Worldwide, ethnopolitics takes on various shapes. Yet, while politics involving ethnicity can be either conflictual, competitive, or cooperative, analysts typically focus either on instances of conflict or ignore the multiethnicity of states by sticking to “the comfortable integrationist presumptions of the 1950s.” All too rarely does one find analyses of policies that work in difficult situations. This global trend is intensified in the case of Eastern Europe. As this region has suffered instances of ethnic politics gone wrong—most recently in the former Yugoslavia—many analysts assume that constructive approaches to ethnic relations are impossible, even though they are needed more than ever. Here, I outline a model of ethnopolitics which is both democratic and constructive, has been used in East Central Europe in the past, and has potential for the future. In presenting the case for ethnopluralism, I outline a promising alternative to ethnic conflict or neglect.

On the north wall of Cracow's Church of the Annunciation (better known as the Carmelite Church at Piaski) hangs a long-ignored inscription. A simple stone tablet unprotected from the elements, its words have faded over the past century. One must strain to make out its cryptic message: “On September 11, 1883, Polish villagers gathered in Cracow solemnly celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the relief of Vienna by John Sobieski, in remembrance of which this stone has been funded.”

In analyzing national and ethnic identities in the Balkans, one notices a “delay” in the development of the Muslim national identity. The Bosniaks and Albanians, for example, developed a national consciousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In contrast to the Southeastern European Christians, the Muslim inhabitants followed the official religion of the dominant political class of the Ottoman Empire—Islam—a faith that (theoretically, at least) privileged religious belief over ethnicity or nationalism. These two concepts, alien to Ottoman intellectual tradition, became fully understood by the Ottoman elite only in the early twentieth century. Although the Muslims under Ottoman rule often perceived themselves as different from their co-religionist rulers in Istanbul, as shall be demonstrated in this paper, they nevertheless shared the religion of the rulers of the Empire and practised a religion that suppressed the development of national identity far more explicitly than did Christianity. Thus, it was the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, and the consequent recognition that this state was ceasing to protect the interests and identity of the Muslim population in Southeastern Europe, which led to the development of ethnic and national identity among the Muslims.

Imagine an intrepid web explorer looking for information on the Czech Republic. He or she might well stumble onto the SunSITE at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague. When our websurfer clicks on the “Czech Republic” link, the screen displays the image shown in Figure 1.

Although narratives of national identity feature territory, myths, and historical memories presumably shared by members,1 national identity formation is an ongoing process with changeable membership and boundaries.2 One of the more complex challenges to a national “imagined community” has been the significant presence in Estonia of cultural Russians3 after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, at that time one-third and now some 28% of the small country's population. The often grudging accommodation of cultural Russians by the titular nationality continues to draw attention from international organizations, scholars, and policymakers alike. Undoubtedly the commentary least welcome to Estonian governments in the last decade, however, has been the thunder of denunciation from Russia. In a great spillover from domestic concerns about Slavic identity to international relations, Estonia has been ranked as Russia's greatest enemy, and political figures across the spectrum have condemned Estonian citizenship and language policies.4

Les événements dramatiques qui ont secoué l'Europe durant dix années à la suite du démembrement de la Yougoslavie, surtout le dernier épisode retentissant qui a affronté les Serbes et les Albanais pour le droit sur le Kosovo, ont impliqué aussi l'ensemble de la communauté internationale pour la défense d'un certain modèle de société et de relations entre groupes ethniques. Les opinions publiques en revanche, abasourdies par les bruits médiatiques et intellectualistes, n'ont toujours pas saisi la signification et les raisons du conflit, que tout le monde espère voir finir une fois pour toutes avec ce dernier et final épisode sanglant. En intégrant l'approche anthropologique aux considérations historiques et géopolitiques sur la région et la culture albanaise, cet article tentera de poser une question qui me paraît essentielle pour la compréhension des phénomènes actuels, à savoir si l'héritage historique et les identités culturelles peuvent raisonnablement, sinon justifier, au moins expliquer les conflits ethniques et le nationalisme, ou si au contraire ils servent tout simplement à déterminer et au mieux à rationaliser les relations interethniques entre groupes sociaux.

The end of communism brought hopes for a wholesale liberal-democratic transformation to the republics of the former Soviet Union. However, bitter disenchantment soon followed, as resurrected nationalism undermined the republics' stability and threatened democracy. Mass nationalist movements in these countries were not observed until the regime's initial liberalization. In most cases, the high phase of nationalist mobilization was reached only after the postcommunist state elites endorsed nationalism as an official policy of the state. In each instance, nationalist strategies of the state were defined in a complex interplay of domestic and international factors. Ethnicity became politicized as a resource for political action when other resources proved inadequate or insufficient. In addition, exogenous factors often played a leading role in this development.

Investigating the Muslim population of Ottoman Europe is the stuff of a demographer's nightmare. There is no lack of material to study; thousands of estimates of Balkan population were made throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Unfortunately, almost all of them were nonsense, the prejudiced guesses of nationalistic advocates or estimates made by travellers who felt a journey through a land provided enough information for accurate estimates of population numbers.

The Setus are an ethnic group, small in numbers, in the southeastern part of the Republic of Estonia and the Russian territories bordering on Estonia (Petseri raion of the Pskov oblast). The Setus can be seen as ethnographic raw material that both Estonian and Russian nationalists have attempted to claim. Generally, the Setus has been viewed as an ethnographic subgroup of Estonians and their language as part of the South Estonian dialect. Unlike the Estonians, who are predominantly Lutheran by tradition, the Setus are Orthodox. The specific characteristics of the Setus have emerged as a result of the combined influence of religious and linguistic peculiarities and a historic fate that is different from the Estonian. Because of the fact that they were considered Estonians when the censuses took place, the exact number of the Setus is unknown; however, I estimate the number of the Setus living in Setumaa and in Estonian towns to be about 5,000–6,000.

The demise of the Soviet Union entailed a reconfiguration of the political space and a reforging of collective identities within the boundaries of the new successor states. In the view of Anthony Smith, this was inevitable: “the rediscovery of the national self is not an academic matter, it is a pressing practical issue, vexed, and contentious, which spells life or death for the nationalist project of creating a nation.” Defining the national “self not only accomplishes a symbolic break with the previous political community but also sets out the parameters of statehood with regard to language and minority rights. However, even if the newness of the polity precipitates ”the definition, creation, and solidarification of a viable collective identity,“ this can be anything but straightforward. New states dwell on particularism, that is they look to ”local mores, established institutions, and the unities of common experience—to ‘tradition,’ ‘culture,’ ‘national character,’ or even ‘race’ for the roots of a new identity.“ And yet defining the national particularism may be fraught with inherent difficulties because, as Geertz observed, ”new states tend to be bundles of competing traditions gathered accidentally into concocted political frameworks rather than organically evolving civilizations.“

Iran is a multi-ethnic society in which approximately 50% of its citizens are of non-Persian origin, yet researchers commonly use the terms Persians and Iranians interchangeably, neglecting the supra-ethnic meaning of the term Iranian for many of the non-Persians in Iran. The largest minority ethnic group in Iran is the Azerbaijanis (comprising approximately a third of the population) and other major groups include the Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis and Turkmen. Iran's ethnic groups are particularly susceptible to external manipulation and considerably subject to influence from events taking place outside its borders, since most of the non-Persians are concentrated in the frontier areas and have ties to co-ethnics in adjoining states, such as Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

The Soviet military officer's motto was “I serve the Soviet Union.” He had taken an oath to a state whose leadership constantly stressed the ethnic diversity of its population. When the USSR fell apart, however, only one of its 15 successor states—the Russian Federation—did not declare itself the homeland of one specific ethnic group. The reality of the divorce was difficult to grasp for many people in the former Soviet Union. In Russia, ideas of democracy and hopes for the future of the RSFSR as an independent state were standing strong. Not all the newly independent states would be missed; the Central Asian republics were widely seen as a culturally distant periphery tapping the RSFSR of resources. However, shedding off Kazakhstan, Belarus, and above all, Ukraine was a completely different story.

During the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire retreated from the Balkans, and underwent a steady decline culminating in its final demise in the early part of the twentieth century. Sizeable communities of Muslims, derived both from those who had arrived with the Ottomans and from indigenous inhabitants who had converted to Islam, remained in the new successor states of southeast Europe. With the exception of Albania, where the Muslims formed the majority of the population, these communities became established as minorities within the new states. Upheld as ethno-national states each based on one dominant nation, the new states suffered from irredentism on the one hand, and internal tension between majority and minority populations on the other. Tension was particularly evident in the relations between the new Orthodox Christian rulers and their Muslim minority populations, which were seen as undesirable relics from the Ottoman past. In spite of such attitudes and the continuing waves of emigration, however, these Muslim communities remain an integral part of the present-day Balkans.

The Albanians are divided between three religions: the Catholics, the Orthodox, and the Muslims. The religious groups participated in the national development of the Albanians around 1900 each in its own way and in proportion to its own strength. As the majority group, the Muslims (70–80%) played the most important role. Most of the Muslims wanted to remain within the Ottoman Empire as long as their traditional rights were maintained, in spite of a strong desire for local self-government, but, as the Ottoman Empire declined, radical Albanian leaders stressing cultural and linguistic unity rather than religious unity were to gain the upper hand. The Albanian language, culture, and feeling of common blood played the most important roles in Albanian nationalism. The Albanian language in particular gave Albanians the feeling of belonging to the same nation.

In the summer of 1978, a Crimean Tatar man named Musa Mamut walked out of his home in a small village in the Crimea toward a policeman waiting for him at his front gate. He was to be taken to the station for questioning, and quite possibly arrested for “violation of the passport regime.” But Mamut had already drenched himself with gasoline and, lighting a match, was engulfed in flames. He ran toward the policeman, who ran the other way. A deliveryman tripped Musa, and two friends who had been passing by extinguished the flames. His friends took him to the Simferopol city hospital, where he died six days later, never expressing any regret for what he did.

There was a fateful inevitability to the military actions in Dagestan that began on 2 August 1999 and concluded on 16 September. During the 2 years preceding, tensions within Dagestan's Islamic community had been building between fundamentalist Wahhabis and traditionalists. These tensions were exacerbated by Dagestan's sharp economic decline. Unemployment, which was running at 80% by August, contributed to growing dissatisfaction, especially in Dagestan's rural regions. These tensions reached critical proportions in the Botliksky rayon, particularly among young men belonging to the Andi ethno-linguistic sub-group of the Avars. Many of the latter were attracted to military training camps operated in Chechnya by Emir al Khattab, leader of the Wahhabite Islamic djamaat (village or connected group of villages) at Karamakhi, Chabanmakhi and Kadar, and by Shamyl Basayev, leader of the Islamic Congress of the Peoples of Ichkeria and Dagestan. In these camps rural Dagestani alienation met Chechen militancy and international Islamic fundamentalist support. Meanwhile Wahhabism grew increasingly influential in Chechnya as rival political leaders appealed to puritanical Islam in order to bolster their claims to authority and legitimize their political agendas.

In June 1996, the newly reconstructed waterfront in Cheboksary, the capital of the Chuvash Republic, was officially opened with a formal ceremony led by the President of the Republic, Nikolai Fedorov, and attended by the Patriarch of All Russia, Alexei II. “We have built a road to the temple,” the President declared. In a literal sense, he was referring to the construction of an embankment leading to one of the city's oldest Orthodox churches. But his phrase had a symbolic meaning as well. Metaphorically the phrase equated the physical reconstruction of the capital city with the cultural and spiritual revival of the Chuvash nation.