As these pages are being written, a fragile cease-fire is holding in Croatia, and the Bosnian legislature is about to declare Bosnia-Hercegovina an independent state despite the strenuous opposition of close to forty percent of the population. When hostilities began in Croatia, the Serb insurgents there called themselves cetniks and referred to their enemies as ustasa, World War II labels which the Serb media promptly adopted. Bosnian Serbs might call themselves cetniks too, should it come to open hostilities in that republic, but they will have trouble finding a label that would be applicable not only to their Croat, but also to their Muslim enemies.

The first years of Communist rule in Poland profoundly shaped the 45 year political experience of the country until the 1989 democratic breakthrough. These formative years encompassed such historic developments as postwar reconstruction and central economic planning, the emergence of new and the disappearance of old political parties, the heretical notion of a Polish road to socialism but also the advent of high Stalinism. Even with the redrawing of Poland's postwar boundaries and with increasing Communist hegemony over political life, the period between 1945 and 1948 was characterized by considerably more political and ethnic heterogeneity than the decades that followed. A significant and, ultimately, controversial role in the shaping of postwar Poland - in its rebuilding, in its economic program, political configuration, national security organization, and in its minorities policies - was played by Jewish Communists.

“We Serbs must militarily defeat our enemies and conquer the territories we need.”

Vojislav Maksimovic, Member

Bosnian Serb Parliament

“I don't see what's wrong with Greater Serbia. There's nothing wrong with a greater Germany, or with Great Britain.”

Bosnian Serb Leader

Radovan Karadžić

The break-up of Yugoslavia has come about as a result of national, economic and political conflicts which by the end of 1987 had taken on unprecedented dimensions. At that point, latent political conflicts between various republics came into the open. More specifically, the conflict between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo had turned into a low-intensity war. Under Slobodan Miloševićs leadership in Serbia, the Serbo-Slovenian conflict over Kosovo deepened, forcing other republics and provinces to take sides. The Slovenian leadership opposed a military solution to the Serbo-Albanian conflict in Kosovo. By 1990 the Serbo-Slovenian conflict had spilled over into Croatia, completely polarizing the Yugoslav political elite into two distinct camps; one encompassed Slovenia and Croatia, the other Serbia and Montenegro, with Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina playing the role of unsuccessful mediators.

The concept of “Western Ukraine” is not entirely a static one. As a valid unit of historical analysis it first appears in the late eighteenth century, when the Habsburg monarchy added Galicia (1772) and Bukovina (occupied 1774, annexed 1787) to its collection of territories; already part of the collection was the Ukrainian-inhabited region of Transcarpathia (depending on how one counts, it had been Habsburg since as early as 1526 or as late as the early eighteenth century). Of course, one can also read back certain features unifying Western Ukraine prior to the 1770s, such as the culturally formative influence on all three regions of the medieval Rus’ principality, later kingdom, of Galicia and Volhynia, as well as the presence of the Carpathian mountains, which was much more than a matter of mere geology (hence the Russophiles’ preferred name for Western Ukraine—Carpathian Rus'). Still, in the centuries prior to their incorporation into the Habsburg monarchy, the three regions had experienced such disparate political histories—Galicia as part of Poland, Bukovina of Moldavia, and Transcarpathia of Hungary—that there is little validity in treating them then as a historical unit.

The 1960's formed the last stretch of the path that was to end in the existential defeat of a generation of Polish-Jewish communists. The 1960's were preceded by the shared experience of turmoil of the thaw, the so-called Polish October, which gained its peak in October 1956. For most members of the generation, the thaw meant a painful awakening from the trance of holy madness, shocking realizations, new hopes - and subsequent frustrations.

The aim of this article is to analyze changes in the ethnic structure in the Baltics. The publication of the results of the 1989 Census data allows one to analyze the dynamics of ethnic structure in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania since the 1920s. The restoration of the de jure independence of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia allows one to describe accurately the factual ethno-demographic situation, because it has made available information which could not be published openly in the former USSR. Nevertheless, a major problem is posed by territorial alterations, especially in Lithuania.

The national minorities question in Romania has been one of crises and polemics. This is due, in part, to the fact that Greater Romania, established at the end of World War I, brought the Old Romanian Kingdom into a body politic (a kingdom itself relatively free of minority problems), with territories inhabited largely by national minorities. Thus, the population of Transylvania and the Banat, both of which had been constituent provinces of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, included large numbers of Hungarians and Germans, while Bessarabia, a province of the Russian empire, included large numbers of Jews. While the Hungarian (Szeklers and Magyars), Germans (Saxons and Swabians), and Jewish minorities were the largest and most difficult to integrate into Greater Romania, other sizeable national minorities such as the Bulgarians, Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Serbians, Turks, and Gypsies also posed problems to the rulers of Greater Romania during the interwar period and, in some cases, even after World War II.

There is certainly some sound logic in the observation by Trivimi Velliste, the former Foreign Minister of Estonia: “The safer Estonians feel about their independence, the more convinced they are that no one will enslave them again [and] the more likelihood they will be more generous [about Russians in Estonia].” The sad conclusion of this article is, however, that the gain of Estonians’ security has not given way to a spirit of generosity but to a more restrictive and irrational citizenship policy.

Nachkriegspolen kannte bis zum Ende der Herrschaft der Parteinomenklatura keine Probleme mit nationalen Minderheiten—so schien es zumindest nach außen. Seit den 1950er Jahren gab es keine Nationalitätenstatistik mehr, und man versuchte den Eindruck zu erwecken, als ob das Zusammenleben im polnischen Staat wenigstens in diesem Bereich völlig problemlos sei. Dies ist zunächst verwunderlich, denn auf der anderen Seite war die polnische Regierung stets bereit zuzugeben, daß der Staat in wirtschaftlicher, aber auch in außenpolitischer Hinsicht in nicht geringen Schwierigkeiten steckte. Nur auf dem Gebiet der nationalen Minderheiten war man zurückhaltend.

Getting a fix on Estonians’ state of mind was difficult in the years before and after September 1991. The runup and aftermath of independence produced what an observer in Estonian Life called a “psychic rollercoaster”—euphoric hopes, long periods of boredom, and moments of sheer terror as Soviet agents struck hard at Baltic independence. Earlier years of collective obedience training had produced the effect of psychic numbing. In the 1990s Estonians dared to think and feel.

There are no differences between the Czech and Slovak governments’ views on the forms of the future coexistence and relations between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Our positions are literally identical.

Vladimir Meciar, Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic (August 1990)

Since our democratic revolution, the situation [in relations between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic] has never been as serious and precipitous as it is today.

Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic (September 1991)

On 9 June 1992 came the shattering announcement by newly elected Czech Republic Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, that the Czechoslovak federation was no more. An interim (but trimmed) federal government was to be set up to preside over the hasty dismantlement of the 74-year old state. By 30 September, the Czechoslovak Republic was to be completely split in two. And by January 1993, the finances of state are supposed to be completely divided.

There have been few areas of the world during the past 150 years that have been as shaped by Jewish influences as East Central Europe. The prominent Czech writer Milan Kundera observed seven years ago that in the years before Hitler, the Jews were the “intellectual cement,” the essentially cosmopolitan and integrative element that forged the spiritual unit of this region. It was this small nation par excellence which added the quintessentially European color, tone and vitality to great cities like Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, not to mention Cracow, Lemberg and Czernowitz further to the east. The Nazi mass murder of the Jews, to which Stalin added his own macabre postscript after World War II, brought about the disappearance of this fructifying Jewish leaven and crushed for forty years the independence of the smaller East European nations sandwiched between Russia and Germany. Since the European revolutions of 1989, these nations, re-emerging from a semi-totalitarian deep freeze, have been recovering their national identities and historical roots long repressed under Communist rule.

The intractable war in Yugoslavia, the breakup of Czechslovakia, the nationalist rumblings in Hungary and Romania, and manifestations of imperial and nationalist longings in Russian politics signify nationalism's enduring potency in Central and Eastern Europe. While some foreign observers worried about this potency, the new elites largely believed that liberalism in power could overcome those forces. Liberal democracy's triumph supposedly meant the end of History, inter alia, aggressive nationalism in Eastern Europe. They believed that these national liberation movements had cooperative, mutually supportive relationships that would flower after Communism ended. Nationalist discords were due to Eastern Europe's previous historical post-1914 nightmares, but the new post-1989 states would have amicable relations with their neighbors. Ostensibly, nationalism, once freed from Soviet repression, would bring an end to Soviet rule and usher in a new ‘springtime of nations.'

Albania, founded at the Congress of Vlora on November 12, 1912, has a far more homogeneous national population than its neighboring states in the Balkans. The Sixth London Conference of the great powers in 1912–1913 ruthlessly divided the territories inhabited by Albanians. The conference fragmented more than half the territories inhabited by ethnic Albanian regions as follows: in the east and the northeast—Kosova, Dibra, Ohri, Struga and Pollugu up to Shkup (Scoplje); in the north—Tivari, Ulqini, Tuzi, Plava and Gucija; and in the south—Camerija. These lands, with an autochthonous Albanian population, were annexed by Serbia, Montenegro (in 1918 by the new Yugoslav State) and by Greece in 1913. Thus, the borders of Albania were confined to an area of 28,748 square kilometers and a population of a little more than 800,000.

Sovietology's gross neglect of the nationality issue is now embarrassingly evident. It was, indeed, a blunder of vast proportions, one that raised doubts about the basic assumptions that dominated the field and the sound judgement of many of its leaders. By analyzing the Soviet past and present, Sovietologists attempted to predict Soviet behavior in the future. For this purpose they produced a variety of models, approaches and scenarios. But if there was one scenario or prognosis which they regularly discounted, it was the one that actually occurred: the disintegration of the multinationalist USSR due to the forces of nationalism.

*“Democracy is next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities.”

—John Stuart Mill

“I have no doubt that this great Eastern Slav empire … has entered the last decades of its existence … Marxist doctrine has delayed the break-up of the Russian Empire—the Third Rome—but it does not possess the power to prevent it.”

—Andrei Amal'rik

Our times do not make much of prophets. The Soviet dissident, Andrei Amal'rik, went to the Gulag for his prophecy, which nevertheless turned out to be remarkably correct.

During the last three years, extensive academic as well as public discussions of national minorities’ rights have taken place in Poland. Scholars can be roughly divided into a pro-national minorities rights group and an anti-national minorities rights group. Some strive to reconcile these two disparate positions. Similar groups can be found in the Sejm (Polish Parliament) which has been discussing the draft of a law on national minorities since Autumn 1993. This brief article investigates the situation of national minorities in Poland ever since a “specific” policy towards ethnic minorities was carried out in Poland by communist governments (though it focuses primarily on the German minority). It also reviews changes in the official policy of the Polish government, the Sejm, and assesses the prospects for the adoption of a Minorities Law, by discussing the major arguments of those groups proposing national minorities rights and those of its opponents.