¶ … Voting to Violence, Jack Snyder starkly poses some of the most vexing questions for foreign policy analysts during the 1990's. Why was this decade, despite the collapse of the totalitarian system of communism and an overall greater global potential for democratic involvement, marked by a worldwide increase in ethnic conflict and hatred in Europe and across the larger world? Why did this "the process of democratization" become seemingly "one of its own worst enemies," because of its populist nature of the democratic politics that seemed to point towards peace and freedom, rather than conflict. Why has the promise of democracy leading to a more stable worldwide peace seemingly inevitably become "clouded with the danger of war?" (Snyder 2000: 21)

In another section of Snyder's book, the author states that "the transition to democratic politics is meanwhile [still] creating fertile conditions for nationalism and ethnic conflict, which not only raises the costs of the transition but may also redirect popular participation into a lengthy antidemocratic detour." It has proved difficult for "advanced civic democracies," the writer Robert Dahl's term for successful and peaceful nations, to evolve from many new nations, even nations espousing democratic ideals, when those nations have arisen out of ethnic self-identification. (Dahl 2000) Snyder and Dahl's analysis force one to ask which conditions and characteristics of a representative democracy in a nation moving towards a new system of government are most and least likely to facilitate the stable, peaceful governance of a diverse political community, and why?

One of, though certainly not the only reason, for the escalation of ethnic conflict during the 1990's was that the regions had long been hotbeds of ethnic unrest. The Balkan region was famously known as the 'powder keg' of Europe before the onset of World War I. After the end of World War I, according to the principles of national self-determination that had become, in Woodrow Wilson's mind, inextricably linked with the principles of democracy, the map of Europe was redrawn. The old Empires were indeed carved up, but this privileged some ethnic groups...

During World War II, old ethnic rivalries, such as those between the Serbs and the Croats, the former whom were persecuted by the Nazis, the latter of whom became allied with German infiltrating powers because of a perceived cultural bond, were again triggered. After World War II, these ethnic ties were smothered because of the officially nationalist (really pro-Russian) communist ideology of the U.S.S.R. However, with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., opposition to Russian ethnocentrism, communist economic inefficiency, and outright political repression became articulated through ethnic self-identification rather than through an advocacy of liberal rights and freedoms.
For instance, in the former USSR Republic of Estonia, the teaching of the native language of the region became one of the rallying cries of those who wished to seek more democratic local control of their nation, and finally to separate from the region. Because such ethnically-based policies were often the way these nations managed to define themselves as free of Soviet-based control, and because these policies were popular and easily transmutable on a grass-roots level, ethnic identity became the way one's democratic, i.e. non-Soviet identity was expressed.

The problem with an ethnic form of democracy, however, is that unlike a rights-based form of democracy, which in the democratic ideal officially considers all citizens merely as equal individuals, all possessing certain inalienable freedoms that cannot be impinged upon by the government, ethnic democracy is far more populist. It is more democratic in some respects, in that policies are defined by majority rule. In other words, if the majority of individuals in, for instance, Latvian, wish to speak Latvian and have their children taught in Latvian in school, why not make this the national language and not Russian? This may seem superficially sensible. However, by constructing a democratic identity within the region as inextricably linked with one's status as a Latvian, the very nature of one's identity as a good citizen becomes how Latvian one is, and also how…