ABSTRACT
At a CSCE conference in Almaty in February 1996 devoted to "questions of interethnic harmonization in NIS countries. In the state museum in Almaty the cultures of all major ethnic groups in Kazakstan are extolled in separate expositions. The Latvian Law on Cultural Autonomy seems to be based on a clear compensatory idea: cultural autonomy is granted to the ethnic minorities as a kind of compensation for the absence of political power-sharing. Ethnic democracy is a system of domination by ethnic elite rather than by the entire superordinate group. The elite pursue its own narrow goals as well as the goals of the larger ethnic community as they define them, and tend to see these goals as coinciding. In a comparative study of conflict regulation Sammy Smooha and Theodor Hanf suggest that ethnic democracy may serve not only as a descriptive but also a normative model, "a viable option for nondemocratic, deeply divided societies."
