(Estimated Pub Date) the Challenge of Ethnic Conflict to National and International Order in the 1990S: Geographic Perspectives- October 1995

Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
Patterns, Trends, and Regional Comparisons
Summary of Discussion
Discussant: Marvin W. Mikesell
In discussing nations and states, there are various
terms that we can use: I
~ Nation-state. An example is Iceland.
' Multinational state. There are many examples; India
would fit very well.
$7 66
- Multistate nation. “Germania, Francophonia,” and
many others fit that category.
' Nonstate nations. In this group we have Khalistan,
Kurdistan, Palestine, and others. ,3
' Normatian states. Two unhappy examples would be
Lebanon and Afghanistan; a happy example is the
Vatican.
It struck me that in all the presentations thus far we
have been dealing with pathology rather than any kind
of medicine or cure. In fact, in some cases, death cer-
tificates have even been written, but we have had very
little in the way of looking for good examples of
where accommodation has occurred rather than con-
flict. Parc of the problem is thatjcountries just do not
leam from other countries on issues of minority rights,
human rights, and questions of culture and nationality.
This is surprising because legal: codes are borrowed;
entire constitutions are virtually plagiarized from one
country to another. Yet it is rare to find one country
saying to another country, “You‘ seem to have a nice
situation here; maybe we can leam from you.”
An interesting case would be Estonia. The Estonians
are making terrible blunders in dealing with their Rus-
sian population. All they have tb do is go to Helsinki
and examine what Finland has done with its Swedish
minority; it has anticipated their needs and, in a sense,
treated a 10-percent minority as_ though it were a
49-percent one. Finland has bilingual signs even
where they are not needed for any functional reason.
Now, if you tell an Estonian, “For Heaven’s sake, get
on a boat and go to Helsinki and learn something,” he
would say, “Well, it’s a totally different situation.
These Russians are occupiers. They’re colonists."
We also have examples of states than denounce mis-
treatment of minorities in neighboring states while
seeming to be surprisingly indifferent to parallel cir-
cumstances within their own borders. Until quite
recently, for example, the Turkish press bitterly
denounced the treatment of the Turkish minority in
Bulgaria. They were denied recognition and forced to
change their names. If a Bulgarian Turk tried to regis-
ter a child or get a driver’s license, he would immedi-
ately be told he must have a Bulgarian name. This
effectively was nonrecognition of a minority that
composed about 10 percent of Bulgaria’s population,
and the Turks were furious about this. At the same
time, the Turks were treating their country’s minority
Kurds exactly the same way: not recognizing their
language, refusing to register names, not even allow-
ing music with Kurdish lyrics on the radio.
That is the problem: we do not have transfer of wis-
dom. We do not have people going into Finland from
Bulgaria, Turkey, Sri Lanka, etc. to study what hap-
pened there since 1918. They could learn from it.
Discussant: Mildred Berman
One of the references to which I immediately tumed
when I was invited to come to this conference was
Isaiah Bowman’s The New World. That book has a
very fine analysis of what led up to the ethnic prob-
lems that resulted in World War I, plus a lot of good
maps. Bowman says, “But the world’s people are fun-
damentally unlike, and the road to success passes
through a wilderness of experiment.” I think that is
what we have been hearing these two days.
I would like to address population, particularly fertil-
ity. Indonesia recently has been successful in cutting
its fertility rate down to a little more than two children
per woman. The Indonesians could get it down to
,
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268