ABSTRACT
The year 1991 enters history as the year when the USSR, the major multi-ethnic communist state, ceased to exist. Its sudden and largely unexpected implosion has created a growing sense of uneasiness, insecurity and perplexity in the international community. Both politicians and analysts in the West seem to be perplexed most by an apparent irrationality in the replacement of established political-administrative units by a score of new states, often of questionable viability. Evidently, the West finds it difficult to come to grips with a wave of nation-states formation because an image of nationalism as a basically irrational and anachronistic movement still prevails in the Western mentality.
