ABSTRACT
The past decade has been marked by two seemingly contradictory trends on the global scale. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the regimes associated with it, Europe and many other regions of the world experienced an unprecedented wave of democratization. The world had to tackle a sharp increase of ethnic conflict at the same time, sometimes in the very societies that had set forth upon the path of democratization only shortly before. The relationships between plural societies and ethnic conflict, on one side, and democracy on the other, have often been misunderstood and misjudged, frequently to the detriment of those plural societies engaged in a process of democratization. This paper will argue that the understanding of democracy and ethnic
diversity, as two contradictory premises on which to build a society, is a misleading one. The building of a multi-national democracy requires that its institutional engineers discard the hope of “solving” nationalism. At the same time, such a political system requires careful attention in order not to exacerbate ethnic tensions. International attempts to develop multi-ethnic institutional frameworks for Bosnia and Kosovo shall serve as a test-case for the Western understanding of multiethnic societies, especially in former Yugoslavia, and its inadequacies in trying to develop a mechanism for (re)building plural society. As early as 1993, Donald Horowitz announced the failure of Western governments to address the special democratic needs of plural societies: “As the recent wave of democratization now runs its course, it is not too soon to say that a major opportunity for constitutional planning for interethnic accommodation has
been largely lost, and the emerging results are there for all to see. This is a serious foreign-policy failure for the United States and for the Western World more generally.”1 This paper will argue that this pattern has been repeated in Bosnia and Kosovo and begs the question of Western and liberal policy towards plural and divided societies in general.
