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.
“Terry”13 pages
Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268 Summary of Discussion Discussant: Alexander Murphy I would like to highlight a few things that I think are particularly significant and to raise a couple of related questions. At the heart of Professor Williams’ presen- tation is a dichotomy between two fundamentally dif- ferent kinds of ethnic issues that Westem Europe will face in the years ahead. One concerns the longstand- ing, regionally specific minority groups, and the other concerns the migrants who have come in from North Africa and the Middle East over the last 30 or 40 years and more recently from Eastem Europe. It is impor- tant to recognize that each of_ these poses a fundamen- tally different problem for Europe in the 1990s. Most obviously, their geography differs. Longstanding minority groups often operate from a distinct regional territorial base. The migrant groups, on the other hand, are concentrated overwhelmingly in cities and do not have the same kind of territorial base. The geography of social disruption associated with each group also differs. With longstanding minority and regional minority groups, the issues, tensions, and conflicts, in general, tend to be localized, ,whereas migrant group issues tend to be focused for political mobilization at the national level and are often far reaching in their impact on society. These differences are evident in the public reactions to them. I agree with Dr. Williams that we are seeing a greater acceptance of the long- standing minority groups and that the focus of opposi- tion politics around the recent migrants is one of the fundamental issues for Europe in the years ahead. Having identified those twin issues, I will move on to note what I see as the two key geographical perspec- tives that Dr. Williams highlighted: ' First, ethnic conflicts play out at different scales, and these scale differences have implications for our understanding. Dr. Williams highlighted the impor- tance of scale in his discussion of Northern Ireland. ' Second, of course, is the importance of territorial setting for ethnic conflict. Some of the comments about the changing significance of regions were par- ticularly interesting in this regard. A focus on the territorial setting for ethnic conflict can highlight some issues that Dr. Williams did not touch on but that are relevant for our thinking about what is happening in Europe. First, differences in how States define citizenship is critically important. One need only think about the different ways in which the Ger- mans, French, or British have defined citizenship his- torically. Second, several different migrant groups exist: older new migrants, newer new migrants, and newer newer new migrants. The most recent come from Eastern Europe and look different from earlier migrants not only in terms of extemal characteristics but also in tenns of the kinds of skills they bring and their potential level of acceptance within West Euro- pean societies. One of the critical contemporary issues is the effect that the new immigrants are having on the old immi- grants. The relatively highly skilled immigrants com- ing in from Poland and the former western republics of the former Soviet Union are likely to be more easily integrated within the cultural traditions of the West. If this occurs, Turks and other non-Westem migrants will be further marginalized. Finally, Dr. Williams raises two critical questions. The first is that the changing political geography of Europe is affecting ethnicity and ethnic conflict. In my own view, centralization as a component of European inte- gration has currently gone about as far as it can go. A key current issue is the importance of regions and regionalization. An example of this is a map produced by the Commission of the European Communities that illustrates European integration from a geographical perspective. It identifies development zones within Europe. These development zones do not conform to those defined by the European Regional Development Fund; they are not based on political-administrative regions within existing nation-states. Rather, the map looks at Europe without nation-state boundaries, play- ing off of some of the transboundary developments currently underway that are beginning to define a new kind of European political space. 57 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.