DELEGITIMIZING MULTICULTURALISM: The Role of Cultural Elites in Ethnic Conflict

During the wars of Yugoslav succession, nationalists on all sides maintained that it was impossible for different national groups to live together in harmony in a democratic society. They spoke of “age-old hatreds,” pointing to an historical landscape littered with international conflicts, civil wars, rebellions, or individual acts of violence between the region’s national and ethnic groups. Moreover, after a decade of continuous confrontation between former Yugoslavia’s constituent nationalities, an increasing number of foreign observers are inclined to agree. After all, the “democratization” process has been attended by the abrupt, acrimonious, and sometimes violent dissolution of multiethnic societies throughout the formerly Communist eastern half of Europe. Thus, one of the first consequences of glasnost and perestroika in the USSR was the secession of the three Baltic states, a step followed by all of the once vaunted Soviet empire’s constituent republics. The “democratic process” certainly played a role in these events. As a rule, populist politicians quickly exploited the post-Communist world’s first “free elections” to marshal the power of those national groups which constituted a majority of their countries’ voters. In central Europe, the seemingly inevitable result was Czechoslovakia’s velvet divorce and Yugoslavia’s bloody dissolution. To the dismay of the international community, postwar “free” elections in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Kosovo