5 - Leaving the State

Summary

Nationalism gets its chance when the non-ethnic imperial structures collapse.

Ernest Gellner (1995: 6)

The end of socialism in Europe was quickly followed by the dissolution of three states in the region: Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. This was a most surprising set of developments. At a general level, we can observe that, if regime collapse is rare, especially when it occurs peacefully (see Gurr, 1974), then even more unusual is state dismemberment. However, even by the standards of those states that have either reduced in size or ended, the recent dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia stands out as exceptional. In particular, why did two of these three states dismember peacefully, in contrast to the pronounced historical norm of violent state collapse? Particularly puzzling in this regard was the Soviet case, where most of the necessary ingredients for a violent end to the state were present – for example, the pattern there of increasingly violent nationalist mobilization prior to the end of the state (Beissinger, 1995a) and the demonstrated willingness of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet president and party leader, to use force to preserve the union (as in the Baltic states in early 1991).

Equally puzzling is why these three states, all in a single region, ended in rapid succession. While there are historical precedents for multiple and geographically and temporally clustered shifts in state boundaries, these earlier cases of state reconfiguration invariably reflected the impact of international factors with evident regional reach – for example, decolonization, foreign intervention, and war termination.