Proposed by Aristides Zolberg in 1976 a model still considered to have validity today argues that societies tend to have three primary sets of segmentation: cultural, territorial, and class-based. Ethnicity thus can be located as a type of cultural segmentation that may also intersect class and territorial segmentation and thereby generate a differing set of issues precisely because these intersections involve overlapping identities, which may reinforce one another.

The first type would include the past controversy in Britain over the refusal of some Sikhs to wear a helmet rather than their turban while riding a motorcycle, and the demands of Latino Americans for Spanish-instruction public schools in some sections of the southwestern United States. Unreinforced by other lines of cleavage, the issues generated by ethno-cultural differences have typically been resolvable within the legal systems or only minimally disruptive to the political process of developed polities.

The second type of ethnicity, ethnoclass segmentation, is distinguishable by substantial differences in social-class status separating one ethnic group from others (or the majority) in society. Issues typical of this category would include questions involving the right of foreign workers to receive the same civil and economic liberties as citizens. In addition to African Americans, groups falling into this class would include Native Americans and Mexican Americans in the United States, Asians in Britain, the guest workers of Western Europe, and the Romany (gypsies) throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

The third variety, is found in the lines of intersection between ethnocultural and territorial segmentation. These groups frequently possess a distinct set of historical and cultural customs, language, and religion, and the issues generated by the ethnoterritorial cleavage typically involve the efforts of the ethnoterritorial community to preserve its cultural distinctiveness, to obtain a fair share of the broader society's resources, and/or to achieve a greater control over its own political lite. Examples include the Scots and Welsh in Britain, the Flemish and Walloons in Belgium, the Quebecois in Canada, the Corsicans in France, the Basques in Spain, and the Hungarian minority in the current Slovak Republic.

One could ad here of course that, there is that type of ethnic segmentation that involves the intersection of highly salient ethnic, class, and territorial consciousness. Issues typical of this category would tend to reflect a pattern of reinforcing cleavages. Like for example in Northern Ireland, where the numerical minority "Catholics" have been discriminated against politically and economically, while also having been forced into largely segregated living areas.

In any case, the multiethnic and multinational states of today are the consequence of historical state-making processes. Be they the result of the European model of expanding centers conquering ethnically distinct communities on the periphery, the settler society model as rulers, with or displaced indigenous peoples, opening the door to immigrants from different points of origin, or the developing world format, where imperial outposts have retained their multinational character as independent states. More recently, ethnopolitics has been further reshaped by the postwar recovery of Europe and an accelerating globalization process, both of which resulted in the movement of large numbers from their (usually) developing world homelands to immigrant lifestyles in the more developed regions of the world. Under the weight of these forces, the basis of ethnicity has been affected.

In some areas-for example the more rural subcultures of Nigeria and newer, immigrant neighborhoods in the cities of the developed world-ethnicity can still be defined genetically. In advanced democratic and economically advanced postcommunist countries (as we shell exemplify in our case study), ethnoterritorial minorities long integrated into their respective states' borders and the third-generation descendants of immigrants are more likely to measure their "otherness" by their pre-union history, areas of origin, and/ or cultural barometers of ethnic distinctiveness.

As to how ethnopolitical communities become mobilized, given the number of variables involved is inconclusive to date because, even the relative weight of such macro-elements as changes in the economic environment versus such micro-variables as the role of political elites in the emergence of ethnopolitical self-awareness, both demands, and conflicts.

Ethnic clashes have occurred without the immediate presence of instigators in advanced democracies; for example, the Los Angeles riots related to the Rodney King case and the 2005 clashes between Romany and Muslim underclasses in the south of France. Conversely, even in Africa's deepest backwaters, the greatest carnage has usually been associated with the presence of radical voices inciting violence, as in the 1994 massacres in Rwanda, where radio broadcasters were urging Hutus to massacre their Tutsi neighbors.

The safest conclusion so far has been  that the relative weight of various elements in inducing and shaping ethnic agendas and conflict varies in terms of area (i.e., jus soli immigrant societies such as the United States versus countries defining citizenship in terms of parental ethnicity), circumstance (the different political environments of 1960s Britain, Franco's Spain, de Gaulle's France, and Gowon's Nigeria vis-a-vis ethnoterritorial movements), and time (Europe's Muslims before and after the twenty-first-century terrorist attacks in Spain, Holland, and Britain). On the other hand, whatever the time, place, or circumstance, it is clear that a different set of elements shapes the emergence of politically salient ethnoclass issues than ethnoterritorial ones, and that once mobilization has occurred ethnopolitics evinces quite different characteristics and trajectories when the ethnic cleavage is linked to the economic cleavages in societies than when it is reinforced by territorial lines of segmentation.

Although the diversity of variables of potential importance in explaining why ethnic issues become politically salient remains astounding, the bedrock factor is the sense of ethnic identity itself. To be sure, conflicts in ethnically diverse countries may be ethnically patterned without being ethnically caused; however, once the ethnic element is infused into the conflict, its character fundamentally changes. Additional members of the ethnic community may join in the conflict because of the instrumental utility of ethnic identity in mobilizing support for a cause-particularly when that cause can be portrayed in terms of the group's ability to gain control of its destiny. Likewise, once invoked the ethnic factor can significantly affect the tractability of the conflict, regardless of its fundamental cause.

Also, as we shall see in part 2 about Eastern Europe, ethnic identity does not have to be persistently active to be politically significant. It may be relatively latent in comparison to other forms of social identification. This is especially a feature of ethnoterritorial conflict in Western Europe, and one of the reasons why the 1950s and 1960s witnessed considerable disagreement over whether the regional movements there reflected a resurgence of older identities, new ones in the process of formation, or some combination of the two. But whether the movement represents a resurgence of older identities or a development of a new, regionalized one is less important than the fact that there was, an ethnic self-identity present upon which these movements were launched and which subsequently affected their ability to achieve a significant political impact. Recognition of this relevance focuses attention away from historical considerations and on those factors that have subsequently affected the activation of ethnic identity and its salience in policy processes-for example, the importance of the region to the parties controlling the state, the openness of the political leadership to accommodation, the political skill of the ethnopolitical spokesmen in exploiting their advantages, the intensity of the grievances, and the nature of the den;lands being articulated.

There is a similar need for a sense of ethnic identity (and community) to exist amongst nonspatial minorities, immigrants, refugees, or foreign workers before their concerns become politically important as a result their own actions. Otherwise, members of these categories are dependent upon nonmembers to articulate their interests, and although this has frequently occurred, these exterior champions of minority causes have not been particularly successful. Yet, left to themselves, the structural and political developments surveyed in our cases do not support much confidence in the ability of ethnoclass minorities to mobilize in defense of their interests. To the contrary, their individual ethnic identities have worked against crosscommunal mobilization on the basis of their common interest as "outsiders."

 What is evident is that political and structural developments occurring in countries hosting ethnoclass minorities have activated in the majority populations an ethnic (not just class) reaction. This includes the rapid expansion of postwar economies, which necessitated the addition of outside workers to the domestic work force in developed countries, the gradual trend of the guest workers becoming permanent parts of their host countries' economies, the resulting social conflict between host country nationals and the foreign workers and their families, the economic downswing in most European states that negated the need for large numbers of foreign workers, and the emergence of globally organized, anti-Western Muslim organizations launching terrorist acts in countries containing Muslim minorities.

 Meanwhile, in Central Europe it is the often internally divided Romany community who have felt the greatest discrimination since the fall of communism, suddenly becoming the unprotected targets of frustrations that built up in majority communities during the communist era, when socialist-styled affirmative action policies seemingly gave the Romany preferential treatment. And in the developing world, ethnoclass consciousness has fueled postindependence conflicts whose roots are traceable to such developments during the colonial era as European decisions to import workers from outside the states being created and economic and educational policies that favored some communities over others.

Ethnoterritorial demands cover a wide range, although all require central government concessions to the ethnoterritorial community and some can lead to dissolution of the state and/or international involvement in a country's ethnopolitical conflicts. As previously noted, they include output-oriented demands (i.e., financial assistance for a downward spiralling regional economy), essentially nationalistic (authority- and regime-oriented) demands for a share of decision-making authority and/or some form of political autonomy, and-at the extreme-groups seeking to purge their land of other communities or separate from the states containing them. In none of the cases examined is there complete consensus over the content of the demands to be placed before political authorities. Each case exhibits a diverse range of factions with varying opinions about the goals to be pursued and how stridently they are to be pushed. In this sense, ethnoterritorial politics tend to be more groups politics than a category of group politics in which a government is addressed by a single, goal-oriented organization.

In contrast, ethnoclass conflicts involve two distinct types of issues: those involving the conditions of the indigenous, territorially dispersed, and immigrant ethnic minorities, and those concerned with the presence of these groups. To recap, issues related to the status of foreigners and indigenous underclasses include their need for more and better housing, health care, and educational facilities, civil rights protection, and affirmative action policies. Where ethnoclass minorities are the issue, however, debate revolves around such issues as the presence of large numbers of foreigners as a threat to a country's unique character and indigenous job market, and-more recently-the danger of foreign communities becoming breeding grounds for terrorists.

Most complex are the issues to be found in ethnoclass-territorial conflicts of the type found in Northern Ireland. These often combine demands found in both ethnoclass and ethnoterritorial politics. Ultimately, however, these conflicts tend to raise on all sides the issue of the political entity's legitimacy; in the case of Ulster, the issue is the legitimacy of Ulster's political institutions in the eyes of its Catholics and of the Catholics presence in Ulster to its Protestant militants.

Regarding the range of political actors involved in the conveyance of policy demands, again some differences between our categories have quite clearly emerged. Collectively, the ethnoterritorial communities we have examined have both produced a wide range of different types of organizational spokesmen and have utilized most conceivable means of influencing their respective political processes, from cultural associations and regionalist parties to direct action organizations practicing civil disobedience (e.g., the Welsh Language Society) to clandestine groups employing overt violence aimed at symbolic (the French national panks targeted by Corsican and Breton extremists) and human targets (i.e., ETA militants' activities In Spain) to declarations of secession and the fighting of civil wars to achieve independence. In the developed democratic world, these actors have also included factions or wings of broader, system-wide, political organizations, such as the Labour Party in Scotland.

The modes of expressing demands related to ethnoclass issues depend on the nature of a conflict. Demands raised on behalf of foreigners can come from the minority community itself, interest groups within the host country, the countries of the immigrants' origins, the host country's government, and transnational organizations. When the foreign communities themselves are the issue, policy demands tend to originate in three sources: domestic nationals (public opinion), domestic interest groups and parties such as Le Pen's, and the government of the host country, usually when it is seeking to placate its majority's sentiments. Contrary to the pattern prevalent in ethnoterritorial politics, the principal system-wide parties in the developed world have tended not to playa particularly active role in the generation of these demands but have functioned more as their recipients with the expectation that they will act upon them.

Among those participating in ethnoclass politics there is a considerable variance in the amount and intensity of activity. Understandably but also paradoxically, the groups most directly affected today by policy responses to ethnoclass demands (the foreign workers, immigrants, Romany, and others) tend to be the least active, in part because these communities are often of such a diverse mixture of nationalities and so mutually competitive in the economy that they have remained politically disorganized. But it also reflects the even more fundamental weakness of their bargaining condition as politically powerless minorities generally lacking in economic influence and the power of numbers in elections, while their opponents in the Western world have been quite willing to use the leverage of the ballot box to promote their exodus. Consequently, except in those instances where their frustration explodes in spontaneous public demonstrations, their grievances remain most often articulated by concerned (indigenous) citizens in the host countries, \vho speak for what is distinctly a minority viewpoint in their states. And, where leaders have emerged from within to articulate issues on their behalf, their demands have been essentially defensive-that they not be deported, dispossessed, or flagrantly discriminated against.

Most fundamentally, ethnoclass minorities frequently suffer from a perceived" otherness" that, at least in older states, ethnoterritorialminorities do not. A citizen of Glasgow can appear as both a Scot and British to the man in the street in Leeds; a Muslim in France is a Muslim in France. Hence, the amelioration of ethnoclass conflict requires double-sided adaptation. Not only must there be a willingness on the part of the besieged minority to adapt to their minority condition (and in some instances that will is lacking) but the host population must often adapt to their own cultural shock in dealing with "foreigners" and reorganize their attitudes toward that minority, often a generation-consuming tasJs. The durability of racist attitudes toward African Americans and Native Americans in large portions of the United States offers a case in point. So too do the continuing negative attitudes toward Europe's Romany, especially in Central Europe, where Andrej Skolkay recently found 65 percent of the Slovaks opposed to having a Romany neighbor, and a hard core, self-declared intolerant element of between 15-25 percent of the population in both contemporary Slovenia and Slovakia likely to engage in hate speech and public action against "dark" foreigners.

As for those rare instances where ethnic identity, class, and territoriality converge, virtually every conceivable category of participants and means of conveying demands can frequently be found. Of particular note, though, are two categories of active participants that are found far more frequently in this arena of ethnopolitics than others: terrorist groups and the systemwide governments. In Northern Ireland, for example, both the Protestants and Catholics have had terrorist organizations committed to their respective cause. In some instances, their die-hard members continue to operate. As in the case of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, the presence of such extremist, extra-constitutional, paramilitary organizations tends to interject an erratic and uncontrollable element into the policy process. It was, in part, in reaction to the terrorists that the British government had to become an active, direct participant in Ulster politics in its effort to manage the communal conflict there, much as the United States government eventually had to challenge the "states' rights" position of the southern states in its federal system in order to end racial segregation in America a century after its civil war ended.

There are two particular areas involving policy responses to ethnopolitical demands where our study suggests the need for further research: Who receives the demands? And, potential patterns of response to them? We will thus limit our observations here to a few brief reflections on the comparative role of governmental actors in this area, and-more broadly-to some of the problems related to studying policy responses.

In the case of ethnoterritorial conflict, the central government and the system-wide political parties are almost invariably the recipients of demands. This is especially true, as would be expected, in unitary political systems, but also holds for federalized countries such as the United States and Canada, though in these instances the state/provincial/ cantonal level is often as involved in the policy process as the central government. A similar pattern emerges when one considers ethnoclass conflicts over immigrants and foreign nationals; however, a broader range of demand-recipients appear to be also involved in these issues. Conflicts over the rights of immigrants, for example, frequently involve the legal system, unions, or employers more than high-level governmental institutions or system-wide political parties, except where the latter choose to co-opt the "foreigner" issue.

How the recipients of the demands respond is a more difficult matter to summarize. With regard to ethnoterritorial conflicts, a diverse set of policy responses have been utilized in Western societies. These, however, can be grouped into two broad (and largely self-evident) categories. Recipients of demands have either tried to accommodate the demands of ethnoterritorial spokesmen by granting at least some concessions or they have responded with hostility to such demands. On balance, the states in the advanced democratic world and postcommunist Central Europe have generally gravitated towards the pragmatic position that accommodation is preferable to conflict. Indeed, the only form of institutional accommodation that was long rejected by system-wide leaders in most Western states involved proposals to federalize fully their polity, federalism being initially equated with separatism by system-wide elites. Even here exceptions abound, beginning in the mid-1970s when post-Franco Spain accepted federalism for its Basque and Catalonian provinces as a necessary step toward democratization and continuing in the volatile climate of democratic politics in postcommunist Europe when the Czechs and Slovaks moved beyond federalization and split their country.

In part, the nature of the response has reflected the degree of mobilization exemplified by the ethnopolitical group and the economic or political importance of their region as much as the specific demands being conveyed. Those regions with the greatest mobilization and of greater importance have, predictably, received the most accommodative responses in advanced democratic systems.

Partisan considerations also weigh heavily in explaining ethnoterritorial policy in the democratic world. The importance of the Welsh and Scottish seats in Parliament to the Labour Party's ability to remain competitive with the Tories in British elections, and of Quebec's vote to the ability of Canada's Liberal Party to govern in Ottawa have thus led these parties to endorse, respectively, assemblies for Scotland and Wales and greater federal autonomy for Quebec.

Plus there is, the economically measurable value of a region to the center and/or its psychological importance can become a powerful consideration in weighing options when faced with separatist demands and the prospects of civil war. The large Serbian minorities in Croatia and Bosnia versus their very small number in Slovenia and Macedonia goes far in explaining the different levels of military commitment that Belgrade made between 1991 and 1995 to retain these diverse parts of the former Yugoslavia, just as Kosovo's status as the cradle of the Serbian nation continues to explain Belgrade's unwillingness to part with that now almost entirely Albanian-speaking and Muslim province. Quite apart from any general commitment to the concept of unity, the discovery of oil in eastern Nigeria made Biafi-a's secession unthinkable in the late 1960s. Conversely, Slovakia's need for investment capital ma.de it easier for Czechoslovakia's Czech leadership to contemplate the partition of their country in 1991-92. The choices that have been made have varied, but circumstances have generally made those choices decisive ones even when they have proven to be wrong, as in the case of Belgrade's 1991-95 efforts to hold onto Bosnia and Croatia and 1999 resistance to international intervention in Kosovo.

The issues generated by the presence of large numbers of foreign workers and immigrants in the advanced democratic world have, comparatively, been approached with greater ambivalence by political leaders. As we have seen, the flow of foreign workers into Europe, and to a lesser degree of citizens from the "coloured commonwealth," in Britain, was initially greeted with a policy of "studied neglect," justified in the case of the foreign workers by the rationale that they were only temporary additions to the domestic work force. As the permanency and number of foreigners became issues in their own right, governments found it increasingly difficult to retain a policy of passive neutrality.

As in most cases of politics, context was a major factor affecting policy response even in the pre-9/11 world. It was easier to use restrictive measures where the foreign presence was concentrated in foreign workers on work visas than immigrants who entered Britain as Commonwealth citizens or-for that matter-against the illegal immigrants from Mexico in the United States, given the generally delicate nature of U. S.-Mexican relations. With the rise of electorally successful anti-immigrant parties, the balance shifted in the 1990s with anti-immigrant rhetoric streaming from the mouths of the leaders of established parties as well as from the Le Pens. It is too early to speculate on the effects that the current instances of terrorism in Europe will have on policy toward Europe's "foreign" communities; however, a further tightening of oversight is already discernible.

Context has also significantly affected ethnoclass politics in the postcommunist and developing worlds, again with the "foreign" element being the target of the political process rather than the instigator of political demands despite the limited, outsider protection that the Romany enjoyed as long as the governments of postcommunist Europe were courting NATO and the EU for membership. Under less scrutiny, and sometimes belligerently selfassertive of their independence, developing world states have addressed the "foreigner" issue with even less ambivalence.

 As to the pivotal role of governmental institutions reacting to ethnopolitical demands, even within democratic systems it differs depending upon the nature of the conflict. In the area of ethnoterritorial politics, governments most often find themselves in the position of responder to the demands. In the area of ethnoclass politics, however, as the focus of various types of demands from a variety of sources, governments will more often see their role as that of a mediator or broker of competing interests. Hence the occasional schizophrenic appearance of policies involving immigrants, foreign workers, and refugees where the government concurrently pursues policies designed to assure foreign nationals, immigrants, and sometimes international overseers of their civil rights, while simultaneously seeking to placate domestic opinion by halting the inflow of additional foreigners and even encouraging those present to return to their home countries. Yet, even where the government adopts a clear and decisive policy in response to ethnopolitical issues, there is inevitably a problem of measuring its "responsiveness" to the matter at hand. What may seem speedy progress to a majority community making concessions to what it perceives to be a noisy minority may seem indecently long to those who have been historically discriminated against or reside at the bottom of a society's socioeconomic ladder. Alternately, if the decision is to do nothing, considerable time may pass before the conveyers of the demands realize it.

Thus, the two most basic aspects of ethnopolitics likely to be affected by policy developments are (1) the nature of ethnopolitical movements and their mode of operation, and (2) the nature of subsequent ethnopolitical demands. The emphasis on these areas underscores our operating presumption throughout this study: that ethnic-laden issues normally defy permanent settlement. This does not mean that ethnic issues are by definition nonbargainable; in fact, most of our studies underscore the high degree of bargainability characterizing ethnopolitical issues. Moreover, political elites seem to have considerable latitude in terms of policy implementation, especially as long as the majority of the public remains unmobilized. But political settlements are almost never permanent. Even the partition of Czechoslovakia did not end tension between the derivative governments, although it did downgrade the issues from concern with the forn1 of the state to such matters as the disposal of public properties and the access of Czechs and Slovaks to universities in the resultant states. Generally, ethnopolitical decisions are always subject to changing social, economic, and international conditions; consequently, they are subject to renegotiation. It is only when the contrary presumption is adopted, that the current political status quo is the proper base for comparison, that these issues become no longer susceptible to political bargaining.

In the area of ethnoterritorial conflict, the impact of policy responses has taken several directions. Generally, though, the key variable in determining the mode to be used for articulating demands has been the degree to which the existing regime is willing to entertain and, at least in part, respond to them. Thus, in Britain, where political leaders were willing to negotiate most of the last quarter century, the principal means selected to express ethnoterritorial demands have been system-participatory, primarily ethnoterritorial parties. Conversely, where the relevant political leadership seemed to be insensitive to ethnoterritorial demands or repudiated their legitimacy, ethnopolitical organizations tended to develop as clandestine, system-challenging actors. The specific level of political violence employed, in turn, has tended to correlate in the advanced democratic world with (a) the degree of insensitivity exhibited by the established leadership, (b) the number of overlapping cleavages encapsulated in the political conflict between ethnic groups within the same region, and between the ethnoterritorial actors and the central authorities, and conversely (c) the degree to which the members of these ethnoterritorial communities share cross-cutting ties and interests with the other members of the broader political community.

The impact of policy responses to ethnoterritorial demands also affect seven generates-subsequent demands for additional action. Responses involving institutional accommodation are likely to create a basis for new demands for further administrative or decision-making autonomy. Even primarily symbolic gestures may increase expectations and desires, and a seemingly favorable reception to ethnoterritorial demands followed by little substantive action may increase the ante the next time around. Alternately, it might deflect ethnoterritorial pressure for a substantial period of time. The introduction of violence into the conflict, however, essentially complicates the situation, because the violence itself becomes a focal point for demands and responses. That, in turn, tends to steer governmental responses away from the avowedly more basic issues of the conflict, and invariably diminishes a government's inclination toward accommodation.

What seems to be most important vis-a-vis the nature of subsequent ethnoterritorial demands is the ability and willingness of elites from each perspective to reach mutually agreeable rules of the game or patterns of interaction. This need not result in a full-blown consociational resolution; in fact, as our case studies suggest, that option is usually time-limited because collaborative ethnonationalists are highly vulnerable to being outbid by more militant spokesmen for their communities. Still, it can be something akin to consociational politics-a bargaining process based on mutually accepted principles of cooperation.

As for ethnoclass conflict, the impact of public policies there appears to depend on whether the conditions affecting the lives of the "outsiders" (including those holding citizenship) or their presence in the host country is the central question. Policy responses regarding the former do not appear to have had a major impact on those raising such issues, perhaps because these issues have been too diffuse in character to be satisfied by specific governmental policies. However, policy responses involving the latter have had an impact on subsequent demands, and equally importantly, the morale of the targeted communities. Most commonly, as minority demands have increased in scope, public support for the parties opposed to their presence has grown. Yet the civil rights protection they have received has never fully satisfied the concerns of these communities, largely because believing in that protection has required them to trust in the long-term goodwill of a host population that in large rneasure continues to support anti-immigrant and anti-Romany laws. In a worse-case scenario, the ambivalent policies aimed at protecting "outsiders" may have gradually hardened the frustration of many of these communities by awakening expectations that have been grievously disappointed.

Further, the policy responses when the foreigners themselves are the issue do not appear to have had much of an impact on the nature of the antiforeigner, anti-Romany, movements actively promoting this perspective in advanced democratic and postcommunist states. At most, such policies as those suspending further immigration have modestly deflected the potential growth of these organizations. The most important variables involving polices in this area, however, remain not the presence of the antiforeigner parties but the dynamic nature of the economic and political conditions in which the policy processes function. To date these have consistently kept the "foreigner" issue salient, if not ever more significant in the political systems of the developed world.

Ethnoclass minorities are still more the target of political action than the originators of proposals designed to improve their status; territorialized minorities in the advanced democratic world, the democratizing postcommunist world, and developing world are still the primary spokesman for their own cause. The tools of management still stress accommodation in the economically developed states of North America, Western Europe, and postcommunist Central Europe, although in the realm of ethnoclass politics the groups whose demands are to be accommodated are more often the domestic majorities rather than the minority communities. Meanwhile, repression remains the major tool of control in the developing world, particularly with respect to dissatisfied minorities with a territorial base seeking greater control over their own affairs.

That stated, the face of ethnic conflict in today's world has altered considerably from what it presented half a century ago or even a generation ago. During the 1950s, the most visible manifestation of ethnoclass politics in the developed world was the quest by black Americans for equality in American society, and their struggle to end segregation was gradually being achieved, albeit still primarily in courtrooms rather than the halls of Congress. As for the ideal of "national self-determination," prior to decolonization when the idea of nation-building was first gaining currency-discourses involving self-determination were generally restricted to either the right of the "captive peoples" of Eastern Europe to throw off the communist regimes imposed on them by Soviet occupation or the right of European colonies to gain independence, not the right of the territorialized minorities in the colonial possessions to Balkanize Asia and Africa into hundreds of economically nonviable but more or less ethnically homogenous states.

By the 1970s, the issue of self-determination had been commandeered by Western Europe's regionalized minorities, as well as dissatisfied territorialized minorities in developing countries; however, for the most part, the demands of those groups seemed tractable. Sri Lanka's Tanlll minority was still seeking Spain, Ulster, and Sri Lanka and of unsettled if nonviolent conflicts such as that between Greek and Turkish Cypriots over the future of their island has gradually altered the conflict-management processes involving ethnic conflict. Whereas formerly states saw ethnic conflict in internal terms and sought to respond to it inside their borders, their constitutional system, and alone-France and Spain, for example, each dealt individually with their Basque communities-conflict-management options now include a growing number of extra-systemic approaches toward ethnopolitical issues.

A considerable number of "options" can be grouped under the "extra-systemic" rubric. Some involve decisions voluntarily reached by the parties to the dispute to resolve or manage it in a controlled if sometimes unconventional manner. The decision to split Czechoslovakia into two states is perhaps the most conspicuous example of this approach, but so too are the Indian Sri Lankan Accord and the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, both of which involved bringing outsiders into the conflict-management process. Also falling into this loose category would be the willingness, at least prior to 9/11, of several European states to "upload" decisions involving the rights of non-EU citizens in EU member states to the decision-making bodies of the EU. These devices can be of an imposed nature, however: for example, when outside force is used to restore order where governments have been unable either to accommodate or repress successfully the demands of militant ethnopolitical communities and disputes are escalating toward civil warfare.

The most extra-systemic devices as well as the fastest growing area of extra-systemic conflict management are those involving the injection of outside actors into ethnic conflicts via peacemaking and peace-enforcing military activity, peacekeeping action, postconflict institution-building, and sometimes the prosecution of war criminals. Indeed, it was the severity of ethnic conflict in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia that prompted the reevaluation of the provision in Article II (7) of the UN Charter, which formally prohibited the UN from intervening in matters falling "essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state." Civil wars were once routinely viewed as falling under this provision, and peacekeeping forces had to be approved by a member state before they could be deployed on its soil. Now, international law permits action where refugee flows into neighboring states render civil wars international, as we]] as where internationally defined war crimes are taking place.3 As for the deployment of peacekeeping forces in areas of communal unrest, although the practice is not recent-the UN entered the fray in the Congo in 1960 and Cyprus four years later, and British troops have been performing a peacekeeping mission in Northern Ireland since the early 1970s-the pace at which the UN and others have launched these operations sharply increased during the 1990s. In the first five years of that decade, the UN alone undertook as many peacekeeping operations as it had in its previous history. Moreover, unlike its previous peacekeeping operations, most of which involved patrolling cease-fire zones between states, the majority of these involved the particularly costly (in finances, lives, and duration) area of communal peacekeeping.

Finally, among the extra-systemic conflict-management devices involving outside parties, by far the most ambitious undertakings are the postconflict institution- and community-building operations in areas of continuing communal conflict (e.g., the UN's position in post-civil war Bosnia and Rwanda). This expansion of responsibilities beyond the peacekeeping activity of interposing troops between opposing sides is understandable. In most of these areas, communal warfare has destroyed the legitimacy of such preexisting institutions for conflict control as the courts, police forces, and the military, if not the institutions themselves. Moreover, while the reconstruction processes are underway; these duties too customarily fall on the intervening parties, especially where such delicate tasks must be performed as part of a peace settlement agreement as the repatriation of refugees to their former homes in zones that have been "ethnically cleansed." In two instances, Bosnia and Kosovo, the UN has even undertaken tasks of political tutelage and exercises tight control over the process of democratization, complete with the right to dismiss duly elected officials.

To date, this shifting nature of communal conflict management, especially in the area of ethnoterritorial conflict, has encountered difficulties at two levels. First, as in the case of India's peacekeeping venture in Sri Lanka, it has often been difficult to keep the peacemakers out of the conflict. Second, the models available for use in these extra-systemic approaches to conflict management have been essentially the same (usually authority-centered or regime-centered) devices, which have often accommodated ethnic demands in advanced Western democracies but whose track record is weak beyond that world.

Under any circumstances, peacekeeping operations in areas on the verge of, in the midst of, or just emerging from communal warfare is politically sensitive and extraordinarily difficult. Even if the intervening party enters the fray in a neutral capacity-and much intervention has been done under the guise of peacekeeping by actors with personal agendas in the outcome of the dispute-the challenge is onerous and gratitude hard to find and usually fleeting when found.

The problem begins with the multiple tasks confronting the individual peacekeeper. Neither police nor soldiers, peacekeepers perform roles that simultaneously require them to have automatic weapons on their shoulder to transmit a sense of security to the world around them, the personal tact necessary to negotiate street quarrels between members of formerly warring communities, and a tool belt at the waist should a child's bicycle require repairs. Unfortunately, as the need for peacekeepers and the danger of peacekeeping operations have grown, the number trained for this specialized task has dwindled.

The most serious problem confronting peacekeeping units nonetheless remains retaining the aura of neutrality necessary to function in the heated environment of communal conflict. Their missions are invariably structured in terms of implementing and/ or preserving some form of status quo. It may be an imposed or negotiated cease-fire line, as in Croatia, or an agreement like the one the Indian Peacekeeping Force operated under in Sri Lanka, or a curfew law like the one British troops enforced in Ulster. The problem is the same. In communal conflicts, the issue is the legitimacy of the status quo itself, however it may be defined. Enforcing cease-fire lines established while one paramilitary was in retreat, or international agreements that require the resettlen,ent of the displaced to their homes in ethnically cleansed areas have the effect if not the intent of identifying the peacekeepers with "the other side" in the minds of at least some of the people.

Where peace has been imposed by outside forces, the peacekeepers may lose their image of neutrality before they are even on the disputed territory. Hence, the leverage of international mediators brokering intercommunal conflict is usually at its peak before the peacekeepers are deployed and when their violence-ending presence is most likely to be interpreted as beneficial by all parties.

Plus, both as a tool of preventive diplomacy designed to prevent conflicts from spreading or rekindling, and as a part of postconflict rebuilding processes, peacekeeping forces have become essential components of recent extra-systemic approaches to managing communal conflict. Only in the atmosphere of security that they provide can individual rights be secured and institutions of governance and justice capable of acquiring legitimacy be constructed. The rebuilding process, however, can also become too heavily dependent upon them. Those returning to ethnic minority enclaves in areas of Bosnia and Kosovo, in particular, have tended to become psychologically dependent on their presence-a recent trend in refugee returns that is likely to extend the stay of peacekeeping missions which in general tend to be openended in areas of communal violence.

In these institution-building arenas, the removal of peacekeepers is usually linked to the emergence of institutions of not just democratic government, but constitutional government, in which the rights of minorities are protected. In fact, there is no instance in our case studies or beyond in which peacekeeping forces have been withdrawn from areas of communal conflict where the conflict has not flared up again or, as in the case of the removal of the IPKF from Sri Lanka, intensified. Yet, there are no tested models available to today's community-builders, even when backed by a coercive military presence. Consequently they have turned to the models of constitutional government and procedural arrangements of the developed world for their principal designs. To date, however, the ideal of national self-determination has traveled into these areas well ahead of the environmental conditions in which constitutional government gradually developed in the advanced democratic world. To the contrary, cross-cutting ties have been historically weak and unemployment very high (in the 50 percent range and above) in Bosnia, Kosovo, and other postconflict settings, feeding both local insecurities and ethnonational parties, just as the high rate of unemployment and underemployment in France during the 1980s fueled the growth of Le Pen's antiimmigrant party. Furthermore, many of these areas do not have any history of government based on the rule of law or tolerance of the views of others.

Even if models did exist, state-building processes would still be plagued by many of the problems that have beset them in the former Yugoslavia, occupied Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Some of these revolve around the third party state-builders. As Stanley Hoffman has observed, "preventive intervention by the United Nations or a regional organization is a highly intrusive affair."8 It has certainly been so in Bosnia, where international overseers of its democratization process have closed radio stations for inflammatory nationalist broadcasts and nullified the elections of ultranationalist candidates deemed unlikely to participate constructively in the country's evolving political institutions. In the short teml, such intrusiveness generates its own resentment and opposition to international tutelage, even when the international community is providing the promised resource assistance, and often, as has been conspicuously true in Kosovo, it does not. In fact, given the costliness of postconflict peacekeeping and institution-building operations, the see-through commitment of the international community, and the potentially conflicting personal agendas of its major actors are also at issue. Loss of military personnel prompted the United States to drop out of peacekeeping missions in both Lebanon and Somalia between 1982 and 1992 and, as we have seen, both NATO and the EU ultimately placed their desire to expand into postcommunist Europe ahead of their commitment to improve the status of the Romany in postcommunist Europe.

Perhaps the most serious obstacles to postconflict reconstruction are the communities and conflicts themselves. Moving beyond the traumatic memories of violent ethnic conflict requires generations, developing the trust across communal lines that is necessary for durable constitutional government will require at least as long. Some conflicts are so entrenched and zero-sum in nature that they are beyond outsider-or inside-management: for example, the conflict in Chechnya, where grievances have reached the point on both sides where pern1anent warfare and/or secession may seem to be the only alternatives. In still other instances, circumstances may defy existing models for conflict resolution. Territorial autonomy in exchange for refugee return, for example, will be unacceptable where a separatist minority has achieved majority status in its region only by driving out large numbers of the former majority community, as has occurred in parts of Georgia.

Finally, there are the limitations inherent in the institutional arrangements available to those constructing constitutional governments in postcommunal conflict arenas. Military forces have-in their own right-proven to be useful but limited components of peace-building processes beyond providing a shield around endangered minorities. Military occupation can be valuable in assisting the short-term transition to civilian rule as an instrument for quickly implementing reforms and overcoming entrenched opposition.9 In building institutions for the long haul, however, reformers have generally relied on the three macro-level approaches to organizing government authority that have been most frequently utilized to manage ethnic conflict in the advanced democratic world: (a) ethnically inclusive modes of allocating political offices; (b) consociational-like arrangements, typically involving power-sharing constitutional designs and parties organized on a crosscommunal basis; and (c) federal-like distribution of power systems where ethnic divisions are territorialized.

All of these arrangements have utility, but as we have seen each also has its limitations or costs. Power-sharing, ethnic-based allocation of offices, and variations on consociational forms of managing societal cleavages require an enduring goodwill on the part of those making the bargain. Ultimately, all can be undone by outsiders mobilizing ethnic cleavages and/ or outbidding the ruling cartels in appealing to their ethnopolitical communities. Consociational schemes, in particularly, are inherently weak means of managing ethnic conflict in the midst of democratization processes where systemwide parties are not already established and a mobilization of voters along ethnic lines is, as in Slovakia, almost inevitable. Once that occurs. because ethnonational and ethnoclass parties alike derive their strength by exploiting the ethnic divisions in their countries, consociational systems have very diminished chances of survival. Indeed, the collapse of that system in Belgium, once its ethnoterritorial division became politicized in the late 1950s, suggests the vulnerability of these arrangements even where system-wide parties have long existed.

At the same time, arrangements territorializing decision-making authority like those that Belgium implemented during the 1970s offer only a limited, long-term potential for managing ethnoterritorial cleavages. The utility of devolution, regionalization, and federal formulae in accommodating ethnoterritorial demands has been noted throughout our studies. They have proven useful in a variety of settings where the demands are focused on reshaping the regime in a federal direction. There are, however, both short- and potentially long-term costs in adopting this approach even where the territorialized communities are not ethnically diverse. Federalism provides an institutional base for territorialized centrifugal forces; it does not neutralize them. The system was "invented" in the United States not by ethnically distinct colonies who had recently fought against one another, but by a set of colonies largely in the hands of ethnically similar, English-speaking elites who had collaborated with one another a few years previously against a common enemy. Yet, within its framework different economic systems and philosophies about the ownership of human beings were perpetuated until they were finally resolved by a civilwar. Where the units are ethnically and perhaps linguistically diverse, as in Canada, even if their respective communities lack a recent history of animosity, ethnoterritorial objectives can reach a separatist level.

Especially in the fragile and volatile climate of politics in the aftermath of communal conflict and in the developing world, federalism is best viewed as not so much a mode of conflict resolution or even conflict management as a means of buying time. Peacekeeping forces, consociational arrangements where possible, and ethnic balancing acts also function as essentially time purchasing, manipulative devices vis-a-vis ethnoterritorial movements in such environments, just as advisory Muslim councils do with respect to the ethnoclass demands of those communities in Britain and France. For territorialized communities desiring control over their own affairs, however, federalesque modes of accommodation are the ones most likely to be successfully negotiated in a postconflict, institution-building process. But, in the long term, unless other forces are actively set in motion to build cross-cutting cleavages and to facilitate the development of non- or crosscommunal parties and a sense of shared identity among the members of a political system, the prognosis is not good. Thus, in most instances the process of conflict management only begins when federalism is adopted or forced upon the conflicting parties. Further manipulations designed to purchase additional time are almost inevitable, reflected in Nigeria and India's case in the steady growth in the number of, respectively, tribal and linguistically organized states in those federations. For long-term stability, that time must be used profitably, as India appears to have done in fashioning a middle class that transcends the borders of its linguistically drawn states.

In brief, contemporary institution- and community-building, like the management of ethnic conflict in general, is a work in progress, and necessarily so. Just as ethnicity itself is a fluid concept with a proven ability to survive as an important basis of identity and political activity in a changing world, so the search for means of managing the conflict is an evolving undertaking. As ethnoterritorial and ethnoclass conflicts increasingly partake of a greater-indeed, international-dimension unknown in Aesop's time, it is a sign of our age that the struggle to manage these conflicts in modern political systems is becoming as extra-systemic as the conflicts themselves.

For updates click homepage here