Regional Outlook / Eastern Europe : A Time to Build, a Time to Destroy : Ethnic war is cruelly laying waste to what was Yugoslavia. Some fear that such nationalist hatreds will spread.

Piles of bricks, broken glass, bombed-out cars and mangled swing sets mark this city where 50,000 Yugoslavs previously savored the rare fruit of prosperity in Eastern Europe.

Now a monument to ethnic hatred, the ruins of Vukovar beg the question, “Why?”

Once a flourishing bedroom community for light-industry workers, Vukovar represented the rewards and comforts most of Eastern Europe’s struggling workers could only dream of.

But Serbian and Croatian nationalism, in its most virulent and violent form, shattered the success story and the ideal of ethnic diversity for which the Yugoslav federation stood. The battle for Vukovar inflicted the most concentrated suffering and damage of the 19-month-old Balkan war, leaving at least 3,000 dead and every one of its citizens homeless.

As nationalist tensions and ethnic conflicts take root throughout the former Communist region, another disturbing question rises from Vukovar’s rubble: Is this the future of the rest of Eastern Europe?

So far, Yugoslavia alone has regressed to the most destructive phase of nationalism. But early stages of the virus can be found throughout Eastern Europe, raising fears that Yugoslav-like conflicts could emerge elsewhere, diverting millions more people from the path of rebuilding what communism destroyed.

“The basic problem in Eastern European society is that the ethnic groups are so mixed,” said Ferenc Glatz, dean of Budapest’s Institute of History whose academic focus has been inter-ethnic relations. “The Central European region is probably the most ethnically diverse in the world, and none of history’s recipes seem appropriate to resolving this region’s problems.”

Glatz believes the regionwide resurgence of nationalist feeling boils down to primitive envy.

“Whenever the economic situation deteriorates, there is a corresponding rise in nationalist sentiment,” said Glatz, pointing to the appeal of Nazism in impoverished Germany in the 1930s. “Communism made everybody poor and tremendously envious. Nowhere in the world can you find so many envious people as in this region.”

Contrasting the plight of the working class with the good fortune of erstwhile enemies has been the springboard to success for the region’s nationalist zealots.

Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic stoked up dormant resentments in ethnically mixed areas by convincing the Serbian minorities that among affluent Slovenes and Croats, they had been deliberately repressed.

Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar made the case for Slovak independence to his compatriots by claiming that the republic had been “colonized” by the more prosperous Czechs.

Even in Hungary, long regarded as an island of social stability, right-wing demagogue Istvan Csurka has amassed a considerable following with claims that Jews and liberals of the former Communist elite continue to enrich themselves at Hungarians’ expense.

Because he is a top official of Hungary’s ruling party, Csurka’s appeals for restoration of Hungarian territory lost after World War I have blighted relations with neighboring countries, as well as Budapest’s international image.

“We have to create a new Europe with new borders and renegotiate the peace treaties” that stripped Hungary of 60% of its territory, Csurka said in an interview.

Despite the political uproar that has ensued since publication of an August essay replete with anti-Semitic overtones, Csurka insists he speaks for many Hungarians and has no regrets about anything he has said, including his use of the Nazi term lebensraum-- living space--in his call for expanding the borders.

“It is impossible to think about getting rid of words just because the Nazis used them,” said the portly member of Parliament and vice chairman of the Hungarian Democratic Forum. “Naturally, not everyone in the party agrees with what I have said, but I feel the majority is with me.”

Like the Austrian populist Joerg Haider, who has hit a national nerve with warnings of disaster from an influx of foreigners, Csurka has sought to make Hungarians wary of other peoples and resentful of richer nations.

“The West is guilty for leaving the Balkan war to fester and ignoring its refugees. Now there is a big question about what will happen in the former Soviet Union,” Csurka said. “If they start migrating out of there, Hungary will be ruined. We cannot provide for millions more people.”

Economic migration from the Balkans into the slightly wealthier countries of Central Europe has already strained relations among the region’s ethnic groups. Gypsies, Romanians, Bulgarians and Albanians have flooded north through open borders, crowding charity camps and train stations and putting a strain on scarce resources.

Budapest officials have provoked accusations of nationalism from neighboring countries with their claims that ethnic Hungarians are repressed in Slovakia, Serbia and Romania, particularly regarding use of the complex Hungarian language in place of each country’s mother tongue.

Some historians and sociologists see language as the key source of ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe, pointing out that tensions are greatly strained where unlike languages fight for priority. The theory holds true for the volatile regions where Hungarians and Albanians live among Slavs. But it seems to have little application to the most severe of the region’s conflicts--the Yugoslav battles among peoples with a common tongue.

Nationalists among the Romanian majority in the troubled region of Transylvania argue that the only solution to ethnic problems in mixed areas is for the minorities to assimilate.

“The language of this country is Romanian. All citizens should learn it and know it,” Cluj Mayor Gheorghe Funar asserted in an interview. “It would be ridiculous to have street signs in 16 different languages, which is how many minorities we have. And why should we do something only for one minority?”

Such hard-line positions have made minorities fearful of losing their ethnic identity.

They have also poisoned relations with neighbors, undermining the chances for cooperative efforts to escape the regionwide poverty that communism bequeathed.

“Most Hungarians living in Romania or Slovakia recognize that it is useful to speak those languages. It is not good to compel them to do so, even with indirect pressure,” said Gabor Ivanyi, a Methodist minister and human rights activist. “Assimilation has been working for some time. I don’t think anyone should force it. If people used their brains, many of these problems would be solved naturally.”

While nationalism was the midwife of Slovakia’s newfound independence, it has proven something of a different breed.

“The breakup of Czechoslovakia didn’t come from a wave of (Slovak) nationalism, but was the result of tactics used by politicians to stay in power,” said Iveta Radicova, a sociologist at the Institute for Central European Studies at Bratislava’s Comenius University.

Support for the Jan. 1 separation was weak in both republics. The split resulted more from a battle between Meciar and his Czech counterpart, Vaclav Klaus, than from acrimony between the peoples.

Still, in the wake of independence, ominous signs have appeared.

Meciar’s government last month declared that bilingual street signs in the new state’s predominantly Hungarian areas would no longer be permitted.

Slovak-Hungarian relations were already strained by Bratislava’s controversial diversion of the Danube River to supply a power station at Gabcikovo, and observers warn that ethnic tensions will continue to rise as officials tackle conversion of outmoded industries and what to do about unemployment that is already at 10% to 12%.

Slovakia’s 560,000 ethnic Hungarians “are afraid they will be used as a scapegoat for the economic disaster that they are certain will come,” said Ivo Samson, a foreign policy specialist at the National Academy of Sciences in Bratislava.

In Prague, former Czech Prime Minister Petr Pithart observed with concern that for the first time since the Holy Roman Empire, Czechs no longer live in a multinational state.

“We speak with disdain of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Yugoslavia, but we have become ethnically clean,” Pithart said. “In the last 50 years, we have lost Jews, Slovenians, Germans and now the Slovaks. I’m afraid this can lead to a renewal of Czech nationalism, which I believe is not gone but only dormant.”

In Poland, nationalism seems to be drowned out in the chaos of a political scene that counts 168 political parties and 29 factions in Parliament. Ethnic tensions have advanced little beyond isolated skirmishes with German, Lithuanian and Belarussian minorities, or the occasional proud Pole who shows a visitor a sword used to kill Russians in the 1920 Russo-Polish war. The leading Polish nationalist, Boleslaw Tejkowski, is described as an anti-Semite protected by a band of skinheads but with little genuine following.

“He has a party but few adherents, no activists and no parliamentary representation,” said Polish research analyst Anna Sabbat-Swidlicka at Munich’s Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty headquarters. “His significance is more as a rallying point for dissatisfied louts.”

Much of the dissatisfaction feeding nationalist tendencies in Eastern Europeans will disappear once living conditions improve, economists and sociologists contend.

But the hoped-for turnaround has proven elusive. In fact, most Eastern Europeans have suffered an erosion of their standard of living over the past three years.

For some, recovery is expected to be further delayed by the diversions of war in Yugoslavia and rising ethnic tensions in Transylvania and Slovakia, propelling a cycle of ethnic unrest that undermines the economy and spawns further unrest.

“As a liberal, I condemn their bloody nationalism. It is wrong,” Yugoslav Finance Minister Ljubomir Madzar said of those waging a war that has set the regional economy back at least 25 years.

“But I also condemn them as a fellow Serb, because they are ruining our nation,” he added. “The ultimate result will be that we as Serbs will have far less than if we had addressed our problems in a reasonable and civilized way.”