ABSTRACT
Among the many paradoxes of communism in Eastern Europe is that many socialist and communist internationalists were transformed over time into nationalists. The several communist federations that were established during the twentieth century followed the Russian model on the basis of a Stalinist paradox which attempted to reconcile Marxism and nationalism. The fact that Russia successfully refederalised itself as an ethnofederal state is a serious challenge to the hypothesis that ethnofederalism causes state instability. Moreover, Russia's territorial integrity has been preserved and has been challenged by only one major ethnic secessionist conflict, that of Chechnya in 1991–2005. The constituent parts of Czechoslovakia were highly homogenous. In Yugoslavia only Slovenia and Kosovo were significantly homogenous, and Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular was characterised by ethnic diversity. Despite the extensive theoretical speculation about the relationship between ethnofederalism and political instability arising from the collapse of three of four communist-era ethnofederations, the concept of federalism persists in state-building in Eastern Europe.
