The uses and abuses of victimhood nationalism in international politics
| Author | Adam B. Lerner |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066119850249 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119850249
European Journal of
International Relations
2020, Vol. 26(1) 62 –87
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066119850249
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The uses and abuses of
victimhood nationalism in
international politics
Adam B. Lerner
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
Contemporary populist movements have inspired political pundits in various contexts to
opine on the resurgence of victimhood culture, in which groups demonstrate heightened
sensitivity to slights and attempt to evoke sympathy from third parties to their conflicts.
Although reference to victimhood’s politics oftentimes surfaces examples of egregious
microaggressions, when victimhood claims are scaled up to the realm of nationalisms,
oftentimes so too are their consequences. Current literature on victimhood in
international politics, though, lacks a unifying theorisation suitable for the comparative
analysis of victimhood nationalisms as important identities in the international arena. This
gap prevents scholarship from investigating how the severity of perceived or real suffering
relates to the formation of victimhood, as well as how victimhood nationalisms legitimize
the projection of grievances onto third parties, potentially sowing new conflicts. This
article theorises victimhood nationalism as a powerful identity narrative with two key
constitutive elements. First, drawing on the narrative identity approach, it outlines how
victimhood nationalisms are constructed via narrations of perceived or real collective
trauma. Second, it argues that victimhood nationalist narratives, unlike other narratives of
collective trauma, break down the idealized victim–perpetrator relationship and project
grievances onto otherwise uninvolved international actors, including other nation-states.
The article concludes by offering comparative case studies of Slobodan Milošević’s and
David Ben-Gurion’s respective invocations of victimhood nationalism to illustrate the
empirical applicability of this theorization, as well as victimhood nationalism’s importance
in international politics across time and space.
Keywords
Identity, Israel, nationalism, Serbia, trauma, victimhood
Corresponding author:
Adam B. Lerner, St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 1TP, UK.
Email: abl33@cam.ac.uk
850249EJT0010.1177/1354066119850249European Journal of International RelationsLerner
research-article2019
Article
Lerner 63
Introduction
In the wake of the election of US President Donald Trump and the UK’s decision to leave
the European Union (EU) (‘Brexit’), pundits from across the political spectrum and
across the globe have lamented the rise of ‘identity politics’ justifying otherwise illogical
grievances and abnormal political behaviour in a variety of contexts. Campbell and
Manning (2014: 692, emphasis in original) have described this trend as a shift to ‘victim-
hood culture’, utterly distinct from past eras, in which groups demonstrate heightened
sensitivity to slights and attempt to inspire sympathy from third parties to their conflicts.
Although reference to the politics of victimhood oftentimes surfaces examples of egre-
gious claims of microaggressions,1 when notions of victimhood are scaled up to the
realm of nationalisms, they necessarily entail consequences for international politics. For
example, Yilmaz (2017) has argued that a sense of victimhood among Turkish Islamists
has fueled the political rise of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Adalet ve
Kalkınma Partisi (AKP), while Caplan (2012) has argued that Israeli and Palestinian
victimhood narratives have reinforced mutually exclusive claims that contribute to the
conflict’s intractability. More recently, scholars like Fukuyama (2016; see also Solis,
2017) have employed the ideas of victimhood and grievance to explain Trump’s electoral
success in invoking rhetoric of the US ‘losing’ to the savvy of China, Mexico and others
in an allegedly zero-sum game of international economic relations. This rhetoric notably
contributed to America’s withdrawal from the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership trade
deal in January 2017 and renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) in 2018.
This juxtaposition of various nation-states’ invocations of victimhood begs two
important sets of questions for International Relations (IR) scholarship. First, as Jacoby
(2015: 528) aptly identifies in her article on victimhood identity: ‘[W]hat is the connec-
tion, if any, between the severity of the harm and recognition/redress of the victim?’. In
each of these examples, nationalist narratives claim unjustified suffering at the hands of
other nations, but the severity of this suffering — past imposition of secularism in Turkey,
the Holocaust for Israelis, al-Nakbah for Palestinians and the decades-long decline of the
industrial middle class in the US — ranges widely. In some instances, victimhood nation-
alisms might emerge out of claims to collective trauma that are clearly exaggerated or
fabricated — does this impact the political potency of the narratives in question? A sec-
ond, related set of questions also arises: how and why do victimhood narratives legiti-
mize the implication of third parties? Israeli leaders, for example, have often invoked the
Holocaust, perpetrated by Nazi Germany and European collaborators during the 1940s,
to legitimize actions against Arab neighbours decades later.2 Victimhood’s projections
often span both time and space, implicating either uninvolved nations or younger genera-
tions within perpetrating nations that were not present for their forebears’ crimes. Put
crudely, why is ‘paying it forward’ such a common response to historical injustices?
These questions are important not only for the clear ethical dilemmas that they entail.
This article’s comparative case studies of leaders invoking victimhood nationalism —
Slobodan Milošević before the break-up of Yugoslavia and David Ben-Gurion during the
1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann — demonstrate victimhood nationalism’s power in inter-
national politics, both in appealing to aggrieved populations and for manipulation by
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