ABSTRACT
The closing decades of the twentieth century witnessed dramatic changes in the structure and identity of many leading political entities in the modern world. One of the most important among them was the breakdown of a number of ‘super-ethnic’ entities (the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, and so on). Their inheritors readily adopted the concept of the ethnic (and sometimes the civic) nation-state as a major feature of their political identity. At the same time, however, the very idea of such a state – a dominant political and social phenomenon in the world during most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – was challenged by two contradictory trends.
