Beyond Ethnic Division: Majority-Minority Debate About the Postcommunist State in Romania and Slovakia
Beyond Ethnic Division: Majority-Minority Debate About the Postcommunist State in Romania and Slovakia

Summary/Abstract: In many societies in Central and Eastern Europe, the process of postcommunist institutionalization has become intertwined with majority-minority conflicts over what are commonly viewed as ethnic issues. The renewed political salience of ethnicity has granted increased popularity to an approach to politics in multiethnic societies that accepts cultural cleavages as givens and expects them to be reflected in political cleavages. But are majority-minority divisions satisfactorily explained as reflections of ethnic cleavage characteristic of "divided societies"? The principal argument is that these political divisions emerged in a contingent process, in a contestation over the proper institutional design for the postcommunist state. [...]

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