James Hughes Gwendolyn Sasse - Ethnicity and Territory in the Former Soviet Union: Regions in Conflict

ETHNICITY AND TERRITORY IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION: REGIONS IN CONFLICT

JAMES HUGHES

and

GWENDOLYN SASSE

First published 2002

by Routledge

Published 2014 by Routledge

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Copyright 2002 Routledge

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Ethnicity and territory in the former Soviet Union :

regions in conflict. (The Routledge series in regional and federal studies)

1. Ethnicity Former Soviet republics 2. Territory, National Former Soviet republics 3. Former Soviet republics Politics and government

I. Hughes, James, 1959 II. Sasse, Gwendolyn

320. 120947

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Ethnicity and territory in the former Soviet Union : regions in conflict, /edited by James Hughes and Gwendolyn Sasse.

p. cm. (The Routledge series in regional and federal studies, ISSN 1363-5670)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Ethnic conflict Former Soviet republics. 2. Ethnic conflict Former Soviet republics Case studies. 3. Former Soviet republics Ethnic relations. 4. Post-communism Former Soviet republics. 5. Democractization Former Soviet republics. I. Hughes, James, 1959 . II,. Sasse, Gwendolyn, 1972 . III. Series.

DK33.E8364 2001

305. 800947 dc21

2001004679

ISBN 13: 978-0-714-65226-9 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-714-68210-5 (pbk)

This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue of Regional & Federal Studies

(ISSN 1359-7566), Vol.11, No.3 (Autumn 2001), published by Routledge

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

Contents

James Hughes and Gwendolyn Sasse

James Hughes

Gwendolyn Sasse

Steven D. Roper

Monica Duffy Toft

Razmik Panossian

Neil J. Melvin

Natalie Mychajlyszyn

James Hughes and Gwendolyn Sasse

For details of the role of the OSCE and the High Commissioner for National Minorities in the FSU see Walter A. Kemp, The OSCE in a New Context: European Security towards the TwentyFirst Century, London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1996.

An OSCE Assistance Group was established in Chechnya in 1995, based in Grozny. There was an OSCE presence at the Khasavyurt truce talks. OSCE personnel were evacuated to Moscow in 1998. The Assistance Group reopened in Grozny in June 2001.

JAMES HUGHES and GWENDOLYN SASSE

The rapid retreat of communism from Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s was closely chased by an upsurge of violent upheavals that are almost universally referred to as ethnic or nationalist conflicts. One of the most common observations on the conflicts that arose from the collapse of communism is that they are an echo of earlier struggles. This view is shared across the spectrum of thinkers on nationalism, from Modernists to Marxists, and to those who favour a primordialist account of the origins of nationalism. For a Modernist liberal like Ernest Gellner Soviet communism was an intervening force that defeated nationalism so long as it captured and controlled the state. In this sense, communism had been a deep freeze for nationalism, and its demise had thawed conflicts whose outcome, even within his own schema, was difficult to predict (Gellner, 1997: 86). Similarly, the Modernist Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm, argued that fear and coercion kept the USSR together and helped to prevent ethnic and communal tensions from degenerating into mutual violence. The nationalist disintegration of the USSR, according to Hobsbawm, was more a consequence of the breakdown of the regime in Moscow than a cause of it (Hobsbawm, 1990: 168). Primordialist-inspired understandings of conflicts are generally the provenance of parties to the conflict, though the crude stereotyping of ancient hatreds is often widely disseminated by policy-makers and journalists interested in the promotion of specific global or regional security frameworks.1