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Comparing Regional and Ethnic Conflicts in Post-Soviet Transition States

The rapid retreat of communism from Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s was closely chased by an upsurge of violent upheavals that are almost universally referred to as ‘ethnic’ or ‘nationalist’ conflicts. One of the most common observations on the conflicts that arose from the collapse of communism is that they are an echo of earlier struggles. This view is shared across the spectrum of thinkers on nationalism, from Modernists to Marxists, and to those who favour a primordialist account of the origins of nationalism. For a Modernist liberal like Ernest Gellner Soviet communism was an ‘intervening’ force that ‘defeated’ nationalism so long as it captured and controlled the state. In this sense, communism had been a deep freeze for nationalism, and its demise had thawed conflicts whose outcome, even within his own schema, was difficult to predict (Gellner, 1997: 86). Similarly, the Modernist Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm, argued that ‘fear and coercion kept the USSR together’ and helped to prevent ethnic and communal tensions from degenerating into mutual violence. The nationalist disintegration of the USSR, according to Hobsbawm, was more a ‘consequence’ of the breakdown of the regime in Moscow than a ‘cause’ of it (Hobsbawm, 1990: 168). Primordialistinspired understandings of conflicts are generally the provenance of parties to the conflict, though the crude stereotyping of ‘ancient hatreds’ is often widely disseminated by policy-makers and journalists interested in the promotion of specific global or regional security frameworks. We do not propose to challenge the notion that many potential nationalist, ethnic and regional conflicts in the Former Soviet Union were kept dormant under communism. As Ian Lustick has demonstrated, suppression or control is a remarkably effective means of conflict regulation in deeply divided societies (Lustick, 1979 and 1993). Furthermore, the control regime of the USSR cynically manipulated nationalisms by the use of quasi-federal institutional devices, in particular the theoretical right of union republics to secession and pseudo-cultural rights. This helped not only to secure internal stability, but also to project an external image of the Soviet Union as a model of a multinational state for anti-colonial movements in the Third World. The hollow Soviet claim to be the ‘sentinel for self-determination’, as Walker Connor phrased it,