ABSTRACT
The belief that problems of identity and political violence at the end of the twentieth century occur primarily in non-Western, non-European settings may serve more to reassure to Westerners that they are insulated from such threats than to usefully or accurately circumscribe a category of political violence. As a term reserved for twentieth-century political violence in mostly non-Western settings, ethnic conflict also conspicuously excludes the experience of Western societies historically, so that we might imagine that “ethnic violence” is somehow different from the history of violence associated with Western statemaking.1 Like most citizens of modern nation-states, people living in Yugoslavia identified themselves in terms of multiple, intersecting, and sometimes overlapping identities, particularly those to which we attribute political significance-ethnic, religious, ideological, and national. Yugoslavs could be Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Macedonian, Hungarian, Albanian, Wallach or Vlach, Turk, Slovak, German, Romanian, Bulgarian, Italian, Ruthenian,2 Russian, and, at the same time Yugoslav. Just as one could be French, Anglo, or Native and Canadian; black, white (Swedish, Italian, Irish, English, German), Hispanic, Native, Asian and American; Protestant or Catholic and Irish; Huguenot or Catholic and French, and so on. The problem is that many compound identities have been constituted as categories serving to rationalize marginalization, discrimination, outright violence against certain groups at the hands of another. These conflicts have not been rectified satisfactorily or peacefully, Many remain problematic.
