Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, numbered RTT 95-10039 and dated October 1995, presents the proceedings of a conference held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored the conference. In it, academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials examined ethnic conflict by region, covering Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. The report also discusses what these conflicts mean for US policy. It does not deal with UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena.
“The Advance”17 pages
Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268 Summary of Discussion General Discussion QUESTION: Do you think that political arrangements have very little to do with the consolidation of nation- alism of our nation states? DR. POULSEN: Geographers are concemed with things that give character to territory; we look at nations as one of the critical components of such. The way govemments adjust their institutional arrangements to accommodate the national diversity is a question more properly in the province of a political scientist. Nevertheless, many geographers will agree that one of the most important characteristics of‘terri- tory is the prevailing national identity in that territory. One cannot understand this section of the United States without knowing that English is the common language and that Americans share a lot of common images and values that help make the country go. Where you have diversity within the state, serious problems exist. I made a particular point of1iistin- guishing between nations and other groups; the caste system in India, for instance, is a very fundamental part of understanding India and really does not fit into this otherwise useful framework. DR. HONEY: I would suggest that our notion ofthe nation-state is really oversimplified and that we would be better off if we adopted Tilly’s definition of the national state. There are few really national states, as you pointed out, and, where the countries are very strong, there are more national states than nation- states. They clearly are very important actors and, in most states, they are not forcing _people into a single form. Clearly, that is the case in the United States, in Britain, and in France. National identity is important, but it is not necessarily an identity that requires every- body to be the same. As we look at the newer states of the world, the states that have been created after World War II, virtually none of them come anything close to the nation-state. They are national states. DR. POULSEN: Well, we obviously differ on this. One of the fundamental facts is that the world is parti- tioned into states, and this cannot be ignored. The states are very significant in determining what is pro- duced, how people do things, and the like. But at the same level, we have, in fact, national identities so that within a state there may be two quite different simul- taneously operating systems based upon this identity. If we go the way of the anthropologist and look at every single grouping of people-—and this is certainly a valid way of looking at things—we do not get to some of the big problems that generate conflict. The interrelationships between nations within states and also of national interests between states are the key ingredients in conflict. 174 Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.