Special Report: Seeking a New World : 3. Pledging Allegiance to Ethnicity: Can the Nation-State Survive? : Now that the lid of the Cold War is off, many artificial ‘melting pots’ are boiling over.

It was a peaceable revolt. On a sultry Balkan summer day last July, 114 members of the provincial Parliament of Kosovo, enough to constitute a quorum, assembled in front of their offices in this shabby capital. Discovering they had been locked out of the building by higher-ranking authorities, the motley collection of farmers, peasants and local businessmen decided to vote in the open air.

The ballot was unanimous: Tiny Kosovo, a land-locked and desperately poor province in the southeast corner of Yugoslavia, declared its independence.

It was a case of one fragment breaking away from another fragment. Kosovo, with a population that is 90% ethnic Albanian, was rejecting domination by ethnic Serbs. They in turn are struggling against Yugoslavia’s other major ethnic groups, the Croats and Slovenes. The divisions run so deep they could bring on civil war, but for members of Kosovo’s Parliament, the overriding issue was not national unity but freedom to express their Albanian identity.

“The Albanians, being a small people, want to preserve the traditions they have,” declared Ibrahim Rugova, a wiry, intense literary critic and leader of Kosovo’s Democratic Alliance.

At one level, Kosovo’s action simply reflects the increasingly dangerous conflicts among rival nationalities in a Balkan state that did not even exist until 1918, when it was fashioned from the rubble of World War I by the victorious Allies.

At a deeper level, however, the vote in Pristina reflects powerful forces that are tearing at governmental institutions all around the world--forces that may redraw the map of nations, usher in decades of new instability and pose difficult and unfamiliar challenges to even the strongest powers.

From China to Czechoslovakia, from South Africa to the Soviet Union, political movements centered around ethnicity, national identity and religion are re-emerging to contest some of the most fundamental premises of modern statehood. In the process, they are reintroducing ancient sources of conflict so deeply submerged by the Cold War that they seemed almost to have vanished from history’s equation.

Ten years ago, for example, Czechoslovakia was gripped by a struggle between liberal reformers and one of the most rigidly Stalinist governments in the Communist world. Today, the liberal reformers control Hradcany Castle, but ethnic tensions may split the country into two separate nations--and the reformers themselves are divided over what to do.

“The thought that ethnicities and nationalisms and all the other primordial loyalties would disappear as a result of modernization was premature,” said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a sociologist at the American University of Cairo, in assessing the post-Cold War era. “That was probably one of the big lessons of the 20th Century: Ideology is no substitute for interest or for geography. That’s what we are rediscovering.”

And the implications of this resurgence of national, ethnic and religious passions are profound:

* A host of modern nation-states are beginning to crumble because the concept of the “melting pot,” the idea that diverse and even historically hostile peoples could readily be assimilated under larger political umbrellas in the name of modernization and progress, has failed them.

Even in the strongest nations, including the United States, the task of such assimilation has proved difficult and the prognosis is for even greater tension in the decades ahead.

* Turmoil in the Soviet Union and parts of China threaten to blow apart the last remnants of an imperial age that began more than 500 years ago. The turbulent dismantling of 19th Century European empires after World War II may be matched by new waves of disintegration within the Soviet and Chinese Communist empires, with incalculable consequences for the United States and other world powers.

Stretching from the Gulf of Finland to the mountains of Tibet and beyond, the sheer scale of the potential instability would tax the world’s capacity to respond. Ethnic unrest could spill into neighboring countries, old border disputes could reignite and, if the central governments tried to impose order with force, civil wars could erupt within two of the world’s largest nuclear powers.

* Around the globe, fundamentalist religious movements have entered the political arena in a direct challenge to one of the basic principles of the modern age: that governments and other civic institutions should be predominantly secular and religion confined to the private lives of individuals and groups.

Since the end of the Middle Ages, when religion dominated not only government but every other aspect of society, the pervasive trend in the past 500 years has been to separate church and state. Now, in many parts of the world, powerful movements are insisting on a return to God-centered government.

One consequence of this trend is to make dealings between states and groups more rigid and volatile: As the United States has learned with the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Iranian revolution, disputes are far harder to manage when governments root their positions in religious principle.

For the major powers, what all this is likely to mean is decades of the most demanding kinds of foreign policy challenges. After years of being able to deal with many problems in simple East-West terms, policy-makers must now struggle to understand a profusion of diverse but inter-connected peoples and issues, decide which are important and which can be ignored, then devise effective strategies for responding.

And the challenge may be particularly difficult for the United States because, especially in such areas as religion and ethnic identity, Washington will be forced more and more to cope with problems that Americans have traditionally regarded as personal matters lying outside the realm of politics or foreign policy.

ETHNIC CONFLICTS REBORN

There is no official demarcation line between Kosovo, one of Yugoslavia’s two autonomous provinces, and Serbia, one of its six constituent republics. But the gulf separating them is evident all over Kosovo. Big red banners emblazoned with a black double-headed eagle, the Albanian flag, hang from the windows of shops and apartment blocks. Tall white minarets rise above rustic dwellings in what is now a Muslim stronghold.

Here and there, anti-tank obstacles in the shape of small cement pyramids have been lined up beside the rough pavement in readiness for possible conflict. As cars pass, three children under the age of seven flash their fingers in a V, Kosovo’s symbol for independence.

But the feeling runs both ways. The day after Kosovo’s Parliament declared it a separate republic, it was suspended by the Serbian government--which has administrative authority over the police and other official institutions in Kosovo despite its nominal autonomy. Although they now account for only about 10% of its population, Serbs regard Kosovo as “the cradle of the Serbian nation.” They are determined not to lose their historical heartland.

The roots of the conflict go back centuries. Orthodox monasteries dot Kosovo’s craggy mountainsides, mute testimony to a time when the region was unquestionably Serbian. The Battle of Kosovo in 1389 still haunts the Serbian memory: The Ottoman Empire vanquished Serbia’s armies and imposed a dominion that lasted for 500 years.

When modern-day Yugoslavia was carved out of the remains of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, Serbia regained control of Kosovo, only to begin losing it again to a demographic tide of ethnic Albanians.

The conflict between Serbs and ethnic Albanians is one of several divisions troubling Yugoslavia. Predominantly Catholic Croatia and Slovenia now demand autonomy. And the old quarrels are kept alive by present-day slights and discrimination.

On a recent trip to Slovenia from Serbia, Predag Simic, director of the Institute of International Politics and Economics in Belgrade, was stopped by Slovene police six times in two days because his car had Serbian license plates. At local businesses, his checks on a Belgrade bank were not accepted.

“The problem really reaches very deep,” sighed Franjo Tudjman, the burly president of the Croatian republic, who was twice imprisoned during the Communist era. During an election campaign stop in a Serbian stronghold inside his own republic last spring, someone tried to shoot him.

Such things should not be surprising. The Treaty of Versailles bundled together five nationalities, four languages, three religions and two alphabets to create the Adriatic nation.

“Having Yugoslavia was wrong to begin with,” mused Veton Surroi, a young writer and president of the Yugoslav Democratic Initiative in Pristina. “It was an unnatural country.”

And, while Yugoslavia is sometimes dismissed as unique, the kinds of national and ethnic currents pulling it apart are battering many countries around the world. Of all the “isms” of the 20th Century--or, indeed, the 18th and 19th centuries--nationalism is among the most enduring.

“The idea of the melting pot and assimilation was part of the American imagination,” said Firuz Kazemzadeh, a Yale historian. “It worked to some extent, imperfectly, in the United States. But it did not work in other parts of the world where assimilation was usually imposed by forces which were not acceptable to the masses of the people.”

In Eastern Europe, the unhappy marriage between Czechs and Slovaks threatens to break up; Bulgaria’s Turkish population, long suppressed so ruthlessly that parents were forbidden to give their children Turkish names, is demanding freedom; and in Romania, ethnic nationalists clash with the Hungarian minority in hand-to-hand combat.

In Africa, tribal hatreds that produced decades of slaughter continue unabated.

In parts of South America, Indian and Mestizo and European-stock populations inhabit the same countries but live in different worlds with little hope of unity. Although Peru has been independent from Spain since 1824, “We are still not a nation,” lamented Luis Bustamante, a Peruvian lawyer and politician. “Most Latin American countries are not yet nations.”

Across Central Asia, vast areas of the Soviet Union and China are torn by ethnic conflict. More than 1,000 people have already died in fighting among Kirghiz, Uzbek, Meshketian and other groups.

In European Russia, Lithuanians, Latvians, Georgians and other national groups are asserting their independence as well. And if such tensions lead to the breakup of the Soviet empire, and parts of China as well, the result would be instability over a vast portion of the globe, with the possibility of many conflicts spilling beyond national borders.

Even the West is plagued by both nationality and ethnic conflicts. In Canada, French Quebec threatened to secede if it was not given special status, while Mohawk and Cree Indians and Eskimos have confronted the government over millennia-old claims to ancestral lands.

In Belgium, after 600 years, only an uneasy truce curbs the hostility between Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons. The split has divided the country with such surgical precision that the ancient University of Louvain even divided the books in its library equally between two new, and separate, universities, a Flemish University of Louvain and a French Universite Leuven.

France itself, where one of the world’s most dominating cultures has absorbed centuries of newcomers by transforming them into Frenchmen, now struggles to digest new waves of Arab immigrants.

Especially in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and other areas subjected to colonialism, national boundaries often reflect decisions imposed from outside. The modern map of Africa was drawn by Europeans under the guidance of Belgium’s King Leopold at the 1884 Conference of Berlin, for example, with total disregard to tribal lands and divisions.

In the Middle East, much of the Arab world was divided into new nation-states by France and Britain in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, with limited recognition of sectarian, communal or religious divisions. The same is true for much of Latin America.

“Not many nations around the world can claim to be genuine nations,” asserted Luis Bernardo Honwana, Mozambique’s minister of culture and noted African writer.

“We not only have historically different national individualities,” explained Croatia’s President Tudjman. “We also have nations who belong to completely different civilizational and cultural spheres. Serbs belong to the Eastern Byzantine civilization. Croats and Slovenes belong to the Western Catholic civilization.

“It’s not by chance that this is the line where the Roman Empire split. Christianity split in the same place into Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic.”

Why do people attach such profound importance to ethnic traditions seemingly so remote from the modern world?

“What we are facing is the reaction of these groups against oblivion,” Mozambique’s Honwana believes. “In order to be part of an ensemble, of a group, one had to give up something, probably much more than one was prepared to give up. And one had to absorb some foreign, some strange values.

“Now we’re trying to make sure that we are not destroyed as a cultural entity,” he said. “Simply, unity cannot be built at the cost of the existence of some of the elements which are going to be part of this unity.”

“Mankind has known itself for 8,000 years, in terms of written history,” reflected Tudjman. “During all that time, there have been great universalist ideas, civilizational, cosmopolitan efforts to create a unified world--Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, even Communist.

“But all of that is disappearing and what remains is man and his ethnic national community. It still exists today when the world is turning into a global village. And still the smallest national individualities claim a place in that world.”

“There is a great task ahead to clarify what exactly a nation is, what its role is in modern liberal civilization, whether it has, in fact, meaning,” said Daniel Kroupa, a political philosopher and member of Czechoslovakia’s new Parliament.

At the same time that many states and societies are fragmenting over religion, ethnicity and national culture, their people nourish hopes of achieving economic progress by allying themselves with one or another of the new trade blocs now taking shape. Yet in many cases such dreams may be difficult to realize. Civil strife and dogmatic politics hold little enticement for foreign investors; bankers lend money to people whose first priority is money.

But the future well-being of millions of people appears to depend on whether ways can be found to reconcile the potentially conflicting impulses toward political separatism and economic integration.

As such tiny but thriving entities as Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore attest, large size is not a prerequisite for economic growth and prosperity. In the abstract, there may be no reason why Serbs, Croats, Czechs, Slovaks, Quebecois and English Canadians could not go their separate ways in peace and plenty.

Clearly, that is what many national and ethnic groups expect. “The next stage, they are liberated, they feel free. They will be able to make their choice,” said Helmut Wagner, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin.

“They will long for, they will pray for becoming part of a bigger union which they can accept freely and which gives them their autonomy in special areas, especially in language, culture and their own ways,” he said. “This is as strong as the disintegration effort, to become a member of a bigger union.”

Again, Yugoslavia illustrates the hope. Even as the country hurtles toward disintegration, Croatia and Slovenia have opened independent offices in Brussels, seat of the European Community. “I would certainly prefer that the capital of Croatia be Brussels and not Belgrade,” which lies in the Serbian republic, declared Dr. Zvonko Letrovic, a political science professor and member of the Croatian Social-Liberal Alliance.

For many of the nations now torn by internal strife, however, qualifying for admission to something like the European Community may not be easy. Some of the fragments that result from the disintegration of existing states may have little to offer the large economic blocs or the global economy as a whole.

Equally hazardous, their focus on issues of religion and national and ethnic identity--as well as the potential for continued strife, since hostile minorities are likely to remain inside most of them--may itself be an impediment to the outside investment that is indispensable for economic growth.

And West Germany’s Wagner pinpointed the probable cost if successful liaisons are not made: “If you don’t do that, you have to pay a price and the price is economic misery.”

Where such obstacles are overcome, analysts predict, the traditional nation-state may be replaced by new, still-undeveloped forms.

“We have to find and create something new . . . structures as open as possible and as cooperative as possible,” said Goertmaker, the German historian.

“We see localization, villagization of the globe. But you also see an internationalization of the globe. The two trends are emerging side by side,” said Ibrahim, the Egyptian sociologist. “The challenge for everybody is how to reconcile these two trends--not stop either one, because they are nonstoppable.”

“How could I assert my local identity in food, in lifestyle, in dress, in feelings and so on and yet not be isolated or insulated or enclaved or marginalized or forgotten? That is the challenge now, and it will continue to be the challenge in the first two or three decades of the 21st Century.”

TALES FROM THE TEMPLES

Blowing rams horns, the band from the Temple Mount Faithful set out Oct. 8 on a symbolic march. A court order barred the 300 Israelis from bringing a three-ton cornerstone for a new Jewish temple anywhere near Jerusalem’s most sacred square--the site of two successive biblical-era Jewish temples, but, for the last 13 centuries, the preserve of two of Islam’s holiest shrines. The Faithful, however, were determined to show that “the Temple Mount will not be silent until it is again the religious and national center of our people.”

Within hours, the ancient city witnessed its worst violence since the 1967 war: 20 Palestinians killed and hundreds of Arabs and Israelis injured.

Twenty-two days later, the tragedy was repeated in India.

In Ayodhya, a holy city in the great basin of the sacred Ganges river, Hindus massed to build a temple at the birthplace of the god Rama. Villagers countrywide had baked bricks inscribed with the Lord Rama’s name for a ceremony astrologers ordained most auspicious between 9:44 a.m. and 11:48 a.m. on Oct. 30.

For four centuries, however, the site has been occupied by a mosque. It is considered no less sacred by Muslims than by the Hindus.

As in Israel, the government tried to preempt trouble. The ceremony was banned, a curfew imposed and 90,000 Hindus detained. Police surrounded the simple mosque. But, by day’s end, the march had been attempted anyway and 20 were dead, hundreds wounded in violence that swept six Indian states.

The tale of two temples reflects one of the most striking trends at the end of the 20th Century: In the world’s most secular age, religion has emerged as a major political force. Vigorous and successful religion-based political movements are challenging the political status quo worldwide.

“With few exceptions, not since before the Age of Enlightenment has religion been so globally vital, energetic and ambitious,” said Ehud Sprinzak, a political scientist at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.

But politicized religions have less to do with changes among major faiths than with the contemporary political and cultural environment.

The common denominator among disparate movements with diverse flash points, tactics and goals is a reaction against--even a rejection of--some of the most basic characteristics of the modern world. For millions of people in different parts of the world, the search for identity, security and fulfillment remains unquenched by the logic of the Age of Reason, by the universal rights promised by the Enlightenment or by the material progress of the scientific era.

“It’s not a theological revolution, not that suddenly some philosopher came and demonstrated the existence of God that wasn’t available before,” said Rabbi David Hartman, a philosopher and director of Israel’s Hartman Institute. Rather, he and other scholars suggested, it is a reaction against the predominantly secular quality of modern politics and public culture.

It is also a reaction to the tendency of traditional values to be swept aside in periods of rapid change.

“The worldwide upsurge in religion owes less to renewed piety than to the fact that religious institutions offer a familiar and psychologically comfortable alternative to the status quo elites and their politics,” said the Peace Institute’s Norton.

Three prominent voices from three prominent religions echoed similar themes:

Said Rachid Ghannouchi, a philosopher and founder of Tunisia’s Islamic Tendency Movement: “Western thought is based on the principle that society can build a civilization without God. The slogans of development and nationalism and science were represented as substitutes for God. But this new God did not give happiness or stability to people. Science acknowledges that the human is so high and so wide, but it does not take into account man’s depth.”

Similarly, Eliyakum Haetzni, a member of Israel’s Knesset and a West Bank settler, reflected: “After we try to shed in this century all those things which have nothing to do with pure reasons, we found that pure reasons are something very sad, very empty.”

Added Gustavo Gutierrez, the founder of Catholicism’s Liberation Theology: “Modernity was born with the affirmation of the individual as the beginning, as the basis of the social contract. But a mentality which has the individual as the absolute principle” does not fulfill the basic human needto believe that life is something more than just a process of survival.

Virtually all modern ideologies have divorced faith from government. Communism erased religion. Democracy privatized it. Even Zionism originally separated synagogue from state.

Ideologies in countries with strong, single religious traditions--Peronism in Catholic Argentina and Kamalism in Islamic Turkey--either ignored or gave lip service to those traditions. Even apartheid, justified by South Africa’s white Calvinist leaders with Old Testament quotations, is secular.

And for substantial numbers of people, in varying degrees, each has failed.

“The promises of modernity in its various forms--whether an industrial consumer society or a classless society--don’t seem to have worked out,” said Harvey Cox, a Harvard theologian.

“There are all these terrible features all over, from atomic war to new diseases like AIDS to the fact that people in New York are sleeping, in the richest city in the world, on the streets,” said Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s legendary mayor. “The normal liberal attitude has not provided the answer.”

As a result of disillusionment or malaise, Hebrew University’s Sprinzak added, “More people today are leaving ideology on the road to theology in search of political solutions to the miseries of our times.”

In some cases, religion is a refuge of last resort; in countries where opposition is outlawed, the church, mosque, synogogue or temple provides an alternative to mobilize dissent.

When most of South Africa’s black leaders were exiled or imprisoned, Desmond Tutu, now the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, led the anti-apartheid campaign; he won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize. Buddhist monks have spearheaded opposition to Chinese Communist control of Tibet; the Dalai Lama won the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize.

In East Berlin, the Lutheran Gethsemane Church was the command center for public vigils and the pro-democracy movement before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“The (opposition) movement came out from the churches. I think it is quite impossible that (the revolution) would happen without the church,” said Konrad Vekel, a member of New Forum during an interview after Sunday services at the 19th-Century church.

In other cases, religion is an anchor at a time of turmoil.

“Modernity is like a violent tornado. When there’s a tornado, what do people do? They go to the basement and cling to pillars,” said Max Hernandez, a Peruvian psychiatrist and historian.

“It’s the same with the current political transition. As the tornado sweeps through, people go to the basements of their soul and cling to the pillars--things that have survived other political tornadoes, things like religion and ethnic roots.”

And in many corners of the globe, religion is not just challenging an existing order: It is defining the political spectrum where no clear consensus has existed.

“In those countries in which the national struggle has not yet been completed, religion--in the form of religious parties, extremist movements and religious leaders--is going to be a major participant,” said Sprinzak.

But politicized religions add complex new dimensions to the political spectrum, as the 1979 Iranian revolution demonstrated.

Islam has since become a powerful player throughout the Middle East, testing all forms of government, often by violence but sometimes by democratic means. The Islamic Salvation Front swept the first multi-party elections in socialist Algeria’s independent history in June. In the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Muslims last year won 33 of the 80 parliamentary seats in the first elections since 1967.

Nowhere, however, is the challenge to the secular identity of the state more visible--in scope or complexity--than in India, the world’s largest democracy.

This year, India was near war with Pakistan over Kashmir, where Muslims are fighting to secede. In Punjab, the death rate now averages 600 a month in violence over the Sikhs’ demand for autonomy or, among extremists, secession.

But the issue that sealed the fate of the last two governments is the hill in Ayodhya where Hindus want a temple for Lord Rama. When former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi allowed fundamentalist Hindus to lay a foundation stone for the temple last year, Muslims withdrew their support from his Congress Party. In last year’s elections, Gandhi, whose party had ruled India all but two years since independence in 1947, lost.

The same election marked the stunning rise of the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). With the temple issue as the centerpiece of its campaign in a country that is 82% Hindu, the BJP’s seats in Parliament soared from two to 86. It became the third-largest party in India and the key member in the coalition succeeding Gandhi.

“The overall growth of the party can be attributed to the people’s disillusionment that the other ideologies are not . . . able to deliver,” explained BJP leader Lal Krishan Advani, who looks more like a soft-spoken grandfather than a fanatic.

Advani claimed that the BJP is a “Hindu renaissance movement rather than a fundamentalist or revivalist movement” and that he himself only occasionally went to temple.

But he then asserted: “I am against secularism. It has become a euphemism for covering up your allergy to Hinduism. Here’s a party that does not shy away from the word Hindu.”

When police cracked down after a defiant Advani led a monthlong, 6,200-mile “chariot journey” across India to mobilize support for the new temple, Prime Minister V.P. Singh defended the action in a televised speech, saying:

“It is not a question of saving the government, but of saving the country. This is the biggest challenge we have faced since the independence of the country. Religious fanaticism is the first step toward the foundation for a theocratic state. It will be the death of India as a secular state.”

It was not an overstatement. Three groups more extreme than the BJP now advocate a Hindu Raj or Hindutva, a Hindu nation-state.

And after Advani’s arrest, the crisis exploded. Despite the ban on the temple ceremony, thousands of youths, many wearing saffron headbands signifying the Hindu faith and shouting: “Hail the Lord Rama,” broke through police barricades. Defying tear gas and rifle fire, they planted three saffron flags on the mosque’s domes.

With their leaders under arrest, militant BJP Hindus withdrew their support for the coalition. Singh’s government collapsed.

Ironically, historians seriously doubt the site really was the birthplace of Lord Rama.

“Can you prove this is the birthplace of Rama?” Advani said. “No, you can’t. No one can prove it. The issue is not whether it is the birthplace of Rama. The issue is whether it is believed to be the birthplace of Rama.

“This,” he pronounced, “is a belief.”

Religious fanaticism is hardly new. The words thug, zealot and assassin are derived from ancient extremist movements within Hinduism, Judaism and Islam. But in modern times, religious issues have rarely had such grass-roots impact on political agendas, nor such global repercussions.

In Jerusalem, what began as a religious march by 300 members of the Temple Mount Faithful resulted in two U.N. resolutions and a crisis so dramatic it threatened to shift world attention away from the Persian Gulf crisis.

And it offers a vivid example of how disputes rise to a higher plane when a religious component is added.

For the Temple Mount Faithful, the issue is not just whether a small band of Jews should be allowed entry to an area. It is instead man’s salvation. “We live now in an age which uses words like redemption and is a little ashamed to do so because it is a very logical age,” explained Gershon Solomon, the Faithful’s leader. “My struggle is not just for the physical site. We must make the Temple Mount as it was in the past, the religious, spiritual and national center of all the Israeli and Jewish people.”

Like Advani, Solomon, a white-haired scholar, said he is not a fundamentalist and only occasionally goes to synagogue. “Our movement is nationalist,” he insisted, adding in the same breath: “Our coming back to the Temple Mount is the will of God.”

But in this case, fulfilling God’s mission means replacing the two Islamic shrines where Mohammed is believed to have ascended into heaven to hear the word of God.

“Jerusalem, eventually, will only be divided on religious lines: conflict between Arabs and Jews and between Jews and Christians,” Mayor Kollek predicted. “Nationalism will fade out, and it will remain a religious conflict.”

The shifting focus has already altered the longstanding political equations within the Arab and Israeli communities. While the Temple Mount Faithful is only a fringe group, Israel’s religious parties have since 1984 gained sufficient clout to determine which of the country’s two major political parties can form a coalition.

But their support comes with demands, including bans on El Al flights on the Sabbath and movies on the Sabbath eve, as well as control of key government positions.

As with India, the secular qualities of the Israeli state are eroding.

Among Arabs, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two Islamic factions, have challenged both the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israelis since 1987.

The two Islamic parties differ deeply from the PLO on long-term goals. “The Islamic Resistance Movement considers that Palestine is inalienable Islamic land, assigned to Muslims until the end of time,” the 40-page Hamas manifesto declares.

Said Sprinzak, “Toward the end of the century, we find out that religious movements do not just want to participate in politics. They are fighting for ascendency, to take over.

“They’re not going to make it, but they will change the agenda. They’ve already changed the agenda, and they will change it more.”

Buzzwords for a New Decade

* Informals--Ad hoc institutions emerging in the world’s megacities to deal with everything from jobs and housing to commerce and social services-- de facto states-within-states, all outside the control of government.

* Lebanonization--The process by which nations are torn apart in multifaceted conflicts over such issues as religion, national identity and competition for resources.

* Nativism--The practice or policy of favoring native-born citizens as opposed to immigrants.

* Turkestan--The name given to the dream of unifying under a single, independent political umbrella the estimated 135 million Turkic-speaking Muslims in the Chinese and Soviet Central Asian republics.

A World of Conflicts Some of the countries of the world with emerging racial, ethnic, religious or other internal strife: * China * Czechoslovakia * India * Israel * Liberia * Myanmar * Pakistan * Peru * Philippines * Rwanda * South Africa * Soviet Union * Yugoslavia * Zambia Source: Los Angeles Times Nation Born of Empire’s Remains Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Empire before World War I Present-day Yugoslavia