ROBERT WISTRICH
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nightmare of controlling ethnic groups and aggressive majorities or
minorities seeking to eliminate other groups .
The new ethnic nationalism proclaims, as
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ex-Yugoslavia, that
people are born with ethnic identities which they can never change -
you are a Serb, a Croat, or an Albanian because your father was one
before you. This primary identity is a reaction to the leveling and ho–
mogenizing tendencies of modernity and, in the case of ex-Communist
states, a reaction against the totalitarian experience. But the erasure of
the Soviet past has not brought with it a true sense of unity, freedom, or
the mutual recognition of self-determination by the ethnically mixed
populations of Eastern or Southeastern Europe. Weare witnessing there,
at one and the same time, a post-Communist predicament and a throw–
back to the prewar past, whether in the Baltic States, Transcaucasia,
Slovakia, Romania, Hungary or ex-Yugoslavia; a return to history,
against a modern backdrop of decentralization and fragmentation,
instead of against the monstrously tyrannical unity and centralization
which characterized the Fascist and Communist experiments.
Today, in the former Soviet Russian Empire, in the Balkans and
Eastern Europe, neither military force, state terror, nor Marxist-Leninist
ideology can hold the center. What has happened since 1989 recalls in
many ways the centrifugal forces that disintegrated four empires in 1918
- that of the Romanovs in Tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Turks in the
Middle East, the Hapsburg dynasty in Austria-Hungary, and the
Hohenzollems in Imperial Gemlany.
It
was war and revolution which brought down these multi- ethnic
empires in the maelstrom events of1917-18 .
In
the name of national self–
determination, East-Central Europe after 1918 was to be made safe for
Western-style democracy. But the new map of Europe which restored
Poland, reduced Germany, Austria and Hungary, enlarged Romania, and
created new states in the Baltic region, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia,
did not result in peace. The mu ltinational empires became multi-ethnic
states masquerading as homogeneous nation-states, discriminating against
their ethnic minorities. Worse still, they rapidly became, with the
exception of Czechoslovakia, authoritarian and quasi-fascist states. Their
fate was to be sandwiched between a revanchist Germany - embittered
by the Versailles Treaty - and a Communist Russia driven by a messianic
ideology of revolutionary expansion. Neither Britain nor France was
strong enough in the interwar period to guarantee the independence of
Eastern Europe against the pressure of such powerful neighbors,
themselves in the grip of Nazism and Stalinism.
Since 1989, as East-Central Europe has struggled painfully to make
the transition to market capitalism and pluralist democracy, the echoes of
