ABSTRACT
The eruption of full-scale war in Yugoslavia in 1991 sounded an alarm about the dire consequences of ethnic conflict throughout this once communist party dominated region. Organised warfare between Croatians and Serbians, producing an estimated 6,000 deaths by January of this year, raises serious questions about the future of East Europe’s post-communist order. Yet, fighting in Yugoslavia is not the only indication that in post-communist Eastern Europe ethnic strife is increasingly the focus of political confrontations. Violent clashes between Hungarians and Romanians in Transylvania, ethnic tensions between Bulgarians and that country’s Turkish minority, secessionist movements in Czechoslovakia, irredentist demands on regions of a disintegrating Soviet Union, and a rising tide of anti-Semitic sentiments throughout the region are testimony to the fact that ethnicity is going to be a routine concern of post-communist politics in Eastern Europe.
