ABSTRACT
At least since the fall of Communism in some portions of the world in 1989, but prior to that event as well, the course of world events has been moving steadily in a direction that seems to challenge Anthony Giddens’s and other contemporary sociologists’ predictions and assessments concerning moder-nity. Specifically, against the assimilatory and globalizing tendencies predicted by Giddens in The Nation-State and Violence (1987), nation-states are splintering and undergoing a sort of fission process into ever-smaller units. For example, new nations were born from the collapse of both the Soviet and Yugoslav Empires, which in turn were dominated by Russia and Serbia, respectively. This new form of nationalism tends toward the implosion of nation-states that results in new nations seeking new states, as opposed to the previous variety of nationalism that emerged in the nineteenth century and which, until recently, led to imperialism, colonialism, and various federalisms. And this new form of Balkanization is no longer confined to the Balkans, but is afflicting the modern West as well (Meštrović 1994). Thus, Quebec nearly seceded from Canada recently; Israel has been divided by the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in 1995; Scotland is seriously considering secession from Great Britain; the European Union seems unable to speak in one voice on many issues, and so on. Quite apart from this literal Balkanization, the dismal state of gender and ethnic relations in Western countries has practically converted gender and ethnicity into group identifications that are so hostile to each other that civil society and the institution of the family also seem to be imploding. An unconscious fear of Balkanization of the West is so pervasive that President Clinton expressed it almost as a matter of course in a televised speech to the US public on 27 November 1995:
As the cold war gives way to the global village, our leadership is needed more than ever because problems that start beyond our borders can quickly become problems within them. We’re all vulnerable to the organized forces of intolerance and destruction, terrorism, ethnic, religious and regional rivalries, the spread of organized crime and weapons of mass destruction and drug trafficking. Just as surely as Fascism and Communism, these forces also threaten freedom and democracy, peace and prosperity.1
