ABSTRACT
In order to respond properly to the national question in general and to the ethno-nationalist challenge in particular, regimes for secession should be made a subject of international law and part of regional regimes. At the level of the international system, the current proliferation of states is taking place in 'uncontrolled' fashion. Although the community of states has steadily expanded the codified protection of human rights and shifted it both from the intra-state to the international level and into the Law of the Nations, this has so far had little effect on the actual situation. It was only in 1991 that the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) concluded for the first time that minority policies could be a legitimate cause of international dispute. In Afghanistan the world community could again observe that a thin layer of religious ideology, in this case Islamic fundamentalism propagated by the Taliban, covered an essentially ethnically determined conflict formation.
