Collaborative Research on Nationality and Politics: The Dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the Reconstitution of a Commonwealth of Independent States

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The fact that the United States has been surprised by the force of nationalism in destroying countries such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia shows that our assumptions and theories about nationalism and ethnicism have serious flaws. The countries of the former Soviet Union remain ethnically very divided and the conseqences of these divisions are only recently being appreciated. In this research investigation, a leading comparative politics area specialist and a leading theorist on nationalism are jointly examining the most complex and least understood of the ethnic issues - - language use and assimilation - - in six of the new countries of the former Soviet Union. Using both sociological and anthropological methods, the investigation not only aims at contributing to our understanding of this crucial area of the world, but also to the improvement of our theories of language use and assimilation and the general factors that determine whether language politics does or does not lead to conflict. Given the total lack of correspondence between country boundaries and ethnic boundaries in the Third World, this is a central question for our understanding of politics and democratization in the former Soviet Union.