After the Cold War ended and the nearly unanimous effort to defeat Iraq during the Gulf War, scholars, policymakers and publics expected that countries would able to cooperate to manage crises and conflicts around the world. The European Community, as it transformed into the European Union, tried to develop a common foreign policy, hoping to play an important role in post–Cold War international relations. Yugoslavia’s wars dashed these hopes because European states could not agree on how to handle them. Germany’s efforts to recognize and support Slovenia and Croatia frustrated Britain and France. Russia’s support of Serbia, and, by...

Why do states support some ethnic groups but not others? Why do states support some states resisting secessionism, i.e., host states, but not all? The conventional wisdom is that states that are vulnerable to ethnic conflict are inhibited from supporting separatists in other states, and that this weakness will cause states to develop and then respect international organizations and norms. This argument has at least two significant flaws: it fails to explain why a state would support a secessionist movement and some do; and, many vulnerable states have supported separatist movements, as case studies in the subsequent chapters demonstrate. A...

Katanga’s attempted secession from the Congo needs to be analyzed in any study of the international politics of separatism. As the first secessionist crisis following decolonization in Africa, it influenced future expectations and understandings about the nature of secession and its international consequences.² Even more importantly, the United Nations intervened in the crisis with troops, who, after some hesitation, fought and defeated the separatists. The Congo Crisis thus serves as a test case of the influence of international institutions on secessionism, since the armed forces of an international organization defeated a secessionist movement. As the Cold War seriously influenced how...

Shortly after the Congo Crisis, Nigeria’s ethnic conflict accelerated. This strife between ethnic groups developed into a secessionist war between Biafra, the Eastern region of Nigeria, largely composed of the predominantly Christian Ibo tribal group, and the Federal Military Government of Nigeria, which consisted of the Muslim Hausa-Fulani group, the religiously heterogeneous Yorubas, and many smaller tribes.

The Nigerian Civil War provides a good contrast to the Katangan secession as four years separated the two conflicts, thereby holding most variables relatively constant. Despite the short time between the two secessionist crises, and despite many similarities between Biafra and Katanga, the...

Yugoslavia’s disintegration has frustrated Europe and the rest of the world.¹ Yugoslavia, particularly Bosnia, had stood as a symbol of interethnic cooperation. Sarajevo, where World War I began, served as a stark symbol of the conflict. The site of the 1984 Winter Olympics became a battleground. Olympic venues became gravesites. Once the conflict started, Europeans hoped and expected that they would manage this conflict due to the newly developing Common Foreign Policy of the European Community [EC].² These hopes were quickly dashed, as cooperation among EC states failed in two ways: it failed to deter the conflict in Yugoslavia, and...

In the previous chapters, studies of secessionist crises indicate that ethnic politics more consistently and more powerfully conditions states’ behavior than the other explanations. However, one could wonder how significant these results are or whether they apply beyond secessionist conflicts to other kinds of conflicts. This chapter, by using data from the case studies and from the Minorities at Risk [MAR] Datasets, addresses these concerns.

First, simple cross-tabulations indicate which factors produce significant correlations using data from the case studies in the preceding chapters. Second, basic trends in international support of ethnic groups in the 1990s suggest that fears of...

As Yugoslavia disintegrated, states debated which sides to support and to recognize, causing scholars to wonder whether the international norms of boundary maintenance were obsolete. Because of the failure of the conventional wisdom to anticipate or explain the international relations of Yugoslavia’s demise, we are tempted to ignore the past and consider each ethnic conflict either as a unique event or as a harbinger of escalating identity conflicts—the “Clash of Civilizations.”¹ Instead, this book suggests that the past was poorly understood, and that revisiting it is helpful for understanding today’s conflicts. Rather than proving that there is something new...