LGI / Ethnic / Bibliography

No 2	A Hotbed of Hatred: Ethnic Conflicts in Eastern Europe
Institution	Department of Development and Planning; Aalborg University: DK-9100 C Denmark
Publication (Journal)	Sociological Papers 3, no. 1 (May 1994): 1-33
Published in	Israel, 1994
Language	English
Abstract	Most nations are constituted around the concepts of either present citizenship (universalism) or origins (ethnicity). The communist states in Eastern Europe provide an exception. Their identities have been dependent on a shared utopian ideology, which explains their instability in the face of redefinition coupled with the fall of official ideology. Due to a political culture characterized by otherworldliness, a lack of citizenship ethos, fear of chaos and the rule of the fist, the ethnic rather than the universalistic option was chosen. Ethnic hatreds became particularly frantic in countries where the role of utopian ideology for national identity happened to be inordinately strong, and where ethnic coexistence had diminished cultural and linguistic differences to the point of extinction. Thus it is the very success of communism's coping with ethnic conflicts that explains the present outburst of ethnic hatred in Eastern Europe.
Discipline(s)	political sociology
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LGI / Ethnic / Bibliography