Collapse of East Bloc Fans Flames of Ethnic Conflicts

An ancient specter is haunting Europe: untamed nationalism.

From Baku to Berlin, as the Soviet Bloc has disintegrated, ethnic conflicts that once seemed part of the past have suddenly returned to life.

In the Soviet Union, Azerbaijanis and Armenians are locked in a bitter communal war.

In Yugoslavia, the country’s precarious federation of ethnic groups is sliding rapidly toward rupture.

In Bulgaria, Slavs and Turks have revived a centuries-old hatred.

In Albania, Ghegs and Tosks, the country’s two ancient clans, are renewing their old feud. Even in Czechoslovakia, where last November’s revolution against communism won fame for its gentleness, Czech and Slovak democrats are jostling over power.

“Europe has got a lot of ghosts in its attic,” said Raymond Seitz, assistant secretary of state for European affairs, “and they are all stirring.”

They are dangerous ghosts.

“The national and ethnic animosities in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union are perhaps the most acute in the world,” Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, told reporters at a recent briefing. “They could result in . . . geopolitical anarchy.”

Bush Administration officials agree that the problem has become a serious concern. “There is a power vacuum in Eastern Europe, and competing nationalisms may fill that vacuum,” Seitz said.

Officials are worried, for example, about how to cope with a possible collapse of the Soviet Union as a single nation. “We’ve never had to cope with the disintegration of a nuclear superpower before,” one senior official observed in an interview.

Some even suggest that the tensions in Eastern Europe are reminiscent of the situation at the eve of World War I, which was touched off by a nationalist assassination in what is now Yugoslavia. “What’s shocking is the degree to which almost nothing in Eastern Europe has changed,” another senior Bush adviser said. “It’s 1914 all over again.”

Scholars discount the idea that the rediscovered conflicts could lead to another major war. “In 1914, the Great Powers were locked into competition, and all of them felt the slightest change could tip the balance catastrophically,” said Gaddis Smith, a historian at Yale. “That is no longer true.”

Still, State Department analysts predicted as early as last spring that the most likely arena for war in Europe was not the 40-year-old front line of the Cold War between East and West Germany. Rather, it was the still-contested border lands among the countries of the Soviet Bloc.

The ferment among Eastern European nationalities is all the more striking in contrast to Western Europe, which seems to have muted the conflicts that produced centuries of war and is now marching toward a single, united economy.

“Western Europe is moving toward a 21st-Century conception of sovereignty through collective mechanisms,” noted Robert E. Hunter of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In Eastern Europe, the movement is back to the 19th Century, to a nationalism that reasserts ethnic identities after 40 years under the Soviet thumb.”

Far from eradicating ethnic and national rivalries in the Soviet Union and its satellites, Communist rule actually aggravated them, scholars say.

“The national conflicts of the 19th Century never got solved; they were merely redefined,” said Ivo Banac, another Yale historian. “Some regimes actually tried to establish legitimacy for themselves by inflaming national hostility.”

In the United States and Western Europe, most ethnic groups are gradually being absorbed into urban “melting pot” cultures where families are mobile and old clan ties are weak.

But in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, village life remains strong, and citizens are more conscious of their regional ties. Especially in multinational federations such as the Soviet Union, which has more than 100 recognized nationalities, and Yugoslavia, which has five, a family’s primary allegiances are often to a clan, an ethnic group or a religious sect.

“These aren’t just conflicts over pieces of the pie,” said Banac in a recent interview. “These ideologies are old. They are deeply embedded in the conscious and subconscious ways of thinking of vast numbers of people.”

“These are very history-conscious societies, something that is difficult to grasp in the United States,” he added. “Some of these conflicts are 400 years old, but they were ideologized in the 19th Century, and they have become national points of reference. The only similar phenomenon in American history is the South, where the experience of the Civil War remained an important reality for generations.”

In the southern Soviet Union, for example, Christian Armenians have struggled for centuries to maintain an independent territory between their Muslim neighbors--Turkey to the west and the Turkic Azerbaijanis to the east. Since 1920, when the Soviet army cemented Moscow’s rule in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, the two communities have lived in relative harmony, but the conflict erupted again two years ago.

The immediate reason was a series of disputes over territory. An Armenian minority lived in Azerbaijan, particularly in the region known as Nagorno-Karabakh; likewise, Azerbaijanis lived in villages throughout Armenia.

As tensions mounted over the last two years, many of these Azerbaijanis returned to their homeland to find Armenians living comfortably, while they themselves could find no good housing. Among the rioters who drove Armenians out of their homes in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, some were reportedly refugees whose main aim was to seize better housing.

But the causes also run deeper. They suggest that the Azerbaijani insurrection, which has turned into a full-scale rebellion against Moscow, may have been only the first of many regional uprisings.

“The revival of nationalism has occurred at the same time as the central government in Moscow is perceived as weaker,” noted Alex Alexiev of the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica. “As the universalist Marxist ideology the Soviets tried to practice has clearly shown its impotence, people go back to the tried and true--nationalism and religion. That’s true in Muslim and Christian areas alike.”

Ironically, in Azerbaijan and Central Asia, 70 years of Soviet rule appear to have helped create a nationalist problem that didn’t exist before.

“Before the advent of Russian rule, the term Azerbaijan was rarely used; people defined themselves as Turks or Tatars or Persians,” said Tadeusz Swietochowski of Monmouth College. “It was only under Russian and Soviet rule that they acquired a distinct Azerbaijani nationality.”

“The Soviets tried to split the Muslim community along national lines,” he explained. “They said, ‘You’re not a Muslim; you’re a Kazakh or a Tadzhik or a Tatar.’ It was the old principle of divide and rule. But now their chickens are coming home to roost.”

The Soviet Union’s western borderlands may also be fertile ground for interethnic disputes. Accompanying the highly visible drives toward independence by the three Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are growing tensions between those republics’ native people and ethnic Russian immigrants, who make up 30% of Latvia’s population.

In Russia itself, ethnic nationalism is visibly on the rise, principally in the form of increasing anti-Semitism.

“What is most alarming is that this movement has received support from conservative elements in the Communist Party,” Alexiev noted.

And in Eastern Europe, 40 years of Communist rule left dozens of ethnic tensions unresolved. Only two of the countries in the area, Poland and Hungary, are ethnically homogenous.

At the moment, a senior U.S. official said, the prospect of ethnic or even cross-border violence in Eastern Europe does not pose a significant threat to the stability of the rest of the continent.

“It’s essentially a Soviet issue,” he said.

Nevertheless, it is one more major problem to countries that are already struggling as they seek to establish democratic structures and to revive their moribund economies.

Czechoslovakia is split between the prosperous Czechs and the less wealthy, less numerous Slovaks. The two groups remained at arm’s length even in the midst of the country’s “velvet revolution” at the end of last year, with Slovak revolutionaries running their own, separate organization.

Romania has a large population of ethnic Hungarians; the December revolution against dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was touched off in part by ethnic Hungarians who protested discriminatory treatment from Bucharest. The revolution appears to have quelled any conflict between the two groups--and focused attention, instead, on the demands of ethnic Romanians in the neighboring Soviet republic of Moldavia for union with Romania.

Bulgaria has significant minorities of ethnic Turks and Macedonians, and the Communist government of former dictator Todor Zhivkov tried to establish nationalist credentials by persecuting the Turks. The new reformist government invited Bulgarian Turks who had fled the country to return, only to be confronted with nationalist demonstrations protesting the move toward tolerance.

The problems of ethnic conflict may be worst of all in Yugoslavia, which was once the pioneer of reform in the region. Delegates from the Communist Party in Slovenia, the country’s northernmost and most prosperous republic, walked out of the national party’s congress last week, raising the prospect of secession.

In Kosovo, a southern province whose population is ethnically Albanian, workers staged a general strike Friday to demand more independence, and there was continued violence in the province Saturday.

“Yugoslavia is disintegrating before our eyes,” Banac said. “And, along with it, the idea that you could simply create something called Yugoslav nationalism. The one thing we’ve learned is that Utopian schemes to create super-nationalisms--Soviet nationalism, Yugoslav nationalism--are doomed to failure. You cannot use a magic wand to turn groups into something that they aren’t. This is a reality that is going to stay.”

ETHNIC DIVISIONS IN EASTERN EUROPE

DIVISIONS AND TENSIONS that had been suppressed for decades by Stalinist regimes are re-emerging in Eastern Europe. Significant ethnic minorities in Bulgaria and Romania have already begun using new-found freedoms to press their human rights and autonomy demands, sometimes against passionate opposition from majority groups. In polyglot Yugoslavia, often violent ethnic tensions threaten to tear the country apart.

Shown below are the proportions of ethnic backgrounds in each country, and for those with large minorities. East Germany German: 99.7% Slavic and other: 0.3% Hungary Hungarian: 96.6% German: 1.6% Slovak: 1.1% Southern Slav and Romanian: 0.5% Yugoslavia Serb: 36.3% Croat: 19.7% Muslim: 8.9% Slovene: 7.8% Albanian: 7.7% Macedonian: 5.9% Yugoslav: 5.4% Other: 3.9% Hungarian: 1.9% Montenegrin: 2.5% Albania Albanian: 96.0% Greek, Vlach, Gypsy, Serbs and Bulgarian: 4.0% Bulgaria Bulgarian: 85.3% Turk: 8.5% Gypsy: 2.6% Macdonian: 2.5% Armenian, Russian and other: 1.1% Poland Polish: 98.7% Slavic and other: 1.3% Czechoslovakia Czech.: 64.3% Slovak: 30.5% Hungarian: 3.8% German, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, Gypsy: 1.4% Romania Romanian: 89.1% Hungarian: 7.8% German: 1.5% Ukrainian, Serb, Croat, Russian, Turk and Gypsy: 1.6% Ethnic Composition of Soviet Republics Each of the constituent republics is named for the predomiant ethnic group. Charts show the size of the majority (white), proportion of ethnic Russians (black) and other significant minorities (shaded). 1. Ukraine Majority: 73% Russian: 21% Jewish: 1% Other: 5% 2. Belorussia Majority: 80% Russian: 12% Polish: 4% Other: 4% 3.Estonia Majority: 66% Russian: 28% Ukrainian: 3% Other: 4% 4.Latvia Majority: 49% Russian: 38% Belorussian: 5% Other: 8% 5.Lithuania Majority: 80% Russian: 9% Polish: 8% Other: 3% 6. Russian Rep. Majority: 84% Ukrainian: 4% Other: 12% 7. Moldavia Majority: 64% Russian: 13% Ukrainian: 14% Other: 9% 8. Georgia Majority: 69% Russian: 8% Armenian: 9% Other: 14% 9. Turkmenistan Majority: 69% Russian: 13% Uzbek: 9% Other: 9% 10 Azerbaijan Majority: 78% Russian: 8% Armenian: 8% Other: 6% 11 Uzbekistan Majority: 69% Russian: 11% Tajiks: 4% Other: 16% 12 Kazakhstan Majority: 40% Russian: 40% Ukrainian: 6% Other: 14% 13 Tajikistan Majority: 58% Russian: 11% Uzbek: 23% Other: 7% 14 Armenia Majority: 90% Russian: 3% Azerbaijanis: 6% Other: 1% 15 Kirgizia Majority: 48% Russian: 26% Uzbek: 12% Other: 14% Note: numbers may not equal one hundred due to rounding Source: The Central Intelligence Agency