Ethnic Conflict in the Post-Cold-War Era

At the turn of the last century, there was widespread expectation that the millennium would be completed in an era of peace. Instead, the twentieth century turned out to be the most violent century in history. As described by Stjepan Mestrovic, “This has been a century saturated in the blood of victims who were sacrificed for the sake of lofty, rational goals espoused by both sides of the political spectrum, from Nazism to Communism and so-called Democracy. From the Final Solution to the Gulag to Hiroshima to the Gulf War, and now the cruel war in former Yugoslavia—how long can social scientists pretend that humanity is becoming less barbaric?” (Mestrovic).

Similarly, it was widely expected that the fall of Communism and the end of the cold war would lead to an unprecedented period of peace and tranquility. This expectation, too, has been disillusioned. The end of the cold war has led not to peace but to an increase in terrorism and ethnic, racial, and nationalistic violence. According to Stephen Cohen, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “The breakup of multi-ethnic states, not the demise of communism, may be this generation's most profound event” (Cohen). Some have said that the twentieth century began and ended with Sarejevo.

To some extent one might have expected this. The widespread hopes that the end of World War II would lead to movement in the direction of a stronger world government, a federation of nations modeled after the United States, were unfulfilled. Woodrow Wilson's post World War I reliance on the concept of national self-determination did not work out any better after the Second World War. The concept of national self- determination was flawed because it never made it possible to determine how large or small a group or territory would be a nation entitled to self-determination. Wars like that in Northern Ireland fo