ABSTRACT
The demise of the bipolar-Cold War world has brought the issue of ethnic identity and ethnonationalism to centre stage in Eastern Europe over the past decade, and also has sharpened discussion about ethnic minority problems in Western Europe. The breakup of three federal states, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia expanded to 28 the number of states in the area. More important, only six of these states are relatively ethnohomogeneous (Albania, Armenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia). The other states must confront ethnopolitical, ethnoterritorial, ethnoreligious and ethnonational issues as a matter of course in the difficult transition to democracy and market economics.1 Since 80-85 per cent of the world’s 190 states are multiethnic, the complexity of ethnocultural relations in Eastern Europe should come as no surprise.2 In order to consolidate these new states, many of the dominant ethnonational formations have unfurled the banners of religious identity and nationalism, while minority ethnic groups have formulated strategies of resistance, autonomy and even outright secession. In the case of the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia-Hercegovina successfully seceded from Yugoslavia, although the Serbs in territorially compact communities within Croatia and ethnically mixed areas within Bosnian-Hercegovina failed in their bloody secession campaigns from 1991 to 1995. This pattern has been repeated in the Serbian province of Kosovo, where the Albanian secessionists were locked in a lowlevel civil war with the Belgrade authorities until March 1999 when the NATO alliance started bombing Yugoslavia for failing to sign the Rambouillet peace plan dictated by the United States in February 1999.3 The NATO forces finally forced Slobodan Miloševi to sign a new settlement agreement in June 1999 and withdraw his forces from Kosovo, and now it is the Albanians who are the oppressors. In Macedonia, the Kosovo pattern has been repeated as the Albanian minority has demanded more rights and constitutional changes to insure a more inclusive political system. The conflict over these demands finally broke out into armed rebellion as Albanian guerrillas began to wage a military campaign in spring 2000. The European community has desperately tried to maintain control of the situation through diplomacy and shaky cease-fire declarations. The Macedonian majority Slav population considers the Albanian insurgents terrorists, while the Albanian population refers to the fighters as the NLA (National Liberation Army), and these very differing perceptions hinder the construction of political solutions.
