But the new states have at least majorities of the titular nations (sometimes only barely). The process is of course not yet completed.

The current trend in western Europe, however, and to an increasing extent in the east, is toward ethno-cultural self-determination within multi-ethnic states.

You are mistaking an incomplete process for a different process. I can give you examples for processes that went further in the east than in the west, as yet.

- rise of nationalist parties
east: taking over government in Poland, Slovakia, Yugoslavia
west: Le Pen, Vlams Blok, Denmark, NPD in Germany, FPÖ in Austria

- rise of leftist antiglobalisation (the newest trend)
east: Smer (government)
west: WASG, Constitution referendum in France

- neoliberalism
east: radical social cuts, flat taxes in several states
west: some cuts in unemployment benefits, retirement age, some tax cuts

- cities flowering, countryside declining
east: universal
west: northern east Germany, mountainous areas of Switzerland, Austria and southern Germany, Spain

As you can see, western Europe is simply behind the curve. I can see no evidence for it being different in the case of the decline of multiethnic states

I’d be glad to if David is agreeable, although my last direct European ancestor left the continent during the 19th century.

Non-Jewish immigration outside marriage isn’t all that new; it began taking place on a substantial scale during the wave of migration from the FSU, and is now being augmented by the naturalization of guest workers’ children. The latter group, at least, has reportedly been assimilating rapidly.

I wouldn’t say that. The borders of the former Soviet republics follow ethnic lines about as much as African borders do, and for very similar reasons - arbitrary frontier adjustments, internal migrations and deportations, the presence of indigenous minorities and sponsored colonial settlement by ethnic Russians. Pretty much every country that was once part of the Soviet Union is an ethnic melange, which is the cause of much of the recent unrest.

I’ll grant you Yugoslavia and, to a certain extent, the Czech Republic. The current trend in western Europe, however, and to an increasing extent in the east, is toward ethno-cultural self-determination within multi-ethnic states. Of course, this is made possible to a large degree by supranational rule of law structures such as the Framework Convention on National Minorities and the European Court of Human Rights, and may not be viable in the absence of these or similar structures.

What? If I may point out that the last 20 years saw:

-dissolution of the USSR along ethnic lines
-dissolution of Czechoslovakia along ethnic lines
-dissolution of Yugoslavia along ethnic lines

in addition it saw:

- far reaching autonomy in Belgium
- devolution in the UK
- always increasing regional autonomy in Spain
- a separatist party in the Italian government

You will notice that the movements didn’t go all the way in western Europe, yet. If you do that, then you should consider that western Europe is filthy rich and in all regards slower and weaker to react to social changes (UK partially exempt) in general.

What we have seen is basically a radical decline of the multiethnic state, not the nation state.
Furthermore, by world standards, western Europe is an abnormity, whose solutions cannot be exported.

I wouldn’t exactly put it in this way Charly, but you are essentially right. In fact they didn’t occupy neighbourhoods, they came and built ‘barracas’ in open fields, with no running water or electricity, and then the neighbourhoods and cities were built around them. Both Badalona and Hospitalet are among the top ten cities in Spain, yet these were small villages when the ‘great migration’ started.

Now the grandchildren of these migrants have been to university and are fuelling the housing boom by buying flats in another set of ‘new neighbourhoods’, but guess what, these neighbourhoods are not being occupied on any kind of Catalan/Spanish axis, they are completely integrated. We are all ‘Catalans’ now.

So yes, Catalonia has a huge tradition of accepting and assimilating migrants (I mean, and this is a big topic, it would have started on this path with the large-scale incorporation of the converso Jews, it is absoluetly impossible, for eg, for Catalonia ever to succumb to anti-semitism quite simply because, if there is an ethnic core, it is a semitic one, you would know better than me on this Jonathan, but on some versions the etymological origins of Barcelona are fromsome variant of ‘community across the sea’ in Hebrew) and the process normally works well, which is why I am pretty optimistic for the future. Basically Barcelona was one of the European capitals of modernism, and it now aspires to be one of the cultural capitals of ‘post-modernism’. It has no longing whatsoever to be a stupid particularist backwater.

Jonathan your concerns are not groundless and I can imagine Abkhazs and Ossetians fears about that subject.. I think it was a big mistake from georgian government dealing with Adjaria’s autonomy status, but otoh after fled of russian supported Abashidze, in Adjaria their was not real demand for Adjarias special status.
Saakashvili is not alone and he has some radical memebrs of government who maybe would like to see Abkhazia in the same situation as Adjaria, but Saakashvili has expressed georgias aspirations for europe and western values wholly and I think he understands what that means…

Just to say thanks for a very nice and interesting post and comments. In your last response you raise so many interesting and relevant points that I hardly know where to start. So basically - apart from one or two loose comments I won’t. What I will do is express the hope that you’ll agree with David to come back from time to time and pick out one or other detail from the chest of drawers that we seem to have opened here and so we can try to go into them in some detail, taking this post as a starting point.

Basically this whole discussion has moved quite a long way on from where you started (in one sense), and in another it has gone to the heart of the issues. Basically my own personal view is that it is hard to separate most of the ethnically related issues which are evolving in Eastern Europe from mother Russia, and since I don’t think you can address the question of ‘whither Russia’ without talking about demography, and since I’m tired of banging that particular drum, I thought I’d try and explore the identitarian issues.

At the end of the day I think identitarian issues lie at the heart most of the big topics which we talk about here on this blog. What happens is that these identitarian issues come out in the guise of debates about which social model to adopt, or something like that. I mean if you glance through the comments on the Referm is a Dirty Word post, you’ll see that what we are really talking about there is identity and how people have trouble handling identity transitions. This normally comes out under the rubric of an increased feeling of insecurity. Basically this is what the Constitution ‘debate’ has been all about, rather than a serious reflection on what type of constitution the EU really needs.

“but isn’t there also a countervailing trend toward regional ethnic self-determination?”

Yes, but this isn’t normally EU secessionist, it’s often just about throwing of the old yoke (as in ‘off with the Norman yoke’). The regionalists normally aspire to talking tu a tu with the central power, without another interlocutor as intermediary.

“Immigrants who are not themselves part of a concentrated population tend to assimilate to the locally dominant cultural stream”

Yes, so this is why in times of increasing migratory flows people want to assert themselves, since they want the migrant to see their’s as the reference culture, to assert the culture of the periphery, against that of the centre, if you like.

Going back to Eastern Europe to finish, it is important to realise that there are both centrifugal and centripetal processes at work, and that these forces are at the present time stonger than ever before. What this means is that some people can ‘couple’ very rapidly indeed, while others can be thrown out just as rapidly in the cockpit ejector seat.

If we look at economic development in what used to be the third world we can now see that a large part of this is ‘coupling’ very rapidly, in a way which wasn’t foreseeable in the 1990s. One symptom of this is the fact that the debate about reforming the IMF is really a non-debate, since no-one is really that interested any more. This is a huge change from the days when the IMF was really seen as the ‘bad guy’, and the IMF itself hasn’t really changed that much in the meantime.

OTOH the UN has actually singled out 18 countries who are going backwards while all this is happening. These countries are either in Southern Africa (where AIDS is a big part of the picture) or, surprise, surprise, in some parts of the old USSR. And this, I think, is the background against which we need to think about all this nascent nationalism that we are seeing there. In many ways this is a nationalism of despair, and that, as history has shown us often enough, is a very dangerous thing.