Chris wrote:
Look at the post-Soviet situation in the early 90s. The Union falls apart, and you immediately start having all these bloody ethnic conflicts around its former borders: Armenians vs. Azerbaijanis, Georgians vs. Abkhazians and Ossetians, Romanians vs. Russians, Ossetians vs. Ingush... There are 34 distinct ethno-cultural groups in Dagestan, which is about the size of Maryland. There are villages of a few hundred people there that are the only representatives of entire languages. The potential for conflict is immense.
Something similar happened earlier, when the Ottoman Empire was defeated during WW1. The Ottoman Empire could integrate an endless variety of groups into its multicultural empire, but the nation-state of Turkey with its centrality of Turkish culture could not do the same thing -- hence wars on Armenians and Kurds.
The Soviet Union was defeated, as was the Ottoman Empire before it and Yugoslavia after it -- first economically, later politically (mainly from inside the the Soviet Union, its multinational elites acting against its multinational masses) or with a combined political, economic, and military warfare (Yugoslavia). Russia and Serbia today cannot be expected to play the same roles that the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia used to be able to play. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
