Overview

While comtemporary history has illustrated the extent to which ethnic tensions are a major source of violent conflict in the world today, scholars and informed observers have been slow to appreciate the value of ethnicity as a tool in understanding the key political developments of recent years. In this book Daniel Patrick Moynihan considers the concept of the self-determination of peoples and discusses major contributions to the subject from Marx, through Wilson and Lenin, to the UN charter. In a critically executed study, he draws upon a rich and diverse fund of historical and contemporary examples to trace the history and illustrate the considerable predictive powers of ethnic studies. He refutes both the liberal ""melting pot"" theory and the Marxist prediciton that ethnic differences would give way to an international proletariat. He explores in particular the role played by ethnic diversity in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and argues that the West's inability to grasp the importance of ethnicity was responsible for its failure to anticipate one of the most important events of the 20th century. This study illustrates how an understanding of the concept of ethnicity is critical to our comprehension of the causes of many contemporary conflicts and to our understanding of international politics.

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9780198279464

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Reviews

A timely, informed plea from New York's senior US senator to make the world safe for and from ethnicity. Moynihan presented an early version of this material in November 1991 as a lecture at Oxford; he's updated that text with notes on such events as the ethnic cleansing occurring in Bosnia. There's a certain amount of self-congratulation here (guess which politician, virtually alone in the 80's, predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union while the realists wailed about the Red tide?), but, at his best, Moynihan displays erudition and a mastery of material. Both the American liberal belief in a melting pot and the Marxist belief in class solidarity, he shows, badly underestimated the persistence of ethnicity. Although a believer in Woodrow Wilson's notion of international law, he points out what a Pandora's box that visionary's concept of self-determination has proven. Not only did Wilson refuse to apply the concept to America's allies (notably regarding Britain's control of Ireland), but he was ignorant of the idea's presumed beneficiaries and fuzzy about what the term meant in the first place. Moynihan lucidly explains how Communists pushed self-determination for ethnic groups without reconciling this with an international proletarian movement; how the UN Charter has been bedeviled by contradictory clauses on self-determination and noninterference with nations' internal affairs; and how preferential policies for majorities and entrenched minorities, both abroad and at home, exacerbate intergroup conflict. Throughout, the senator's mordant observations on historical myopia are leavened with typically puckish wit ( For years Europeans asked: Why is there no Socialist movement in the United States? The answer may be that we knew better ). The latest in a series (On the Law of Nations, 1990, etc.) demonstrating that Moynihan may be America's foremost literary politician - someone who can advance policy as cogently on the written page as on the stump. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

About the Author: Daniel Patrick Moynihanis the senior Senator from New York. A former professor of government at Harvard University, he has served as Ambassador to India and to the United Nations, where he represented the United States as President of the Security Council.

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