Managing Variety: Issues in the Integration and Disintegration of States

Margaret Blunden

Centre for the Study of Democracy
University of Westminster

Spring 1997 Research Papers, Number 12

INTRODUCTION

The integration and disintegration of states is the oldest subject in International Relations. Disintegration, perceived during the Cold War as principally a Third World phenomenon associated with the ending of European empires overseas, has now come to the heart of the Eurasian land mass. The pressures on states to couple externally and to decouple internally are both intensifying in the international system of the late twentieth century. The difficulty of sustaining both the commonality with neighbouring states required for economic prosperity and security, and the internal diversity demanded by increasingly autonomous, potentially separatist, regions or subcultures, becomes ever greater. The question of what is the optimum variety of political entities, and how that variety can best be managed, has never been more pressing.

The paper looks at selected cases of disintegration and integration - disintegration of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia, integration of the Soviet successor states and of the post-national European Union - each seen as an exercise in the management or mismanagement of variety. Variety, a measure of complexity which can be measured along different dimensions - economic, political and ethnic - poses problems at either extreme of its spectrum. Large, multinational empires have historically coincided with authoritarian government, sometimes explicitly justified by what is argued to be the ever present possibility of anarchy and chaos in ethnically and geographically diverse entities. Some measure of variety reduction, in the form of the nation state, with its shared history and sense of identity, is often considered a necessary stage in the transition to democracy. The risks attached to the formation of new nation states may, however, be high. Multinational empires have, historically, a greater tolerance of minorities than do nation states. Democracy itself may promote an exclusive and intolerant ethnicity rather than inclusive and tolerant civic nationalism.

The Soviet Union, a vast entity with extraordinarily little political or economic variety, was ethnically highly diverse. The policies of the Union inadvertently fostered consciousness of ethnic identity, although demand for self determination on ethnic lines played only a small part in its demise. The successor states have to find, in difficult circumstances, unifying mechanisms to contain their multi-dimensional variety if they are to avoid a spiral of successive fragmentation, which would see their territories splinter in the hopeless search for ethnic homogeneity; this was the disastrous path followed in Bosnia. Can they create sufficient national coherence to withstand the intense variety amplification which comes with political and economic liberalisation?

The European Union, a post-national enterprise in integration based on economic and social convergence, has a historically distinctive approach to variety management. The European project differs from classic multinational empires in that its components are themselves democratic nation states, and the processes of integration between them are based on free association, not settlement or conquest. This critical distinction makes possible the survival of a vast political aggregation of imperial proportions, without its usual historical concomitant, autocratic government. The European Union is attempting to ease the coordination of sixteen, and potentially more, highly diverse countries by stipulating political and economic criteria for membership: an unusual form of variety reduction. The signatories to the 1992 Treaty of European Union, mindful of increasing public resistance to the 'harmonization' associated with economic and monetary convergence, have begun to incorporate small counter-balancing elements of diversity. The European Union has now advanced beyond those empires it most resembles in scale, if not in form. Since 1992 it has sought not merely to tolerate diversity but to encourage it in specific dimensions: to moderate blanket homogenisation and variety reduction with some small compensating measure of variety amplification. The success of the European project is important both in itself and as an export model for the reconciliation of unity and diversity elsewhere in the world.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION

The sudden and relatively non-violent disintegration of the Soviet Union, following a spectacular loss of confidence by its leaders in the communist ideology which had cemented it together, took political scientists by surprise. Why did experts in International Relations, Soviet Studies, Strategic Studies - some of the best funded social sciences in the United States - take for granted the stability and cohesion of the Soviet Union? There has been a good deal of soul searching in the political science literature. ₁ The unpalatable conclusion is that neither methods nor data were inherently faulty: the failure was more fundamental and more disturbing. Ted Hopf rejects the case advanced by John Lewis Gaddis, that the problem was a methodological one. What was at issue here, he argues, was not methods or theories as such, but the choice of topics for study. 'Normal science' during the Cold War channeled enquiry into predicting war and peace, East/West co-operation and conflict, but not the future of the Soviet Union. ₂ Walter Laqueur, severe on the failure of Western Sovietology and particularly the revisionism of the 1970s and 1980s, argues that the problem was not lack of information: 'While a considerable body of knowledge was available, it was rejected because it did not suit preconceived belief.' ₃ Western misperceptions derived from the particular setting of what Geoffrey Vickers called the 'appreciative system', defined as a set of readinesses to notice this and to ignore that aspect of reality. ₄ What interested Sovietologists, by definition, was the ideological distinctiveness of the Soviet state, not, for instance, the integrative processes of the largest political entity in the world. They focused their attention on the theoretical categorisation of the Soviet state - for instance, should it be described as an example of 'participatory and welfare authoritarianism' rather than of 'totalitarianism'? - not on the cohesion of the Union, the mechanisms by which it held itself together, and the effectiveness of these mechanisms over time. The question of how political entities generate sufficient unity to contain their diversity, how they manage their variety, how they decide what is optimal variety - some of the enduring problems of politics - barely came into view.

The unifying processes of the Soviet state are, however, peculiarly relevant, practically and theoretically, in the post-Cold War world, when issues of integration and disintegration can no longer be neglected. The Soviet state, like any other political construct, had to find ways of keeping the tensions between uniformity and diversity within critical limits. Its distinctiveness lay in the gigantic scale of the task, for, like its predecessor the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, was, in the phrase of Catherine the Great, more of a universe than a state. The Soviet Union's ethnic diversity manifested itself in the more than 100 nationalities making up the vast federation of the largest state in the world. The Bolsheviks modified the empire they had inherited by creating a federation of socialist republics, with somewhat arbitrary boundaries. Federal in form, it was in practice centralised and unitary. The well established link, evident in the Tsarist as in other empires, between vast territories and autocratic government, remained strong. The unifying mechanism, on which all depended, was a centralised, Russian-dominated, one-party system operating under the rubric of an all-encompassing ideology, Marxism-Leninism. The ruling party for sixty years imposed rigid ideological conformity, stifled dissent, regimented thought, in short virtually eliminated political and economic variety, with all the stultifying effects which accompany extreme homogenisation.

Although rigorously uniform ideologically, the Soviet Union, as a multi-ethnic aggregation covering one-sixth of the world's surface had, with some disfiguring exceptions, that greater tolerance of minorities which distinguishes empires from nation states, ₅ larger and more diverse entities from smaller, more homogenous ones. Containing this ethnic diversity was the condition of great power status, hegemonic dominance and continental-wide stability. The multinational Union had in its time been sustained partly by force and partly by fear: during the Stalinist period the state might be considered to have made war from above on sections of its own population. But, for most of its seventy year span, the Soviet leadership was powerful rather than merely violent, and Hannah Arendt has reminded us of the important distinction between the two. ₆ Power depends on a measure of at least tacit consent. Tacit consent to Soviet power, among wide sections of the population of the vast federation, embraced some limited acceptance of common identity. Some shared political identity, some sense of common membership, emerged and survived. Russian national identity, in particular, remained submerged in the continental-wide Union, as it had previously been in the Empire: pride, legitimacy and self-respect derived from the dominant role played in the Eurasian landmass. In a public opinion poll conducted as late as 1990, 64 per cent of Russians agreed with the proposition that neither Russia without the Union nor the Union without Russia could exist. ₇ The community of Soviet citizens, coexistent with national communities, was an official political construct, but it had, even for non-Russians, some meaning beyond the level of propaganda. The community of Soviet states was not a strong foundation for personal identity, but some sense of commonality and shared interests, going beyond the inescapable economic interdependence, was strong enough to survive the breakup of the Union. The Soviet Union was not just, as some have assumed, the Russian Empire in disguise.

Lenin always believed that the prolific 'national' diversity of the state which he helped to build would gradually diminish, as local ethnic or religious loyalties declined over time. These 'primitive' feelings of the constituent peoples during the early years of the Soviet state would eventually give way to a socialist, internationalist ethos. He was confident that what the Soviets called the 'nationalities' would ultimately fuse together. Like Marx and Engels, Lenin saw nationalism as a weapon deployed by the bourgeoisie for the oppression of the masses. It had no serious content and would not survive the demise of capitalism. Marxist-Leninist optimism was in this, as in other respects, rooted in the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Central to Enlightenment thinking, as John Gray has observed, was 'the hope that human beings will shed their traditional allegiances and their local identities and unite in a universal civilization grounded in generic humanity and a rational morality'. ₈ Faith in Enlightenment rationalism was not, of course, confined to the Soviet Union. Many English speaking Canadians assumed until recently that modernisation and democratisation would somehow cause the ethnic self-assertion of the Quebecois to fade away, that the development of supranational forms of organisation would advance the integration of French and English speakers into larger, functional units geared to economic growth.

Although Lenin was convinced that 'reason' would ultimately triumph, his immediate tactic was to promote the smaller minority languages, partly to weaken the dominant larger nationalities, and partly as a base for the great leap forward into a modern industrial society. People would learn fastest, he believed, if they were educated in their mother tongue. To this end, during the 1920s many of the minority languages of the Soviet Union were written down for the first time. The pace of change was startling. In 1924 textbooks were printed in 25 languages. Ten years later, in 1934, they were being printed in 104 languages. By 1938, 22 different languages of instruction were in use in Uzbekistan alone. ₉ It took more than half a century for Soviet leaders to realise that their assumptions that modernisation meant 'rationalism' were problematic and their tactics at least partially self-defeating. Indeed, the printing of vernacular languages had been for centuries a powerful driver of national consciousness in western Europe and elsewhere. ₁₀ The failure of Soviet citizenship to supersede national consciousness in the way that Lenin had anticipated was no doubt compounded by what John Keane has called the 'self-paralysing contradiction' of the Soviet Union: it was a Russian-dominated Communist party, with a 'Russified definition for securing socialism', yet which was governing through national cadres, promoting national cultures, and encouraging education in local languages. ₁₁ But failure, or at least incomplete success, it would have been in any case. Soviet citizenship appealed to the head, not the heart. It did not have nationalism's extraordinary emotional power. Stalin had good reason to suspend Communist slogans in 1941 and to rally resistance to the German invasion in the name of Russian patriotism.

By the 1960s it was beginning to dawn on Soviet leaders that the 'nationalities question' was not going to go away. The more developed and educated the nationalities became, the more conscious they became of their national identity. The more the country modernised, and industrialised, and printed and propagated its rich variety of languages, the more it empowered national sentiment. Modernisation and the languages policy, instead of eliminating the nationalities question, were actually exacerbating it. Instead of reducing variety, they were amplifying it. In 1982 President Andropov finally acknowledged, albeit implicitly, that the assumptions which had animated more than half a century of Soviet policy on the nationalities were faulty: 'The record shows that the economic and cultural progress of all nations and nationalities is accompanied by the growth of their national self-awareness.' ₁₂

By the 1980s, Soviet leaders had acquired a more sophisticated appreciation of how they might hope to preserve unity amidst this proliferating diversity. They now talked of the 'higher unity transcending national distinctions'; the cohesion of the Union was based on common values, on the shared identity of the 'Soviet people', and on a concept of 'Soviet citizenship' that complemented, rather than supplanted, nationality. The New Party Programme of 1985 hints at what later theorists of the European Union were to call 'layered identities' when it speaks of 'the Soviet people's single culture - socialist in content, diverse in national forms and internationalist in spirit'. ₁₃

It seems that in the 1980s, 60 years after the revolution, Soviet leaders were beginning to understand that Soviet rationalist universalism could never provide a completely satisfying identity, effacing all others. They were groping their way towards a less simplistic, less Enlightenment concept: of unity in diversity, a concept of a single Soviet people with common socialist and inter- national values, co-existing with national diversity. Any long-settled political entity on a continental scale can, in the modern world, only hope to hold together over time if it develops some way of thinking about what should be held in common and what should be diverse, as the European Commission now appreciates. The Soviet Union, at the point of its collapse, was beginning to develop such a sense, it was evolving an answer other than brute force to the tough question facing all political entities: how to generate sufficient unity in order to contain their diversity. The collapse of the communist regime, inherently repressive and corrupt even in its later, milder manifestations, and increasingly callous towards the natural environment, cannot be mourned. The simultaneous collapse of the Union, however, like that of all empires, brought losses as well as gains. The task of reconciling more than one hundred diverse nationalities across the world's largest land mass was an heroic venture. Its abandonment has the quality of tragedy.

The Soviet leaders' loss of confidence in Marxism-Leninism and its inability ever to compete with capitalism fatally weakened the party, the core homogenising and unifying mechanism of the state. Pride in Soviet advancement became tarnished. As Helène Carrière d'Encausse has observed, the explosion of the nuclear power station at Chernobyl had a decisive impact on public perception: many Soviet citizens suddenly realised that, in the USSR, the appearance of power and progress, and the mastery of technology and of nature, masked only weakness, backwardness, technical underdevelopment and destruction of the environment. ₁₄ There is no doubt that popular enthusiasm for communism, evident during the 1920s, had long since died. But it is not self-evident that the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism should have led to the breakup of the Union. National self consciousness is not the same thing as nationalism, and the one does not inevitably lead to the other. Nationalism, in the sense defined by Isaiah Berlin - 'the elevation of the unity and self determination of the nation to the status of the supreme value before which all other considerations must, if needs be, yield at all times' ₁₅ - was quite localised in the last days of the Soviet Union. Although the idea that all multinational empires are condemned inevitably in the modern period to dissolve into nation states is implicit in much of the western literature, ₁₆ the fact remains that in the Soviet Union of 1991, as in the Ottoman Empire of 1918, clamour for national independence was the exception rather than the rule.

A demand for national self-determination, understood largely in ethnic terms, was beyond question an important factor in the relatively prosperous Baltic States, lately and disreputably incorporated in the Union under the secret terms of the 1940 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Although the independence votes did not follow just ethnic lines, the Russian population of Latvia and Estonia were widely perceived as immigrants or occupiers. In Lithuania, where the Russian minority was smaller than the Polish one, the strong Catholic emphasis of the independence movement gave it an anti-Russian flavour. Demands for national self-determination on ethnic lines were also a factor in Moldova, in the Caucasus, and in the western Ukraine, annexed by the Soviet Union during the Second World War. In the Ukraine as a whole, however, politicians leading the independence movement sought the support of the eleven million-strong Russian minority - concentrated in the east of the territory - in a bid to create an inclusive sense of national identity and avoid what was seen as the mistaken ethnic exclusions of the Baltic states. In the December 1991 elections, independence was linked with territory and statehood rather than ethnicity and nationhood, and ethnic Russians were promised a more secure economic future in the Ukraine than in Russia. Majority votes for independence were secured in the main Russian speaking areas, notably the Crimea and the Donbass. ₁₇

The Central Asian states, representing a region larger than western Europe, gained their independence without a popular anti-Russian or anti-colonial uprising. ₁₈ The weak nationalist groups which existed in the region hoped at best for greater autonomy and barely contemplated the possibility of unconditional independence. In Kazakhstan national identity emerged after rather than before independence. In this region, decoupling from the Soviet Union was the reactive response of local communist leaders to events further west, particularly the declaration by Russia of its independence from the Soviet Union and the Russian-Belarusian-Ukrainian agreement of December 1991 to establish a purely Slavic Commonwealth of Independent States. The leaders of the newly independent states - former communist nomenklatura and long-standing obedient servants of the Moscow apparatus - quickly sought a new relationship with Russia, one in which the old links would be protected, not destroyed. President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan maintained that the majority of the Soviet people opposed the disintegration of the Soviet Union. ₁₉ Nazarbayev has repeatedly emphasised the need to maintain close links between the Turkic and Slavic worlds in order to sustain the 'Slavic-Turkic community' which 'constitutes our strength'. ₂₀

Popular demand for national independence no more determined the breakup of the Central Asian provinces of the Soviet Union than it had the earlier breakup of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. ₂₁ In both cases local leaders reacted opportunistically to external events, of very different kinds, which unexpectedly provided an opening to satisfy those ambitions for enhanced status and power which make centrifugalism latent in all political or economic organisations of any size. The manifest economic weakness of the Soviet Union - its economy was increasingly ramshackle by international standards - undoubtedly encouraged a willingness to leave. What was distinctive about the breakup of the Soviet Union was the extent to which imperial dismantlement came from the centre, not the peripheries, promoted by Boris Yeltsin and his advisers for a mixture of personal career and public cum-political objectives.

The group of economists associated with Yegor Gaidar, close to Yeltsin, were already arguing in the late 1980s that the task of reform was too great to accomplish within the vast Soviet Union, with its differing levels of economic development. They urged that it was necessary to make the scale of the task more manageable - in the terms of this paper, to reduce variety - if fundamental economic changes were to have a hope of succeeding. The complexities involved in recreating the economy, a process which embraced a simultaneous transformation of politics, culture, and individual psychology, required some compensating simplifications. Ideas of this kind were not unfamiliar in dissident circles. In the early 1970s Alexander Solzhenitsyn had argued for an abandonment of the empire in order better to tackle the problems of Russia. Echoes of Tom Paine's formulation two centuries before - that a sense of national identity is necessary for democracy - were common among those Russian dissidents arguing for western style liberalisation. In 1991, as in 1917, Russian leaders were willing to implement a 'big idea' with astonishing completeness and with little understanding of the full implications of their actions.

The collapse of most of the European empires in the twentieth century has come from the revolt of the peripheries against the centre. The collapse of the Russian Empire represented more the abandonment by the centre of the peripheries. The metropolis itself, representing Russia, the largest and most dominant nationality, took the lead. Russian leaders' weariness with the burden of cross-subsidisation of other republics - the necessary corollary of the socialist belief that the poorer regions should be developed to a level of equality with Russia - played some part in this calculation. As one of Gaidar's aides put it: 'Why should we bail out these strife-torn regions of Central Asia who share nothing with us - least of all our religion. We would be much better off on our own, for then Russia could become a great power again.' ₂₂ Yeltsin himself identified the problems of the Soviet state in the 1980s with its failure effectively to manage its great variety. He told Margaret Thatcher, when she received him in London in April 1990, that 'it was the failure to grapple with the issue of decentralization which had led to the present troubles. With so vast a country it was simply not possible to run everything from the centre'. ₂₃ The Russian government's abandonment of the Union, the fact that Yeltsin threw his weight, not behind decentralisation, but dismantlement, can, however, best be explained in terms of passing circumstances: the struggle for power between Yeltsin and Gorbachev. Supporting the independence of other republics helped Yeltsin, as President of Russia, to upstage Gorbachev, whose power base was the Union and who could therefore only promise the republics greater autonomy. The sense of relief from having shed a burden was, however, short-lived. Within a very short space of time, most Russians deplored the breakup of the Union.

Interpretation of the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the determining events of the late twentieth century, is still in its infancy. Much is not yet understood. Some things, however, can be said. It is not unequivocally the case, as John Gray declares, that 'the subjects of the former Soviet Union asserted themselves against its power not as persons, but as peoples'. ₂₄ We do not have to conclude that the twenty-first century belongs not to Enlightenment universalism but to atavistic nationalism, racism and obscurantist religion. Gerhard Simon, for his part, is right in saying that the Soviet Union could not have moved in one bound to modern supranationalism without going through the necessary stage of the nation states, since he defines supranationalism as post-nationalism. ₂₅ But whether an aggregation of the continental scale of the Soviet Union could have found other enduring, less determinist, ways of managing its variety, consistent with late twentieth century economic and political expectations, whether it could have democratised without breaking down into small components along national lines - some sort of approximation to nation states - is not clear. China, with its 23 constitutive provinces, five autonomous regions, and three independent municipalities, may yet prove to be an alternative model of achieving reform without dismemberment. The collapse of the Soviet Union does indeed have lessons for the European Union. But it is misguided to conclude, with Mrs Thatcher, that the Soviet Union's collapse demonstrates the futility of trying to construct any large supranational entity, particularly one - the European Union - which remains relatively strong economically and which is sensitive to the need to complement, rather than to efface, national cultures and identities.

In the Soviet Union, centrifugal forces, sometimes nationalist in form but mostly not, were indeed latent, as they are in any large human aggregation. The effect of the breakup of this empire, as of earlier European empires, has certainly been to enhance ethnic self awareness and the potential for ethnic conflict, particularly at a time when liberalisation is amplifying economic and political variety. The challenge to the successor states to manage their variety during this process remains formidable. The question now is, will they be able to create an inclusive sense of national identity, tolerant of diversity, and in turn contain their own centrifugal forces, or will the breakup of the Soviet Union lead to a continuous spiral of disintegration as political splintering gathers momentum? Will the introduction of democracy grease a slide from national identity, inclusive and tolerant, to nationalism, intolerant, homogenising and potentially deadly in its consequences?

CONSTRUCTING THE SUCCESSOR STATES

As Philippe Barret has remarked, we are accustomed to seeing the destruction of empires, and their replacement by a collection of independent democratic states, as a natural progression, the ineluctable path of History. ₂₆ As Gerhard Simon puts it, 'Les vieux États multinationaux étaient condamnés ˆ dispara”tre.' ₂₇ However, the collapse of previous empires, notably the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman, encourages no easy optimism. The Austro-Hungarian empire spawned in its immediate aftermath weak and unstable states, susceptible to nationalism in its most virulent form; the end of the Ottoman Empire, at least in the Middle East, made way for states where democracy and civil society have barely taken root, and gave birth to some of the world's most intractable border disputes. Can the ethnically diverse Soviet successor states create sufficient national identity to coalesce as states? Will they have sufficient coherence to withstand that intense variety amplification which comes with economic and political liberalisation? Can they exploit the opportunities which smaller, more homogenous entities are believed to offer for the development of democracy; and, if they manage to democratise, can they avoid that slippage from national identity to nationalism which democracy appears, regrettably, to facilitate?

The fifteen successor states, based on the dominant, larger nationalities, shared out between them the more than 100 'nationalities' of the Soviet Union. They have, for the most part, to invent themselves today as nation states within the shaky administrative boundaries of the republics created in the early Soviet period. All the successor states face the task of creating national identities and stable territorial states as the condition of political authority and national autonomy. They have to hold the line at a time when disintegrative forces have been encouraged by the breakup of the Union.

The problem facing the successor states is not ethnic diversity as such: modern states have routinely been constructed from ethnically diverse elements. The task of state building is particularly difficult because the construction of national unity coincides with two massive variety amplifiers: the shift from a command to a market economy, and expectations of political freedom. The integrative and homogenising processes of state construction and nation building are necessarily in tension with privatisation, an enormous amplifier of difference. Transition from communist to capitalist economies represents a magnum increase in variety: psychological, cultural, and, potentially, political, as well as economic. This alone helps to explain the widespread tension between governments' desires to obtain the material benefits of the market economy and their continuing attempts to control economic life. The divisive impact of privatisation is particularly acute when, as in Russia, the state leaps in one bound from Marxism-Leninism to Friedmanism, without going through Keynesianism, jumping from extreme regulation to total deregulation, from stifling regimentation to uncontrolled variety, from stasis to chaos.

The problem of uncontrolled variety manifests itself in the relationship between entrepreneurs and politicians in post-Soviet Russia. All too often the autonomous business interests, which theoretically balance the central power of the state in a pluralist society, are not 'co-operating informally but intimately with the polity' - in Gellner's view the mark of successful economies ₂₈ - but are criminal gangs, threatening political authority and social order as well business effectiveness. The demoralisation that is the peculiar legacy of the communist state - born of the cynicism, petty corruption and shabby deceits necessary for day to day survival under communism - has created a political void, an absence of the public, civic virtues. All this exacerbates the inherently fissiparous, disintegrative tendencies of western-style capitalism, with its exploitative self-interest and blatant inequalities, its flaunted self-indulgence and abject deprivation. As Marx correctly identified, it was because the inherently divisive character of rapid industrialisation on capitalist lines was recognised to be politically problematic, even in a pre-democratic period, that western European governments of the nineteenth century deliberately promoted nationalist sentiment. The glow of popular patriotism helped to obscure widening inequalities of wealth distribution.

Nation building requires a sense of membership, of commonality, of sharing, it relates to the collective; economic liberalism promotes diversity and inequality and, at least in its Western form (which provides the model for Russia), fosters individualism and impatience of constraint. Where, as in Russia, a serious attempt is being made to introduce economic and political liberalisation at the same time, the tensions are manifest. The disparities between rich and poor characteristic of capitalist economies offend the sensibilities of people schooled for three generations to see 'speculators' as enemies of the state. It is difficult to reconcile the disruptive processes of privatisation with the immediate expectations of new electorates. The divisive impact of capitalism is here and now. Its potential for the broader reconciliation of interests, lifting the standard of living of whole national communities, is distant and unreal. Voters look for instant benefits. Economic disparities can quickly transmute into ethnic or sectarian resentment.

Democracy itself constitutes a condition of prolific variety, so much so that, it is argued, it is only possible in nation states with a counter balancing measure of homogeneity. In fully democratic systems, as John Keane remarks, 'everything is in perpetual motion. . . . There is difference, openness and constant competition among a plurality of power groups to produce and to control the definition of reality'. ₂₉ Will the creation of smaller units, nation states which theoretically enjoy a greater measure of commonality and a sense of shared membership than empires can hope for, make possible the secure establishment of democracy with what John Keane calls its 'multilayered political and social mosaic'? ₃₀ Or, alternatively, given that the successor states remain ethnically mixed - Khazakhstan, for instance, has more than 100 distinct ethnic groups - will democracy fuel ethnic nationalism, intolerant and potentially exclusive of minorities?

The prospects for political stability in the ethnically varied successor states must depend on avoiding the Romantic version of the nation as a seamless, organic cultural unit, and, instead, on promoting civic nationalism, a more voluntaristic and pluralist conception of the nation as a rational association of common laws and culture within a defined territory. ₃₁ This, the Western European model of the nation, emphasizes the importance of a shared territory, common laws and institutions, and the legal equality of citizens. Civic nationalism implies an acceptance of variety - at its best a celebration of it - and provides the framework for managing it. Ethnic nationalism rejects variety - its values are exclusivity and homogeneity. The practice of democracy, to which most of the successor states officially subscribe, does not necessarily promote civic nationalism. The tensions between democracy on the one hand and the concept of a broad inclusive civic nationalism on the other are evident in Latvia and Moldova, where substantial parts of the electorate see the presence of large Russian populations, and Russia's claim to protect the interests of the 25 million Russophones living outside the borders of the Federation, as particularly threatening. About half a million post-1940 Russian settlers born in Latvia could become citizens by the end of the century, but another 300,000 will be left in limbo, subject to quotas expected to allow only about 2,000 persons per year to be naturalised.

However, democracy, which serves to undermine civic nationalism in some circumstances, may facilitate it in others. Experience in the larger states is positive in some respects. The most prominent supporters of civic nationalism in the post-Soviet Empire, at least for internal purposes, have been the leaders of the 'big two', Boris Yeltsin in Russia and Leonid Kravchuk in the Ukraine, representing 150 million and 50 million inhabitants, respectively. In both territories the formation of a multi-ethnic 'nation state' has coincided with a serious attempt to introduce democracy. Civic nationalism is also established in Lithuania, which has accorded citizenship to all residents, irrespective of nationality. Former President Kravchuk's success in the first Ukrainian presidential election of December 1991 owed little to ideology or policy. He managed to symbolise national unity and the reconciliation of the eastern and western parts of the country. ₃₂ So far, ethnic tensions have not been acute and separatist tendencies have been contained: Crimean independence is now a less pressing issue, and has not produced the sort of violent conflicts seen in the Caucusus and Moldova. Ethnic diversity and democracy may have been mutually reinforcing, preventing the domination of Ukrainian politics by either Russian re-unionists or Ukrainian ethnic nationalists. Ukraine's variegated population cannot easily be governed by either extreme. ₃₃ As Renée de Nevers has argued, the democratisation of previously authoritarian states may provide an opportunity for allaying ethnic tensions, particularly by building ethnic variety into party or coalition structures. ₃₄ The enduring stability of the Ukraine's large territorial state, and the associated model of civic nationalism are, however, heavily dependent on economic prospects. Successful long-term integration depends on substantially meeting the economic promises made to the electorate, particularly its Russian element.

The commitment both to democracy and a broad inclusive civic nationalism have so far survived exceptionally difficult circumstances in Russia. Russia has the unique problem of being simultaneously an ex-empire and a continuing multi-racial aggregation of imperial dimensions. There is no shared Weltanschauung. The problems of creating a coherent national identity, embracing a limited set of shared assumptions, are at their most acute here. While some argue that the end of the Union proves the opportunity for national renewal, modernisation and democracy, many more have yet to come to terms with the abrupt decline from superpower status, and the associated unprecedented losses in territory - which have returned the country's frontiers roughly to what they were in the mid-seventeenth century - as well as in economic potential and population. Russian pride, self-worth, legitimacy, and historical identity derive from its extraordinary expansion, its dominance within the Eurasian land mass, in a state covering one-sixth of the earth's surface. The great majority of Russians, it is believed, now see the collapse of the Union as a break with Russian history, not an opportunity for the future. Popular consciousness is still that of inhabitants of an empire, not a nation state. ₃₅ The political elite, for its part, is said to be 'clinically disturbed'. ₃₆

The political debate echoes the theory that equates nations with democracy, and empires with autocracy. Since the 1980s, radical democrats have seen the end of empire as necessary for a new democratic future for Russia. Andrei Sakharov believed until his death in December 1989 that national self-determination was a necessary preliminary to becoming a normal, modern, democratic state. Russia, the radical democrats argue, could not become a democratic state unless it consciously renounced its empire since, in the twentieth century, democracy was incompatible with the maintenance of multinational empires. For Liudmila Saraskina, the threat of legitimate national sentiment in Russia taking a damaging, anti-democratic, nationalist form lies in the persistent hankering for a revived imperial role for the country, for a special status for Russia as the arbiter of conflicts in the 'near abroad'. ₃₇ Ethnic nationalism, imperial revanchism, and authoritarianism certainly coincide in the policies of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's 'Liberal Democratic' Party.

In practice, the Russian state, for all its post-imperial trauma, has achieved a remarkable degree of democratisation. The 1996 presidential election was conducted with a degree of openness, on a relatively level democratic playing field, and with a level of media freedom, all of which would have been inconceivable ten years earlier. This in spite of the fact that the continuing levels of diversity in most dimensions of the Russian state might be considered too great to support the additional variety amplification, the messy heterogeneity, the proliferating pluralism, the restless flux, of the democratic process. Post-Soviet Russia, extending from the Baltic to the Sea of Japan, with its 17,075,000 square kilometres, has almost double the land area of the United States. The dimensions of modern Russia remain imperial rather than national. Although the ethnic composition of the state is less varied than that of many other successor states (80 per cent of the population is Russian), differentiation along a number of dimensions - religious, social, philosophical as well as ethnic - has reasserted itself since the lifting of Soviet blanket homogenisation. There is as yet little sign of what Adolph Lowe called 'spontaneous conformity': those common assumptions about the world in which we live and common standards by which we judge our own and each others' actions in that world, those indisputable axioms of democratic societies which provide the foundation of personal liberty and social stability, enabling them to survive as coherent political entities without the need for authoritarian direction. ₃₈ Yet in spite of all this, significant elements of democracy and freedom of expression survive. It is always possible that Russia will lurch towards or other extreme of the variety spectrum, returning either to rigid totalitarianism or sinking into anarchy and chaos. The forces making for a more moderate path, encompassing stability and democracy, are reasonably clear. First, if secessionist pressures are to be weakened within this huge federation, there has to be effective decentralisation and devolution of authority to the republics, counterbalanced by strong and respected central institutions: an exercise in the classic art of variety management. Considerable progress has in fact been made along these lines, in the aftermath of the initial secession in Chechnya. The division of powers between the federal and local governments of the constitution adopted after the December 1993 referendum helped to defuse long-simmering rows about tax revenues and thus to weaken pressures for secession, which at certain points in 1992 and 1993 had threatened to tear the country apart. ₃₉ Secondly, the Russian economy needs to operate sufficiently effectively to meet a moderate level of expectation, or at least to avoid the kind of catastrophic collapse which nurtured fascism in inter-war Germany. Thirdly, policies of major external actors - the United States, the European Union, and Japan, among others - must be constructive politically, economically and psychologically. Internally, much will hang on the capacity of Russian governments to meet psychological as well as social needs: needs for self-respect, identity, memory, roots, as well as for personal and economic security. The psychological element is no less important at the international level. As Isaiah Berlin reminds us, to be made an object of contempt, amused condescension, or patronising tolerance by proud, successful and powerful neighbours, is one of the most traumatic experiences that individuals or societies can suffer. ₄₀

Just as the multinational Soviet Union was not 'condemned to disappear' on the ineluctable path of history, the construction on its ashes of stable and coherent, let alone democratic, nation states cannot be taken for granted. The successor states are, however, for the most part engaged in an inclusive process of nation building, based on civic rather than ethnic nationalism. In spite of the violent conflicts in the Caucusus, Tajikistan and elsewhere, there is relatively little sign of surrender to individual or small-group consciousness, of linking ethnicity to territoriality, of abandoning national unity to a proliferating diversity - the disastrous path followed in the former Yugoslavia. In Central Asia, where there is a broad acceptance of the national and territorial status quo, ₄₁ and elsewhere, gloomy prognoses of widespread ethnic conflict and political fragmentation have not been borne out. It is possible that the Soviet Union will leave a more positive legacy of variety management than did either the Hapsburgs or the Ottomans.

THE DISINTEGRATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

Yugoslavia was formed to bring together the South Slavs in the fit of enthusiasm for national self-determination which accompanied the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire, one of those multinational empires 'doomed to disappear'. Yugoslavia should in theory have become a modern, democratic nation state. For Yugoslavia, as for the other Austro-Hungarian successor states, smaller size and reduced variety should have permitted the emergence of that sense of national identity which is believed to underpin civil society and the participatory pluralist state. Why things did not work out like that in practice is far from clear. Did Yugoslavia have from the beginning such an exceptional level of variety within its relatively small borders that the idea of a shared national identity was always hopeless? If not, why did it collapse? And when it did collapse, why was separation not a peacefully negotiated agreement, as in Czechoslovakia, or in the Soviet Union for the most part, rather than the longest and bloodiest conflict in Europe since the Second World War?

Yugoslavia, a classic western nation state constructed from diverse elements, was never going to be easy to integrate, given its great diversity at the intersection of three civilisations, Catholic, Muslim, and Orthodox, and its peculiarly violent history. The first Yugoslavia, which existed in effect though not in name from 1918 to 1941, certainly suffered from a polarisation between the unitarists (Serbs of Serbia and Montenegro), who were committed to Yugoslavia as the means by which all Serbs could live in the same state, and the federalists (particularly Croats and Slovenes), for whom 'Yugoslavia' meant domination by Serbs. However, good progress was made in accommodating these differences: the dominance of Serbs in the state apparatus was balanced to some extent by the economic power of the Croats and the Slovenes, and during the second half of the 1930s the kingdom of Yugoslavia was a relatively democratic state. ₄₂ The first twenty years of Yugoslav history suggest that the attempt to create a single Yugoslavia was not fundamentally misguided, that expectations of its evolution towards a modern, pluralist, participatory state on familiar European lines were not hopelessly Utopian.

What put paid to these expectations was not internal discord but foreign intervention. The aggression of the Axis powers against Yugoslavia in 1941 was followed by deliberate dismemberment and a four-year civil war. The classic Nazi tactics of setting one ethnic group against another, familiar in eastern and central Europe, had particularly disastrous consequences in Yugoslavia. The Nazi alliance with the Croat Ustashes, racist extremists previously excluded from political life, initiated one of the most tragic ethnic conflicts in Europe this century. The task of reconstruction facing the second Yugoslavia, initiated under communist auspices in 1945, was consequently far more daunting than anything facing its predecessor. The normal processes of integration across ethnic boundaries were impeded here, as in Northern Ireland, by religious differences. Leaders of the Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim communities discouraged mixed marriages. Reconstruction was still, however, not a hopeless task. Post-war communist governments compounded their difficult but not impossible inheritance by smothering rather than healing inter-ethnic resentments, and by constructing a federal republic in which the components were not politically equal citizens with shared political values, but 'free and equal nations and nationalities'. Variety was managed, or rather manipulated, not at the individual, but at the collective, 'national', level. Loyalty was generated first of all to the ethnic or ethno-religious 'nation' and only through that to the federation as a whole. The result was a federation without federal loyalty or a securely anchored federal identity.

The collapse of the federation was intimately related to this communist structure which institutionalised ethnic and ethno-religious differences - exploited to such devastating effect by the Nazis - into supra-individual and totalitarian collectivities. ₄₃ The main concern of the Communist party ruling from Belgrade, with the support of the prestigious Yugoslav army, was to prevent the dominance of any single ethnic group, particularly the Serbs, whose hegemony was blamed, largely mistakenly, for what was now interpreted as the 'failure' of the first Yugoslavia. Like Lenin before them, party leaders aimed to weaken the national sentiment of the principal nationalities, Serb and Croat, while stimulating the development of the national identity of the small ethnic groups (Slovenes, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Muslims). The formal structure of the second Yugoslavia, made up of six republics, and two autonomous provinces within Serbia, bolstered authoritarianism and the instrumental manipulation of inter-ethnic relations. It precluded that direct link between the individual citizen and the state which is a solid plank of the modern democratic state. There was little structural or constitutional resilience to cope with the economic downturn of the 1980s, which exacerbated regional differences in standard of living and sapped confidence in self-managed socialism. As the economy disintegrated, political relations between the republics rapidly deteriorated. Slovene, Croat and Serb leaders were increasingly inclined to blame the federation for their problems, and long-suppressed hatred between the communities became ever more apparent at a popular level. There was no lack of warning that a breakup of the federation would unleash uncontrollable violence.

That said, the second Yugoslavia had effectively withstood ethnic violence for 45 years, as its predecessor, the first Yugoslavia, had done for 23 years. During the whole of the Cold War, Yugoslavia was considered the least totalitarian of the communist states, and was the most respected in the West. The first Yugoslavia would not have broken up without violent invasion by the Axis powers. The second Yugoslavia need not have collapsed had the international community devoted a fraction of the efforts to maintaining this multi-ethnic state which it was later to devote to trying to hold together multi-ethnic Bosnia. There were significant reasons why this did not happen.

It was normal during the Cold War for the territorial integrity of states to be held sacrosanct. Prominent international lawyers tended to restrict the right to self-determination to circumstances in which colonial, alien or racist rule prevailed. ₄₄ Once the initial emancipation from the European empires was complete, the line was held against incipient secessionism. Decolonisation was once and for all. Even in those parts of the world such as Africa, where the colonial boundaries were held to have little intrinsic legitimacy, post-independence governments collaborated through the Organisation for African Unity to obstruct further secession. There was a lively appreciation that such developments could unleash uncontrollable violence, potentially threatening the territorial integrity of all concerned. Memories of the violent deaths accompanying the separation of India and Pakistan were still fresh. During the Cold War the international community approved only two post-colonial separations, those creating, respectively, Bangladesh and Singapore.

However, the dramatically unexpected events associated with the ending of the Cold War, particularly the bloodless unification of East and West Germany, lulled the international community into complacency, created a powerful precedent for self-determination along ethnic lines, and gave enhanced influence in the international system to Germany itself. As Jean-Marie Calic observes, German public opinion was attracted by the Croats' and Slovenes' striving for independence which it saw as an expression of its own ideal of self-determination. The fact that such self-determination was couched in terms of ethnic rather than civic nationalism was not a problem for the Germans. Historically, the Germans had conceived of the nation primarily as a community determined by descent, language and culture. Thus they interpreted the right to self-determination differently from the Americans or French, who viewed nationalism from a political rather than an ethnic standpoint. ₄₅ But even the Americans and the French, with their civic conceptions of nationalism, did not long sustain their support for the integrated Yugoslav state which, for all its shortcomings, represented an inclusive nationalism and had served to contain ethnic violence, if not ethnic antagonism. The logic of linking the state, not to integrative nation building and the maintenance of territoriality, but to disintegrative ethnic and religious identities, followed its horrifying course. The passions which would be triggered by dismemberment were grossly underestimated, as was the difficulty of maintaining within smaller successor states that pluralism now abandoned at the national level.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia exacerbated ethnic and religious differences, as is classically the case when states breakup. People who had previously been citizens of Yugoslavia, a broad and inclusive identity, found themselves 'protected minorities' within what they saw as an alien microstate. About four million people were left on the 'wrong' side of the new state boundaries when Croatia and Bosnia - themselves with populations of only about five million and ethnically no more homogenous than Yugoslavia had been - became independent. The Serb minority in Croatia, and the Serb and Croat minorities in Bosnia - each group about one million strong - were, in turn, frustrated in their bid for self determination. It was easy for local leaders competing for power in what seemed a fluid situation to play on fear and to whip up unexorcised hatreds dating back to the Second World War.

Once the breakup of Yugoslavia had been accepted, the framework within which it was accomplished - which groups could exercise the right of self-determination? - was of central importance. It should have been apparent that since pluralism had been abandoned at the Yugoslav level, it was necessary to take action to minimise it within the successor states. However, the Badinter Commission set up by the European Union ruled out options along these lines, options which could have facilitated negotiation rather than conflict. In reply to a question put to Lord Carrington by the Republic of Serbia on whether the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia had the right to self-determination, the Commission interpreted that right more narrowly than it might have done had it been aiming to be consistent with the Helsinki Final Act. As Kamal Shehadi points out, EC policy, instead of favouring a peaceful negotiation of the Serb-Croat and Serb-Muslim disputes, virtually eliminated the possibility of a negotiated change in boundaries. ₄₆ Instead, the Commission could have recognised internationally-supervised plebiscites in the disputed areas of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

As Thierry de Montbrial has pointed out, in the world of international relations as it is practised, governments shamelessly justify their actions in terms of the principles which happen to suit them at the time:

On pourrait ainsi justifier la Grande Serbie au nom du droit des peuples *agrave; disposer d'eux-mêmes, et condamner l'offensive croate en Krajina de l'été 1995. Mais, en l'occurrence, l'objective des Occidentaux étant a ce moment-lˆ de corriger le déséquilibre créé par l'expansion des Bosno-Serbes, ils ont choisi dans ce cas précis de mettre l'accent sur le respect des frontières de 1991.

(One could justify Greater Serbia in the name of the rights of people to self-determination and condemn the Croat offensive in Krajina in the summer of 1995. But, in practice, the objective of the Western powers being at that moment to correct the disequilibrium created by the expansion of the Bosnian Serbs, they chose in this particular case to place their emphasis on respect for the frontiers of 1991). ₄₇

The end result was not only the disintegration of a historically enduring and potentially coherent nation state, but its violent deaththroes and - its aftermath - the creation of microstates, still indeed not homogenous, but with the values of homogeneity. The greater tolerance of the pluralistic state, and the dangers for freedom of the would-be homogenous state, were spelt out at the end of the last century by Lord Acton. ₄₈ Using the term 'nation' in the technical sense in which the Yugoslavs and the Soviets used it - to refer to an ethnic group - he wrote:

the coexistence of several nations under the same State is . . . the best security of its freedom. It is also one of the chief instruments of civilisation. . . . The combination of several nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society. . . .Where political and national boundaries coincide, society ceases to advance, and nations relapse into a condition corresponding to that of men who renounce intercourse with their fellow men.

The effective management of variety is now more difficult in the Yugoslav successor states than it was in Yugoslavia itself. There are powerful pressures for further splintering in Bosnia and from the Albanian community within Serbia. The external, no less than the internal, tasks are formidable The microstates cannot long remain isolated, economically, culturally, intellectually, or any other way, from each other. Decoupling normally reduces intrasystemic strains at the price of exacerbating intersystemic ones - reduced variety within the system means increased variety between systems. In this case, intrasystemic strains are not reduced - they are indeed exacerbated - while intersystemic ones, relations between the microstates, have become more complex. The best long-term hope has to be for some much larger integrative mechanism, subsuming local fragmentation with its accompanying tensions, dangers and impoverishment, into a greater coherent whole. The European Union, which so conspicuously failed to support either the integrity of the Yugoslav state, or its peaceful disintegration, still remains the best long-term hope for eventual reconciliation in the Balkans, precisely because of its successful experience of civilianising relations between states with a previous bitter history of war.

HOMOGENEITY AND DIVERSITY IN EUROPE

As a general rule, there is nothing new under the sun. The European Union is, however, sui generis. The geographical scale of the enterprise, continental in its scope, is of imperial proportions. But, unlike the empires familiar throughout recorded history, the components of the European project are relatively mature states on the Westphalian model, each itself the more or less successful product of integrated variety on a national basis. The territorial states forming the building blocks of the Union have developed over time that shared sense of national identity which is, in John Keane's view, a necessary precondition for the creation and strengthening of citizenship and democracy. ₄₉ The modern European project is a subtle balancing act in homogenisation and variety. It seeks to preserve the identity and authority of its components - the integrated nations - while sustaining a common framework of law and institutions which reduces anarchic variety and imposes the norms of civil society across international frontiers. During the 1990s increasingly frequent attempts have been made to balance measures of homogenisation at the European level, which have manifestly failed to win decisive public support, with vertical and horizontal variety. The principle - enshrined in the Treaty on European Union - that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the citizen, represents vertical variety by level of government; and the Treaty's commitment to preserve national and regional diversity, and the preference for mutually agreed recognition of differences rather than uniformity (for instance in educational systems), represent types of horizontal variety by form.

European leaders have had, from the beginning, a lively awareness that so ambitious and unusual a project can only hope to succeed with some deliberate reduction of variety, expressed as criteria for membership. A core criterion since the earliest days of the project has been a commitment to the shared values of liberal democracy and liberal economics. The European Coal and Steel Community was based on the principle of equality of the participants before laws jointly made, and any democratic country in Europe ready to accept these principles could join it. Geographical criteria, emphasizing the regional dimensions of a project which has for many states replaced the earlier worldwide affiliations of their colonial empires, have to some extent served as mechanisms for cultural variety reduction. The continuing exclusion of Turkey, overtly justified in terms of the democratic criteria, is widely believed to reflect the existence of a tacit variety reducer: the desire to confine membership to predominantly Christian states. This is a criterion which European leaders, with their avowedly liberal philosophies and large domestic Muslim populations, have not wanted openly to avow. Earlier empires, comparable in scale to the Union, were typically held together by a homogenous administrative and military cadre, imbued with the ethos of the metropolis and drawn largely from the dominant national group. The variety reducers of the European project are not military/bureaucratic personnel but political liberalism, regional proximity, economic performance, and cultural ethos.

The non-imperial, even anti-imperial character of the European project derives from the motivation of its founding fathers, and its inception in a period when the memories of European war were still fresh. The problem, the great evil, which obsessed Jean Monnet, was the recurrence of wars, which he attributed to the instinct for power of nation states restrained neither by laws nor common institutions. ₅₀ Economic interdependence on its own was not enough to achieve unity of purpose among democratic societies, even when they shared common values. Monnet's great idea - the idea which, according to John Kennedy, did more to achieve unity in Europe than any imposition by force ₅₁ - was to put in place between European nations what had already been accomplished within them, to set the standards of legality that are normal within domestic politics in place of the balance of power of the interstate system: that is, to replace international power politics by a civil order. Anarchy at local levels common during the feudal period had been subdued to order by the Renaissance monarchs. Anarchy between European states was to be subdued by a body of law and operating rules which applied equally to every member, and by shared institutions with the power to make decisions. Both processes are, of course, exercises in the reduction of variety.

The replacement of foreign policy by civil politics within the European Union has been so successful as to be invisible. It is now taken for granted that the security dilemma, by which states perceive threats from their neighbours, and, in preparing to defend themselves, are seen as threatening in their turn, has all but vanished. The risks of complacency about peace, of carelessness of the mechanisms which tame and domesticate national rivalries, are largely ignored, as the hard lessons taught by earlier European wars fade in public consciousness. Member states are forgetful of the immense security benefits which the Union has bestowed, and wrongly assume that peace is assured for all time. Monnet himself, who anticipated such complacency, attached overriding importance to the strength of the European institutions, which had to have that power to make decisions which was lacking in the League of Nations or the Council of Europe. Institutions, if adequately structured, could, he believed, accumulate and transmit the wisdom of successive generations as no individual could hope to do. Some element of the supremacy of supranationalism over intergovernmentalism was central to the core purpose of replacing international power politics, with all its potential for war, with a civil order.

The idea that lasting security depends on a measure of supranationalism - reducing the variety of decision-making - has lost its potency as decades of peace in Europe have given governments the opportunity to reassert their autonomy and independence. In the last decade the power of the Council of Ministers, representing intergovernmentalism, has become stronger, and that of the Commission, representing supranationalism, has become weaker. The British government of John Major consistently represents the Treaty of European Union as a charter not of union but of intergovernmentalism, that is - in the terms of this paper - weakening the original element of variety reduction. Recent British governments have extolled the benefits of variety amplification in Europe: economic liberalisation, free trade, widening membership. This is not entirely because they have forgotten the hard lessons of 1914 that Free Trade does not 'break down the barriers that separate nations' as Richard Cobden had optimistically believed. ₅₂ Security is conceived of in military terms and associated with NATO, not with the European Union.

In present day Europe, it is the Germans who most faithfully retain the insight that the European project, as an instrument for peace, must reduce its variety if security, the fundamental underpinning of prosperity, is to be assured. The existence on its eastern border of economically relatively weak and insecure countries has sharpened awareness that strong institutions, incorporating supranationalism as well as intergovernmentalism, are essential for the maintenance of peace; indeed, it has heightened the perception that widening of the Union has to be balanced by deepening, that variety has to be managed.

In Reflections on European Policy, written in 1994 for the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag, Wolfgang SchŠuble and Karl Lamers argue that the way to prevent a return to the unstable pre-war system, with Germany caught in the middle between East and West, is to integrate Germany's central and eastern European neighbours into the western European post-war system and to establish a wide-ranging partnership between this system and Russia. The European Union cannot effectively widen unless it deepens at the same time:

Deepening is a precondition of widening. Without such further internal strengthening, the Union would be unable to meet the enormous challenge of eastward expansion. It might fall apart and once again become no more than a loose grouping of states unable to guarantee stability. ₅₃

This conviction of the German government and all the major parties that widening must also mean deepening stems from the realisation that the stronger centrifugal forces associated with increased size have to be balanced by enhanced centripetal forces, that increased diversity has to be matched by strengthened cohesion. Whereas the continental scale and variety of previous European empires were held in check by autocratic government, the advocates of deepening within the European Union rely for its cohesion on common supranational institutions. The alternative policy favoured by the Major government - enlargement of Union membership to the east accompanied by further economic liberalisation, and the reinforcement of competitiveness - would multiply variety to the point of political incoherence. This might possibly serve economic purposes in the short term, but it is doubtful whether it would foster that enduring political stability on which security and, ultimately, economic prosperity depend.

The issue of variety is only one of the challenges of reconciling unity and diversity which have become more acute for the Union during the 1990s. The core European objectives of economic and social cohesion, based on a high degree of economic and social convergence do, of course, represent variety reduction on the grand scale. The acquis communautaire is a corpus of homogeneity. The Treaty on European Union reiterated the commitment to reduce disparities between the levels of development of the various regions and to remedy the backwardness of the least favoured, usually rural, ones. However, the uniform macroeconomic principle - an open market economy with free competition - is itself a variety amplifier in microeconomic terms. While potential new members from the former communist bloc are most struck by the diversity of the open market, in the older, established, liberal democracies to the west it is the homogenisation associated with economic and social convergence which is most noticeable, and increasingly resisted. As the referenda on the Maastricht Treaty demonstrated, it has become increasing difficult to secure public support for further measures of harmonization.

During the 1980s the European Commission, long aware of the unpopularity of harmonizing national systems (the dominant method of integration of the 1970s), and of the increasing difficulty of securing agreement, had inclined more towards interchangeability rather than uniformity, that is, the mutual recognition by member states of their different national systems rather than the adoption of one single system. ₅₄ In education this approach has meant encouraging the mutual recognition of qualifications, based on a system of equivalences, rather than the adoption of uniform qualifications. The Maastricht Treaty (article 126) acknowledges the value of the 'cultural and linguistic diversity' of the national education systems. There is also some awareness of the need to balance unity and diversity in cultural matters. 'The Community shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States while respecting their national and regional diversity and at the same time bringing the common cultural heritage to the fore.' ₅₅

The issue of variety and diversity is even more pressing in terms of levels of government. How far can or should the supranationalism of the Union be counterbalanced by an enhanced role for the regions? Pressures for greater regional autonomy - if not secession - are evident in Lombardy, Catalonia, the Basque country, Bavaria, and Scotland. 'Nationalist' leaders in these areas see the variety reduction at the level of Brussels - potential weakening of national governments - as providing the opportunity for variety amplification at the sub-national level.The revival of the culture and identity of those 'submerged nationalities' - the Basques or the Scots, for example - who have lost within the modern nation state so much that was precious and unique in their heritage, is an attractive idea. The creation of the modern European nation state, bringing in its train the cultural domination of the strongest or most numerous group, invariably involved a measure of deliberate cultural homogenisation. Although this discrimination has operated at the level of cultures rather than individuals - individuals from minority or submerged cultures like the Scots or the Welsh proving some of the ablest exponents of the dominant culture - the losses have been immeasurable. Cultural variety reduction has been impoverishing. Some are tempted to conclude from this that separation from the parent state, under the European umbrella and within the logic of subsidiarity, would bring political as well as democratic benefits. It is, however, alarming if local autonomy fuels demands from submerged nationalities for secession from the host state. The nation state in western Europe - based on civic and territorial concepts rather than ethnic ones - has been one of the world's most successful political mechanisms for the reconciliation of unity and diversity. It has been closely associated with the development of democracy. Surrender to a narrow, homogenising regionalism based on small-scale nationalism would risk reviving the dangerous idea of a linkage between ethnicity and territory.

The question of optimal variety, both by level of decision-making and by dimension of commonality or diversity, will present itself in every more acute terms to the European Union, embarked as it is on the most ambitious enterprise of building an aggregation of imperial proportions without its usual concomitant, autocratic government. There are lessons to be learnt from the breakup of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia, very different political entities as they were. As these breakups demonstrate, national or ethnic identity has a resilience often underestimated in the past. However, it is not hopeless to think of constructing over this another identity, supplementing but not supplanting national identity, if this is done sensitively and grounded in common institutions: for instance, a European identity which is political and economic in focus over a national identity which is social and cultural. ₅₆ The collapse of Yugoslavia - a relatively tiny exercise in political construction - emphasises the importance of strong common institutions, particularly as variety increases with additional member states. Widening has to mean deepening. Although blanket homogenisation will be increasingly resisted, gross economic disparities will always potentially encourage separatism, particularly in the event of an economic downturn, which puts integrative political mechanisms under strain. The core ideology - liberal economics and democratic government- has to deliver sufficiently in material terms, or at least relative material terms, in the face of increasing global economic competition, particularly from the countries of the Pacific Rim. The integrative mechanisms have to be robust enough to withstand relative economic disadvantages. The anti-imperialist credo of the European Union - the avoidance of domination or perceived domination by any single nationality within this free association of democratic states - is also crucial. Balancing unity and diversity, containing the tensions between them, managing commonality and diversity along a host of different dimensions - the classic arts of variety management - will have to reach heights never yet attained if the Union is to survive. Integrative mechanisms strong enough to contain variety without stifling it have to be constantly renewed.

OPTIMAL VARIETY

At the end of the twentieth century states are experiencing pressure simultaneously to integrate cross-nationally and diversify internally. Rising economic expectations around the world strain the integrative mechanisms within and across states that cannot deliver in relative economic terms. Those integrative mechanisms based on strong institutions and a broadly based civic identity will better survive these tensions - exploited as they inevitably will be by local leaders ambitious for greater power and autonomy - than those relying on ideology, force, charismatic leadership, or the internal manipulation of balanced ethnicities.

Reconciling national and international integration with the diversification needed for maintaining democracy, with a sense of identity and belonging, and with creative cultural diversity, without surrender to exclusive and intolerant particularities, or animating the dangerous link between ethnicity and territory, will be one of the biggest political challenges of the twenty-first century.

Margaret Blunden
Centre for the Study of Democracy
University of Westminster
London
February 1997

Footnotes

Note 1: John Lewis Gaddis, 'International Relations Theory and the end of the Cold War', International Security, vol. 17, no. 3 (Winter 1992/3). Walter Laqueur,The Dream that failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Back.

Note 2: Ted Hopf, 'Getting the end of the Cold War wrong', International Security, vol. 18, no. 2, (Fall 1993), p. 203. Back.

Note 3: Laqueur, p. 25. Back.

Note 4: Geoffrey Vickers, The Art of Judgment (London: Chapman and Hall, 1965). Back.

Note 5: Bertrand Badie, Les Fins des Territoires (Paris: Fayard, 1995), p. 21. Back.

Note 6: Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York and London, 1969), p. 43. Back.

Note 7: Alexis Berelowitch, 'Le Nationalisme Russe', Politique Étrangère, vol. 57, no. 1, (1992), p. 38. Back.

Note 8: John Gray, Enlightenment's Wake, (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 2. Back.

Note 9: Michael Kirkwood, 'Glasnost, ŇThe National QuestionÓ, and Soviet Language Policy', Soviet Studies, vol. 43, no. 1 (1991), p. 62. Back.

Note 10: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). Back.

Note 11: John Keane, Nations, Nationalism and the European Citizen, CSD Perspectives (Research Papers), Number 2 (London: University of Westminster, Autumn 1993), p. 5. Back.

Note 12: Bohdan Nahaylo, 'Nationalities', in Martin McCauley (ed.),The Soviet Union under Gorbachev (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 82. Back.

Note 13: Ibid., p. 89. Back.

Note 14: Quoted in Thierry de Montbrial, Mémoire du Temps Présent (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), p. 139. Back.

Note 15: Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 338. Back.

Note 16: See, for example: Gerhard Simon, 'La Russie: une hégémonie eurasienne?, 'Politique Etrangère, vol. 59, no. 1, (Spring 1994.) Back.

Note 17: John Morrison, 'Pereyaslav and after: the Russian-Ukrainian relationship', International Affairs, vol. 69, no. 4 (October 1993), p. 685. Back.

Note 18: Roland Dannreuther, Creating New States in Central Asia, Adelphi Paper no. 288 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, March 1994), p. 52. Back.

Note 19: Ahmed Rashid, The Resurgence of Central Asia: Islam or Nationalism? (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1994), p. 119. Back.

Note 20: Quoted in Dannreuther, p. 46. Back.

Note 21: Elie Kedourie, England and the Middle East: the Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, 1914-1921 (London: Mansell Publishing, 1987 [first published 1956]). Back.

Note 22: Quoted in Rashid, p. 3. Back.

Note 23: Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (Harper Collins, 1993), p. 804. Back.

Note 24: Gray, p. 5. Back.

Note 25: Simon, p. 30. Back.

Note 26: Philippe Barret, 'La Raison Impériale', Géopolitique, no. 45 (Spring 1994), p. 17. Back.

Note 27: Simon, p. 43. Back.

Note 28: Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 169. Back.

Note 29: Keane, p. 11. Back.

Note 30: Ibid., p. 7. Back.

Note 31: Anthony D. Smith, 'National identity and the idea of European Unity', International Affairs, vol. 68, no. 1 (January 1992), p. 56. Back.

Note 32: Morrison, p. 685. Back.

Note 33: Strategic Survey 1994/5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1995), p. 88. Back.

Note 34: Renée de Nevers, 'Democratization and Ethnic Conflict', Survival, vol. 35, no. 2 (Summer 1993), p. 31. Back.

Note 35: Simon, p. 33. Back.

Note 36: Riina Ruth Kionka, 'La politique étrangère des États baltes', Politique Étrangère, vol. 59, no. 1 (Spring 1994), p. 891. Back.

Note 37: Simon, p. 45. Back.

Note 38: Jeanne Vickers, Rethinking the Future: the Correspondence between Geoffrey Vickers and Adolph Lowe (Transaction Publishers, 1991), p. 35. Back.

Note 39: Strategic Survey 1994/5, p. 76. Back.

Note 40: Berlin, p. xliii. Back.

Note 41: Dannreuther, p. 14. Back.

Note 42: Predrag Simic, 'Le conflit serbo-croat et l'éclatement de la Yugoslavie', Politique Étrangère, vol. 59, no. 1 (Spring 1994), p. 133. Back.

Note 43: Lidija Basta-Posavec, 'Federalism without democracy, political rights without citizens: the relevance of the experience of the dissoluted Yugoslav federation for (uniting) Europe', in Radmila Nakarada (ed.), Europe and the Disintegration of Yugoslavia (Belgrade: Institute for European Studies, 1994), p. 134. Back.

Note 44: Antonio Cassese, International Law in a Divided World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 134-6. Back.

Note 45: Marie-Janine Calic, 'German Perspectives', in Alex Danchev and Thomas Halverson (eds), International Perspectives on the Yugoslav Conflict, (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 58. Back.

Note 46: Kamal S. Shehadi, Ethnic Self-determination and the Break-up of States, Adelphi Paper no. 283 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1993) p. 30. Back.

Note 47: De Montbrial, p. 28. Back.

Note 48: John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, 'Nationality', in John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (eds), The History of Freedom and other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 290. Back.

Note 49: Keane, p. 5. Back.

Note 50: Franois Duchene, Jean Monnet: the First Statesman of Interdependence (New York and London: Norton and Co., 1994), p. 363. Back.

Note 51: Ibid., p. 345. Back.

Note 52: Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 43. Back.

Note 53: CDU/CSU Fraktion des Deutschen Bundestages, Reflections on European Policy (Bonn, 1 September 1994), p. 4. English Version: German Embassy Press Office, London. Back.

Note 54: Anthony Cary, 'Subsidiarity - Essence or antidote to European Union?', in Andrew Duff (ed.), Subsidiarity within the European Communities (London: Federal Trust for Education and Research, 1993), p. 49. Back.

Note 55: Council of the European Communities, Treaty on European Union (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1992), article 128. Back.

Note 56: Ole Waever and Morten Kelstrup, 'Europe and its Nations: Political and Cultural Identities', in Ole Waever, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup and Pierre Lemaitre, Identity, Migration and the new Security Agenda in Europe (London: Pinter for the Centre for Peace and Conflict Research, Copenhagen, 1993), p. 91. Back.