ABSTRACT
In the first two to three decades after the Second World War it was widely, though mistakenly assumed that ethnicity had ceased to be a significant factor in European politics. Increasingly challenged from the 1970s, this view lost any remaining credence following the end of the Cold War. Since the turn of the 1990s, ethnic politics has been a particular focus of attention in relation to the former communist countries, where the policies of the previously existing regimes are widely seen as having strongly institutionalized ethno-cultural understandings of nationhood. The economic turbulence of the late socialist period, a collective memory of past oppressions and the absence of any strongly rooted tradition of democratic institutions all created fertile terrain for ethnic conflict, which emerged in several of the countries created or reconstituted following the demise of the USSR and the former Yugoslavia. To outside eyes, the bloodshed that has occurred in Croatia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo and elsewhere has invited parallels with the period from 1878–1945, when the region’s ‘national question’ contributed in no small measure to the outbreak of two World Wars. This focus on conflictual dynamics of ethnicity, however, has obscured past multinational legacies within the region, including some original models for the management of ethnic diversity within a single territorial state framework.
