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

美国对摧毁苏联和南斯拉夫等国的民族主义力量感到惊讶，这表明我们关于民族主义和民族主义的假设和理论存在严重缺陷。前苏联各国在种族上仍然存在严重分歧，这些分歧的后果直到最近才得到重视。在这项研究调查中，一位领先的比较政治领域专家和一位领先的民族主义理论家正在共同研究前苏联六个新国家中最复杂、最不被理解的民族问题--语言使用和同化。运用社会学和人类学的方法，这项研究不仅旨在帮助我们了解世界上这一关键领域，而且还有助于改进我们的语言使用和同化理论，以及决定语言政治是否会导致冲突的一般因素。鉴于第三世界国家边界和民族边界之间完全缺乏对应关系，这是我们理解前苏联政治和民主化的一个中心问题。

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.