When the powerful disappear, the powerless do not easily succeed them. There must be

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someone to blame for the chaos left behind. Who is behind the devastating economic dislocation?
Being for so long accustomed to (justly) blame their own government, it was an easy transition to
continue to externalize blame. If, as in Poland, there is no clear internal enemy, one will be created
from the country's social history. The political and economic instability in Eastern and Central
Europe in the wake of the loss of the Communist enemy is ripe territory for the demagogue
exploiting the paranoid dynamic and scapegoating. Throughout the region, demagogues have
provided meaning for the distressed population by identifying new enemies and reviving old
enmities.
NOTES

1. This paper is drawn from Chapter Four, "The Need for Enemies: Nationalism, Terrorism and
Paranoid Mass Movements, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred (with Robert
Robins), New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
2. A major contributor to political psychology is the psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan. In his study The
Need to Have Enemies and Allies, Volkan traces the roots of international conflict to the crib,
persuasively demonstrating that fear and hatred of the stranger is deeply rooted in the human
psyche. The theoretical formulations in this paper draw significance from Volkan's work.
3. Melanie Klein uses the term "objects" to refer not only to persons and physical objects, but also
to abstract concepts such as capitalism and racial homogeneity We all have these "objects" in our
minds (the idea of capitalism, the idea of the president), and to the extent that our behavior is
determined by psychological forces, it is determined by the nature and relation among these mental
objects. Kicinian theory~ for this reason, is called object relations theory Klein's major theoretical
and clinical contributions can be found in her Contributions to Psychoanalysis.
4. This is not to imply that the fear of enemies is always a psychological distortion. If the paranoid
dynamic is expressed in the mobilization of a mass movement, it can lead to war. And for the
nation at war, it is not paranoid to fear the enemy. Thus the paranoid appeal, a fantasy at first, can
come to be a reality Just as individual paranoids create genuine enemies, so will groups and even
nations create theirs in war. When the paranoid group finds itself at war with the larger society (as
do religious cults and terrorist organizations), or paranoid nations with other nations, the paranoid
fears are realized. They are out there, and, for the nation at war, it is true that it is us versus them
and that they will destroy us unless we attack them and are successful. If the incentive to join a
mass movement is collective feelings of fragmentation and isolation, going to war cements the
alienated into a cohesive united whole. For each party to the war, the aggression is defensive,
justified, indeed required, by the external enemy.
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5. The situation is at its most extreme when there is major Socio-economic incongruity between
adjoining groups. That is, hostility at the boundary is most intense when one group is rich and the
other is poor, and where languages differ, so that one ethnic group looks upon the other with
contempt or bitter envy.
6. Demoskop Research Agency "Democracy Economic Reform and Western Assistance in Poland."
7. Interview, November 1991, Warsaw.
8. Even though Jews rarely rose to senior levels, in fact Jews were represented in disproportionate
numbers in the Communist party. Both in the Soviet Union and the socialist nations of Eastern
Europe, the prospect of eradicating expressions of nationalism meant the prospect of eradicating
expressions of anti-Semitism. Thus it was that many Jews joined the Communist Party in the hope
of finding asylum from persecution. Of course, Jews also had impeccable anti-Nazi credentials.
9. Personal communication, November 1991, senior minister, government of Czechoslovakia.
1

This chapter is drawn from The Loss of Enemies, Fragmenting Identities, and
the Resurgence of Ethnic/Nationalist Hatred and Anti-Semitism in Eastern
Europe, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, Vol. 1,
# 2, Fall, 1996.

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