ABSTRACT
As the Soviet bloc entered into a process of disintegration, nationalist politics and ethnic conflict appeared as part of the momentous transformations. Nationalism and violent conflict waged in the rhetoric of ethnic antagonisms caught most observers and participants by surprise. The most popular explanation that emerged has been caricatured as the “deep freeze” theory; communism, in this version taken for once as some sort of internationalist or non-nationalist ideology, kept the subterranean, primeval nationalisms in the region in a deep freeze. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery has insisted that this is ideology cloaking itself as analysis, and a dangerous ideology at that, for it legitimates a stance of nonintervention by assuming the primacy of irrational forces that are beyond the control of any political actors. Instead, she argues, contemporary nationalist politics did not come out of nowhere. Communist regimes perpetuated ethnic divisions through a variety of policies and structures; indeed, communism, as practiced in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, had made considerable accommodation with local nationalisms. But although this historical analysis might help explain the persistence of ethnic identities in post-Soviet nations, it does not yet explain how those ethnic identities have been mobilized in often violent conflicts. Equally important to her argument, then, is her insistence that much of today’s ethnic conflict is a consequence of specific policies of the exit from the Old Regimes, including marketization and democratization. Above all, Verdery reminds us of the importance of agency and historical processes in explaining contemporary conflict and warns of the dangers of treating nationalism as a social actor in its own right rather than as a set of symbols over which diverse groups compete in varying contexts.1
