Ethnofederalism,separatism,and conflict: what have we learned from the Soviet and Yugoslav experiences?

Abstract

The breakups of Yugoslavia and the USSR, as well as the violent conflicts that took place on their ruins, spurred a large number of studies claiming that the ethnofederal designs of these states were at the root of these events. I argue that the ethnofederal designs of these states were themselves the consequences of prior nationalist mobilizations in the Russian empire and the Balkans. I also criticize this literature for using the wrong baseline of comparison for evaluating the performance of ethnofederal states, for selecting cases on the dependent variable, for ascribing to ethnofederalism what should be ascribed to other variables, and for relying on certain questionable assumptions about separatism.