Ethnic Politics After Communism [antikvár]

Preface and Acknowledgments Ethnicity is one of the primary poHtical forces in the world. The polidcal predilections of diverse ethnic groups are instrumental to the stabihty or instabihty of governments, the vitality of democratic freedoms, and the peacefulness of interstate reladons. Two disdnct and contradictory perspectives regarding the role of ethnicity and nationalism emerged at the end of the Cold War, one optimisée and one pessimistic. The former drew on ideas of liberal internationalism in predicdng an era of internadonal peace (and presumably domestic tranquility) as a by-product of the spread of liberal democracy, whereas the latter envisioned worldwide cultural conflict surrounding insurmountable divisions between antagonis-dc civilizadons. It might be too early to judge which of these perspectives captures the role of nationalism and ethnicity more accurately in the early twenty-first century. Nevertheless, this book is an attempt to take stock of the power of ethnicity in the region—postcommimist Europe and Eurasia—that sparked this debate in the first place. To make the book coherent and consistent, we decided that we needed to identify key concepts pertinent to ethnic polidcs on which individual chapters would be based. Our hope was that taken together, the theoretical and empirical explorations of these conceptual areas would yield a more or less comprehensive survey and broad imderstanding of ethnic polidcs in the postcommimist world. By definition, then, we were interested in how various aspects of ethnic polidcs develop and change after communism. We agreed that the following issues were crucial to address: ( 1 ) the fall of the Soviet empire and its impact on nadonalides and ethnic groups, (2) ethnic idendty and culture, (3) ethnic mobilizadon, (4) ethnic pardes and vodng, (5) ethnic conflict, (6) ethnic migration, and (7) the impact of normative standards and external institudonal actors on national minorities.