In the long term, most migrating minorities have found relief from persecution by assimilating, as much as possible, to the culture of their host country: for example, the core group assimilation practiced by most groups migrating from continental Europe to the United States prior to World War I. They not only embraced the language of the English who colonized the original 13 colonies but adapted to their attire, style of living, and political creed as well. Or, the Russian immigrants to France after the 1917 revolutions in Russia, who likewise chose to melt into the culture of their French hosts.

But what happens to a relatively small number of outsiders who refuse to divest themselves of their distinct culture and assimilate even after centuries, and who lack outside protectors?

The general answer to that question in the case of Central Europe's Jewish and Romany minorities is little different from that provided by our brief examination of their fate in Czechoslovakia: a centuries-long story of banishment, expulsion, discrimination, and even genocide.

Given the anti-Romany prejudice throughout for example the former Czechoslovakia, discrimination against the Roma needs no Le Pen-like public figure to catalyze it. Those involved in policy processes are well aware of anti-Roma sentiment, however, and pander to it. Unfortunately for the Romany, the international community has had little success in persuading Prague or Bratislava to be more proactive on behalf of the Roma minorities, although it has been very vocal on the matter. In August of2000, for example, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Hatred urged the Czech Republic to end the pervasive discrimination against Gypsies in housing, education, and employment and prosecute those inciting racial hatred. Similarly, EU administrators once stressed that Slovakia's treatment of its Romany would be an important factor affecting that country's application for admission to the EU. Others joining the chorus have included: the Council of Europe, which issued a report in 2000 attacking intolerance against the Roma in Slovakia; the European Parliament, which as late as October, 2000, found it necessary to pass a specific resolution calling for Slovakia to improve the status of its Roma and other minorities; the United States Congress, whose Committee monitoring compliance with the Helsinki Accords has persistently noted in its annual reports the Czech Republic's ill-treatment of the Roma; Amnesty International, whose 2001 report bemoaned the pattern of racist attacks against Roma in the Czech Republic and the failure of the courts and police to intervene; and even the World Bank, whose April 22, 2002, report noted the continuing high poverty level and welfare needs of the nearly half a million Slovak Roma. Despite the numerous outsiders interested in the Roma's well-being, the Romany nonetheless lack an outside protector of the type that Slovakia's Hungarian minority has in Hungary; that is, an entity dedicated to vouchsafing their welfare and security. In 1974, Indira Gandhi formally recognized India as the Roma's point of origin, but India has never assumed the role of championing the Romany cause. It has other and more pressing issues.

Although the Soviet Union broke apart peacefully, with its various union republics emerging as sovereign states during 1991-92, its disintegration did not follow the Czechoslovakia model, of mutual consent between the two leading parties. Instead Moscow would have preferred to have preserved the Soviet Union, but when the governments of its union republics announced their intention to leave, Gorbachev could neither interest them in the confederate-like Commonwealth of Independent States (CSI), which it proposed in a last minute effort to preserve the Soviet Union, nor physically prevent them from seceding ell masse. Further, the USSR's decomposition did not end ethnopolitical conflict in the former Soviet Union, a state that once contained over 150 different ethnic groups, politically organized in a hierarchical fashion based on their size, territoriality, and degree of national consciousness, with the union republics at the top of the pyramid,] Even in those states that emerged from the union republics with relatively high degrees of ethnic homogeneity, territorialized ethnic divisions have frequently produced violent conflicts between the majority and minority populations that have retarded the democratization effort and have sometimes spilt into the international system. Among the most volatile areas are at least, the following five.

1) The Nagorno-Karabakh enclave of Armenians living in the mountains of Azerbaijan generated considerable tension inside the Soviet Union between Armenia (93 percent Armenian) and Azerbaijan (90 percent Azerbaijan) from the beginning of the Soviet system. The area was transferred to Azerbaijan by Moscow in 1923 as a part of Moscow's efforts to consolidate Soviet control of the border regions following a 1918-20 war between independent Anl1enia and Azerbaijan over Karabakh and other territory. Soon thereafter. the enclave's predominantly Christian, Arnlenian population fell under the discriminatory control of Muslim Azerbaijani administrators. The long-simmering conflict reignited during the mid-1980s when Gorbachev liberalized political dialogue. Armenian nationalists used their new freedom of expression to renew long-standing demands that Nagorno-Karabakh he returned to Armenia and that until then the Armenian language be given legal priority in education and public affairs if: the region. By 1989, both Armenia and Azerbaijan were openly discriminating against the minorities inside their borders. Three years later, when an Armenian missile shot down an Azerbaijani helicopter during the last moments of the Soviet Union, war was only averted by Russian diplomatic intervention. Subsequently, Armenian separatists have been slow ir: subscribing to the 1998 ceasefire agreement negotiated for the region. Ir: fact, in 1998, the president of Armenia was forced to resign for making concessions to Azerbaijan in peace talks designed to resolve the conflict,"

2) Russia has been drawn even more deeply into the process of intercommunal conflict management in the former Union Republic of Georgia. There too, the ethnoterritorial conflicts long predate the collapse of the Soviet system. Gorbachev's glasnost reforms opened the door to increasingly open rivalry between contending ethnonationalist movements in a Soviet republic. In the case of Georgia, this involved the Georgians, whose nationalist movement against Moscow reemerged in the mid-1980s, along with the nationalist movements against Georgian rule among the minority Abkhazians of Northwest Georgia and the Ossetian minority in the south. By 1990, Communist rule was on the way out in Georgia and nationalist spokesmen had assumed leadership positions at the head of all three national communities, ethnic violence was becoming commonplace in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and South Ossetia had declared its independence. Over the next two years, while the Soviet Union was collapsing and Georgia fought a war to prevent South Ossetia's secession, matters deteriorated further. When the Georgian ultra-nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia was ousted from office, a mini-civil war erupted between factions inside the Georgia community that ended only when Eduard Shevardnadze was returned to power in 1992; however, no sooner did the fighting end in South Ossetia in a Russian-brokered ceasefire than Georgia invaded its Abkhazia region to quell the ethnopolitical conflict there between the Abkharians and the Georgian minority in the region. By 1993, that war had ended with essentially a Abkhazian military victory, which let the Abkhazians in control of the province and provoked an exodus of Georgian refugees from the area. The introduction of a Russian-led (nominally Commonwealth of Independent States) peacekeeping force and reintroduction of a UN observer force the following year ended neither this exodus nor the fighting between ethnic Georgians and the Abkhazians. Ten years later, Shevardnadze was again gone but Russian troops were still present, Russia's influence on events had become a source of tension between Moscow and Georgia's new government, and separatist movements still controlled large sections of South Ossetia and Abkharia.

3) Although 82 percent of Russia's population is composed of ethnic Russians, Russia continues to house numerous, territorialized minorities acquired during Czarist Russia's state-building period. Even before the Soviet Union's collapse, the desire of many of these for ever-greater freedom from Moscow's control occasionally forced Moscow to tinker with the subcategories of autonomous republics and autonomous zones inside the large Russian federation which formed the Soviet Union's core. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, ethnonationalism surged in many of these areas, in some cases leading to the emergence of low-grade civil wars necessitating the intervention of the Russian Army. The most serious of these has raged at the southern tip of the Russian Federation, just north of Azerbaijan and east of Georgia in Russian Chechnya. Acquired by Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century and only secured by Moscow after nearly a quarter century of aggressive resistance from Islamic warriors in Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan, Russia's Chechen region attained Autonomous Republic status in 1922 and, in 1934, became a part of the Cheneno-Ingush Republic. The area remained restless, however, and concern during World War II over the political loyalty of the Chechens led Stalin to deport them from their homeland. It was not until the 1950s that they were allowed to return, but throughout their years in exile Chechen national identity remains strong although it has been hijacked by bin-Laden type Islamists. In 1992, as the Soviet system unraveled and Russian troops were withdrawn from the area, Chechnya declared itself an independent Republic. Two years later, the civil war began when Russian troops shelled the separatist rebels and occupied the region. Chechen fighters, aided by al-Qaeda forces, retaliated by bombing apartment complexes and other civilian targets in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia. That activity continues, including the September, 2004, attack, which resulted in more than 300 children dying when a hostage situation unraveled at a school in Beslan in the North Ossetia area of the Russian Federation.

4) The former Soviet Union and portions of its Central European empire are peppered with conflicts of the Chechen, Georgian, and Nagorno-Karabakh ilk. In nearly every instance, the same combustible combination of elements are discernible: religious, linguistic, and other factors reinforcing ethnonational lines of cleavage (the Muslim Chechens and the non-Muslim Russians); simmering national grievances; often fueled by relatively recent moments of bloodletting, and opportunist leaders inciting minority ethnonational communities into pursuits of independence. These elements, albeit with a twist, are partially evident in the most violent example of separatist politics in post communist Europe, Yugoslavia's bloody descent into multiple civil wars, and especially in the former Yugoslav province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Muslims, Serbs, and Croats where to a degree territorially intermingled and none of these groups represented a majority. At their core, the conflicts that ripped Yugoslavia apart were rooted in deep grievances separating ethnonational communities often claiming the same soil as their motherland. Differences in economic status also entered into the picture, often reinforcing the cultural differences separating Yugoslavia's national groups and providing the nationalist leaders of the communities with additional justification for secession. Slovenia, for example, was not just Yugoslavia's richest union republic but one of the richest regions in Central Europe, with an average per capita income that is more than three times that of Serbia's. Slovene nationalists could therefore argue not only that an independent Slovenia would be economically viable but that as long as Slovenes remained in Yugoslavia they would be subsidizing their Serbian masters. A similar situation prevailed in Croatia, also a substantially richer republic than Serbia. Meanwhile, Bosnia and, inside Serbia, Kosovo were far poorer than Serbia as a whole-a state of affairs. their nationalists argued, that reflected Serbian indifference to their poverty and hostility to their Muslim culture. Finallly, in all of Yugoslavia's national communities, opportunists played a major role in moving their peoples away from accommodative politics and toward open conflict.

Among these opportunists, the central figure was the president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), Slobodan Milosevic. Unlike Vaclav Klaus, the Czech prime minister who responded to Meciar's threats of secession with almost indifference, Milosevic was a former communist who resurrected his political career as a militant Serbian nationalist fighting to retain Serb control over historical Serbian lands (e.g., Kosovo) and those regions with large Serbian minorities. He was therefore quick to champion the demands of Serbian autonomists in Croatia and the cause of the Serbian minority in Bosnia, and to become increasingly embroiled in the interethnic conflicts in both union republics. Nonetheless, it was outside parties in particular, Germany-whose advice pushed Yugoslavia into civil wars.

The unraveling began in early 1991, when Western diplomats encouraged Croatia and Slovenia to secede under the mistaken belief that Milosevic's problems with the ongoing insurrection in Kosovo would force him to accept their departure as a fait accompli. Instead, when they declared their independence, Belgrade responded militarily. The resultant war against the Slovenes lasted only ten days before Belgrade acquiesced to Slovenia's independence, in part because Slovene units in the Yugoslav army defected to fight on Slovenia's side but also because the negligible number of Serbs in Slovenia and its location in Yugoslavia's extreme northwest made it difficult for Milosevic to mobilize support for the war as a defense of Greater Serbia.

The war between Belgrade and Croatia lasted longer given Croatia's larger Serbian population (11.5 percent), and it did not wind down until Belgrade's large-scale offensive during the winter of 1991-92 left it in control of a third of Croatia. Even then, with a UN-negotiated ceasefire in place and Croatia as well as Slovenia and Bosnia admitted to the UN as sovereign states, the battle between Serbian paramilitaries backed by Belgrade, and the Croatian government in Zagreb continued until the 1995 Dayton Accord ended the first round of civil wars in what was once Yugoslavia.

In the meantime, the center of the conflict shifted to Bosnia, where Serbs constituted nearly a third of the population. Paramilitary units and acts of atrocity quickly proliferated on all sides. By the time the fighting ended, at least 250,000 Bosnian-Muslims had died in the war, millions of Bosnian residents had become refugees, and the ferocity of the various ethnic-cleansing processes had prompted the international community to create a tribunal to prosecute those responsible for the crimes against humanity committed during Yugoslavia's civil wars. The war also produced the worst instance of atrocity since World War II in July, 1995, when Serbs overran the UN-created "safe haven" of Srebrenica and massacred at least 8,000 Muslim men and boys in front of an under-armed, 450-man Dutch peacekeeping force.

It was the brazenness of the attack on Srebrenica and the almost simultaneous Serbian shelling of Tuzla and Sarajevo, two other UN-designated "safe" cities, which finally prompted NATO to intervene with sufficient military force to establish a peace that could be kept by the international forces deployed in Bosnia. By December, the leaders of all communities involved in the conflict had agreed to the Dayton peace plan, which ended the war and provided the legal basis for establishing, under international tutelage, self-governing institutions in Bosnia. It was clear at the time, though, that the peace-building process was going to be a long one, especially on the refugee repatriation front. Two of the signatories of the pact, Croatia's leader Franjo Tudjman and Milosevic, vigorously opposed the repatriation provision in the Dayton Accord in the hope of maintaining those territories under Croatian and Serbian control as ethnically cleansed as the wars had left them. Progress is hard won still, delayed by both corruption within the fledgling new state and the electoral success of the ethnonational parties representing each of Bosnia's ethnic communities in most of the democratic elections that have been held there under international supervision, beginning with the local elections of October, 1997.

5) The hand of outside parties is also apparent in the escalation of ethnic conflict in Serbia's Kosovo province and, later, in Macedonia. In both instances, though, their intervention occurred against a backdrop of the same factors that have shaped ethnoterritorial conflict elsewhere in postcommunist Europe.
In Kosovo, both the heart of an ancient Serb empire and the birthplace of nineteenth-century pan-Albanian nationalism, the combustible materials revolved around the Albanization and Islamization of the province while under Ottoman rule. By 1990, Kosovo had become 90 percent Albanian Muslim but had lost its right to provincial autonomy and was under the direct control of Belgrade's highly nationalist, Serbian government of Milosevic, with its commitment to keep Kosovo forever Serbian. After agreeing at Dayton to abandon Belgrade's claims on the Serbian populations of Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia, it was not a promise that Milosevic could politically afford to break.

On the Albanian side, by the mid-1990s, the principal actor had become the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an outlawed paramilitary organization no more inclined to compromise on the issue of an independent Kosovo than Milosevic. While Milosevic concentrated on harassing the Kosovo Albanians to the point where many would choose to leave the province, the KLA focused on attacking Yugoslav personnel in Kosovo in the hope of provoking Belgrade into so overreacting that the international community would intervene on behalf of the Kosovo autonomists. It took a few years but the strategy worked. Widely criticized for having delayed too long before responding to the carnage occurring in Bosnia, in 1998, President Clinton's administration began to press Belgrade to restore Kosovo's autonomy and permit the deployment there of an international force to guarantee the safety of its Albanian populace. In fact, although rumors of Serbs committing atrocities in Kosovo were rampant, there was little evidence to support these rumors and considerable evidence that the acts of political violence being committed there were not one-sided.  Even the increasing deployment of Serbian military personnel in Kosovo during the mid-to-late 1990s was primarily reported as Belgrade's response to KLA attacks on its forces in Kosovo. By then, however, the atrocities committed during the war in Bosnia had also been well responded, and the most famous of these had been executed by the Serbs. Highly exaggerated stories of Serbian massacres of Kosovo Albanians were thus given credence, especially when Belgrade's efforts to crush the KLA produced a steady stream of Albanian refugees during the winter of 1998-99.

Even though each threat of NATO intervention on behalf of Kosovo Albanians emboldened the KLA into hardening its demand for Kosovo's independence and Serbs as well as Albanians were fleeing the province to escape the fighting, the Clinton administration placed full blame on Milosevic. Consequently, when at a March, 1999, summit Milosevic refused to cede sovereignty over Kosovo to an international peacekeeping force, U.S.-led NATO forces initiated a 78-day air campaign against Yugoslav targets to force his compliance. Matters quickly degenerated ever: further. NATO's bombing of factories, railroads, and communication, £1cilities in Serbia provoked the Serbian forces in Kosovo into escalating their attacks on the province's Muslim Albanians, who NATO had lei: unprotected when it ruled out deploying ground forces as a part of ie' campaign. Then, when the war ended and the Albanian refugees returnee.. the absence of a NATO force in place to prevent revenge attacks. Kosovo's Serb and Romany minorities triggered a massive exodus of non-Albanians fleeing the province.
The absence of a NATO ground force in Kosovo when the war ended also precluded NATO from disarming the KLA at that time. Three years later, KLA militants initiated fighting between the Albanian minorities and the majority population in Macedonia, the only independent part of former Yugoslavia which had hitherto escaped civil war despite the province of elements conducive to interethnic conflict. Invariably the Christian Orthodox Macedonians controlled economic and political power and enjoyed a living standard visibly better than that of Macedonia's Albanian Muslims, but who possessed a paramilitary liberation force. Nonetheless, the fighting that raged in the mountains along Macedonia's border with Kosovo in the early months of 2001 was clearly instigated by KLA guerrillas, albeit in collusion with allies in the Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA) in Macedonia. Once started, the conflict between the NLA and Macedonian security forces gained momentum and produced yet another stream of refugees from a war torn area of the former Yugoslavia until, months later, international mediators brokered an uneasy peace in the area. Subsequently, Macedonia's government has extended several output-oriented (economic and educational) packages to its Albanian minority, and has restructured local government to grant them limited local autonomy in Albanian-majority areas. Nevertheless, Macedonia's two communities continue to coexist in a tense relationship, while in Kosovo, Albanian hardliners have begun to improve their showings at the ballot box in a province that itself remains bitterly divided between its Albanian majority and the Serbians, who now live under international (UN) oversight even though officially Kosovo is still legally a part of Serbia.

Plus then as mentioned, there are the Romany and also Jewish minorities. Since Jewish migrants arrived a thousand years before the first groups of Romany, in notable moments European Jews achieved prosperity and cultural influence-and hence a higher than average ethnoclass status-never within the reach of the Roma. During the early centuries of Christianity, Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, and other European leaders invited Jews into their domains for the useful functions they could perform as merchants, moneylenders, and tradesmen until the Crusades created a backlash against non-Christians in Western Europe. Then, stigmatized as heretics, Jews were forced to flee during the Middle Ages into Central Europe, where they had already established a presence in Poland and adjacent areas as early as the tenth century. Later, as in the case of Czechoslovakia's Jewish communities, they were gradually reinvited to return to the countries from which they had once been exiled, and well-educated Jews attained eminence in numerous fields in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including the administration of Budapest's imperial realm. Even after World War I their influence continued to grow in the newly created states of Central Europe, which often lacked a developed commercial class of their own. Meanwhile, throughout these years, the Romany remained a despised community, existing outside European power structures-enslaved for centuries and used as game as late as Germany's now infamous nineteenth century Gypsy hunts.

Beyond these differences in wealth and stature, however, Europe's Jewish and Romany communities had several things in common. First, both practiced a high degree of intra group exclusiveness, shunning assimilation to their hosts' cultures, emphasizing intra communal solidarity, and thus sharing in an "other" identity as much self-imposed as imposed on them by the states in which they lived. For centuries, the insular nature of Jews as the self-proclaimed chosen people of the Lord set them apart from, and incurred the animosity of the peoples among whom they lived, even when their status was more humble than that of their hosts.

Only four generations after William the Conqueror opened England to Jews, a local community in Norwich was charged with murdering Christian children in a heretic rite. A few generations later, Edward I became the first leader in Europe to cleanse his country of Jews when he ordered their mass expulsion from Britain, an act that one commentator has labeled the "medieval-style 'final solution.'

This pattern became a familiar one for Jews living on the continent as well. As anti-Semitism grew in Western Europe, King Kasimierz the Great invited the Jews to Poland in the fourteenth century. By the sixteenth century, Poland had become a center of Jewish culture in Europe, but not in Warsaw, from which Jews were expelled during the fifteenth century and banned again from 1527 to 1768. Then, at approximately the time that Jews were allowed to return to Warsaw (1780), Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II ended the policy of confining Jews to ghettos and excluding them from specified trades in his realm. With the subsequent entry of Jews into important posts in the Austrian Empire's civil service and the field of law and other professions, by 1819 Austria had become the home of the first broad based anti-Semitic movement in Central Europe. One hundred years later, the same pattern unfolded again when the creation of new states out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in areas lacking a large professional or middle class of their own allowed Jews to achieve high status in interwar Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Poland. Anti-Semitism rose; the Holocaust followed.

Meanwhile, by the early 1400s, the Romany had also spread, albeit uninvited, throughout most of southeastern Europe into the areas now containing Serbia, Greece, Hungary, Germany, Slovakia, Italy, France, Belgium, and Holland. Discrimination, persecution, forced sterilization, impoundment of Romany children, and/or expulsion followed, often immediately, both there and elsewhere in Europe over the centuries that followed.

Third, both the Roma and Europe's Jews were targeted by the Nazis for extermination as inferior races during the Holocaust, and in their extermination policies the Nazis were often abetted by the national populations of Nazi-occupied Europe, with devastating results. Except for Bulgaria, whose small (48,000) Jewish community survived essentially intact, Jewish communities throughout Central Europe absorbed the same devastating blow as those in wartime Czechoslovakia. In Hungary, with an estimated prewar Jewish population of 444,000, only 140,000 remained by 1945. For Romania, the numbers were 757,000 before the war, 428,000 afterward, and in Yugoslavia more than 80 percent of its estimated 68,000 Jews perished. It was in Poland, however, with the largest Jewish concentration in Central Europe, that the most tragic figures were recorded. Nearly 10 percent of Poland's prewar population was Jewish: 3,350,000 people, and only 50,000 remained in Poland after the War.

The Holocaust claimed a smaller number of Romany lives, in part because local populations in much of Central Europe collaborated less in the destruction of the Romany than the extermination of their often envied Jewish communities, and in part because Central Europe's Jews were concentrated in highly vulnerable, urban Ghettos whereas the Romany were widely scattered in the more remote areas of Central Europe. On the other hand, because they were a despised underclass, generally perceived as useless, the Romany were early targets for forced sterilization by countries concerned with keeping their populations pure, including Sweden in 1934. Accordingly, they became the subject of German purification plans very early (1933) in the Nazi era, and were marked for extermination in Germany in 1938 and, three years later, in German-occupied Poland, Croatia, Serbia, and the Ukraine. Although the data are less reliable than in the case of the Jewish Holocaust, it is generally believed that by the time of the Roma Holocaust a more than 500,000 Roma had been executed by the Nazis and their collaborators.

In communist-controlled postwar Central Europe, anti-Jewish pronouncements remained commonplace. As in Czechoslovakia, when dissatisfaction with the regime grew, the Jewish minority was repeatedly scapegoated for society's ills. The strategy did not always succeed, but it was serviceable. As one analyst noted, shortly after the failure of Czechoslovakia's reform movement in 1968, when Soviet propagandists refer to the "zionists," they are speaking to the population in a familiar language. The Zionist is the old, mythical Jew, the faceless enemy, the cunning foe. Jews can be set apart and defined more easily than, for instance, the intellectuals, the opposition, or the deviationists. Neither a janitor nor a mailman can be 100 per cent certain that an attack on the intellectuals is not also aimed at him in a way ... but every Aryan knows quite definitely that he is not a Zionist. (Paul Lendvai. Anti-Semitism Without Jews, 1971, p.20.)

Matters were both better and worse for the Romany of communist Central Europe. In deference to an ideology that stressed class over ethnicity and in order to meet the need for low-cost manpower, con1munist regimes officially sought to contain the Roma within their individual borders and to assimilate them into their respective societies. In most instances the outcome was similar to the results achieved in Czechoslovakia. The Romany were consequently neither officially persecuted nor scapegoated; however, their traditional way of life was disrupted by them being forced to end their nomadic ways. At the same time, despite numerous, self-congratulatory government reports of progress, proportionately few Romany overall were actually resettled from the remote rural areas they favored and in which they established self-segregated enclaves once the borders were closed to them. Furthermore, wherever they lived they continued to practice their traditional professions (e.g., horse-trading and trafficking in used clothing) even when these activities were proscribed. Alternately, when they were relocated among local national communities their presence often intensified anti-Romany prejudices and their children were usually segregated in schools established explicitly for them. Hence, integration plans were unable to dispel the prejudice through which the Roma have traditionally been viewed throughout Central Europe and beyond. And, as in Czechoslovakia, the assimilation policies were often harsh and usually administered by local nationals with little interest in actually improving the Romany's collective status, and the education of Romany children in special education classes was often paralleled by incentive-laden programs aimed at enticing Romany women into availing themselves of sterilization services.

The fall of communism revived local grievances against the Romany entail far more than resentment over the favoritism they supposedly received under communism. The role of the media in sustaining the worst stereotypes of the Romany is also cited, by the Romany and others, to explain the discrimination that they continue to encounter. Governments also contribute to the problem, and not just by exploiting anti-Romany prejudices in campaigning for office. At least as late as September, 2002, for example, the Hungarian Ministry of Education had approved textbooks for public schools containing such passages as, "the life of Romany is marked by crime" and Gypsies "were unable to and did not even want to adapt to a civilized European way of life.

Where they reside, the Romany continue to live in the worst conditions of any community, and their poverty continues to grow. When civil wars occur, they are among the first to be driven out by the victorious parties. They are also usually denied education, health services, and other basic assistance in the states where they find shelter. Meanwhile, as in Czechoslovakia, the widespread dispersion of the Romany communities, the unwillingness of Romany to vote or otherwise participate in politics, and the internal factions within individual Romany tribes have made it difficult for them to gain even those concessions achieved by small, concentrated territorialized minorities such as the Hungarians in Slovakia.

Furthermore, the desired international support for the Romany has not effectively materialized in spite of the Roma's efforts to achieve higher visibility by joining in UN activities and participating in a variety of European conferences. The memberships offered to the Czech Republic and Slovakia by NATO and the EU have, with the current exception of the states emerging from the former Yugoslavia, also been offered to the remainder of postcommunist Europe despite its continued mistreatment of and discrimination against its Romany minorities.

But the fall of communism was also responsible for indirectly contributing to a new round of anti-Semitism in a Central Europe that, by the 1990s, was inhabited by less than a quarter million Jews-approximately 5 percent of its pre-World War II number. In unleashing nationalist movements, which had been generally kept under control during the communist era, the fall of communism created a backlash against not only the national minorities in Central Europe's multinational states, but Jews as wel1. Across the region Mein Kampf and other anti-Semitic books sold out in newly opened capitalist bookstores; in Warsaw, the posting of guards at the memorial erected to honor those who once inhabited the Warsaw ghetto has not prevented its occasional defacing with anti-Semitic markings. And recently, one in three Italians did not believe that Jews were true Italians. Twenty-first-century polls taken in Italy, France, and Germany indicate that this trend is developing on a Western Europe-wide basis.

Ethnopolitics haye also been volatile in postcommunist Europe because the meltdown of the Soviet empire removed the cap that formerly contained communal conflict in a region honeycombed with memories of historical injustices and simmering desires to "settle the score." As long as Armenia and Azerbaijan were governed by Moscow, Armenian nationalists could not easily express Armenia's frustration vis-a-vis the Nagorno-Karabakh region. The responsibility for the injustices done to the Annenians there could be divided between Moscow, who transferred the region to Azerbaijan, and the Azerbaijani, who wronged the area's Armenians for generations without Moscow intervening. Moscow's loss of control over its periphery and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union simplified the equation. Suddenly only the Azerbaijani were responsible for the persecution of the Armenians. Similarly, freed from the fear of Moscow's intervention, the leaders of Yugoslavia's national communities could engage in previously foreclosed, rancorous personal (Milosevic- Tudjman) and lethal military confrontations.

In a much more muted fashion, the same elements colored the postcommunist history of Slovak politics. It was not the Czechs but the Turks and the Hungarians who had committed the great historical injustices against the Slovak people. The dialogue with the Czechs over the terms of continued cohabitation could thus be conducted with a degree of cordiality entirely absent when ethnopolitical discussions in the independent Slovak Republic focused on the political rights of Slovakia's Hungarian minority. Likewise, the collapse of communism opened Central Europe's Romany to violence as these long detested minorities were "repaid" for the preferred status they allegedly enjoyed under communism.

In the broader context, groups longing for self-determination and political opportunists seeking to exploit ethnopolitical emotions have added a greater rigidity to ethnopolitical bargaining in Central Europe than has been customary in the developed democratic world. Political leaders have had less room in which to compromise even when inclined to do so. So, neither territorialized nor territorially intermingled minorities have fared particularly well in postcommunist Europe.

Those minorities who have gained states of their own have generally been insensitive to the demands for autonomy and/ or civil rights guarantees raised by the minorities in their countries. In addition, the acquisition of national self-determination has frequently triggered an outpouring of nationalism, which in several instances has translated into politics meant to stress the culture of the new rulers, often at the expense of the culture of the new state's minority communities. Score settling has also occurred against minorities akin to those who previously ruled, be they ideological (the hunt for former communist informers in the Czech Republic and Poland) or ethnic/national (the Russians in Estonia, Hungarians in Slovakia). The cases are varied, reflecting historical, demographic, and cultural elements; however, despite the obvious differences separating the multiple instances of ethnic conflict in postcommunist Europe, several common themes bind them together.

In the 1990s, anti-Semitism was reinforced by the increasingly anti-Israeli drift of public opinion in numerous Western European countries, especially those with large Muslim minorities and/or a high dependency on Arab oil and the accompanying fear that its availability could be disrupted because of Israeli intransigence on the Palestinian issue, A poll taken in Italy in the mid-1990s captured the changing Neither territorialized nor territorially intermingled minorities have fared particularly well in postcommunist Europe, Those minorities who have gained states of their own have generally been insensitive to the demands for autonomy and/or civil rights guarantees raised by the minorities in their countries, In addition, the acquisition of national self-determination has frequently triggered an outpouring of nationalism, which in several instances has translated into politics meant to stress the culture of the new rulers, often at the expense of the culture of the new state's minority communities, Score settling has also occurred against minorities akin to those who previously ruled, be they ideological (the hunt for former communist informers in the Czech Republic and Poland) or ethnic/national (the Russians in Estonia, Hungarians in Slovakia), The cases are varied, reflecting historical, demographic, and cultural elements; however, despite the obvious differences separating the multiple instances of ethnic conflict in postcommunist Europe, several common themes bind them together.

Governments dominated by their national majorities may not be willing to create federal-like systems to meet the demands of their territorialized ethnic groups; however, where these minorities are territorialized that option at least exists. Sensitive issues can be downloaded to regional assemblies (i.e., language issues in Belgium) and demands for self-rule can perhaps be satisfied by regime modifications in a federalist direction before escalating to the separatist level. Where, however, communities are territorially intermingled, the problem of soothing minority fears is much more complicated. Civil rights legislation can be enacted or given constitutional status, but in either case its enforcement requires a good-will commitment by the ruling community minorities may doubt will be forthcoming, especially from people against whom, in earlier days, they discriminated.

In conclusion, the international dimension of many ethnonational conflicts in postcommunist Europe is obvious. The genocidal elements in Yugoslavia's civil wars visibly raised issues covered by international law, just as the large numbers of refugees who fled these wars into neighboring states gave those conflicts an international element. So, too, did the eventual deployment of international forces in order to contain and end to the conflicts, and provide a secure environment for the creation of self-governing institutions. And, as we have seen, conflicts in the postcommunist world have been partially instigated as well as penetrated and affected by outside actors.

Frequently outsiders have had a detrimental impact on political stability in the region. Yugoslavia might have unraveled violently without external prompting, but there is little doubt that Croatia and Slovenia were encouraged to secede by Western countries. Likewise, France was a booster of Slovak independence, with its information office in Bratislava adopting an approving attitude toward the Slovak nationalists and beginning the preliminary work of converting itself into an embassy almost a year before the nationalists took control of the Slovak government in June, 1992.

More constructive have been the oversight activities of NATO and EU countries involved with democratization and economic liberalization efforts in postcommunist Europe, including their policies toward the minority communities. Among the primary reasons cited by both NATO and the EU in explaining their decision to exclude Slovakia from their lists of states eligible for early admission were Meciar's policies toward freedom of expression and Slovakia's Hungarian and Romany minorities. Conversely, Hungary and Romania's shared desire to court the EU played an important role in pushing them toward a formal agreement on the rights of Romania's Hungarian minority.

Diplomatic pressure by the Council of Europe on the Baltic states to treat their Russian minorities fairly and the advice offered by EU officials on the treatment of minorities to countries hopeful of obtaining membership represent perhaps the least intrusive form of external influence on politics in the postcommunist world. Pacts such as the Romania-Hungary agreement, and the similar Slovak-Hungarian State Treaty concluded in 1995 in response to Western pressure on Slovakia, represent a middlerange degree of outside involvement in the politics of a postcommunist European state. And as we detailed already in the previous part, peacekeeping and peace-building missions are invariably expensive, long-term ventures offering no guarantees of success in bringing together multinational antagonists in a stable political order.

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