Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics.

• Author: Ikle, Fred C.

EVERY SPOT ON this earth--well, nearly every one--is inhabited nowadays by two, three, or more peoples that differ in race, religion, or ethnic background. For each of these disparate groups, the same spot is their inalienable land, their rightful home, their patrimony. The origins of this multi-tribal cohabitation vary greatly. Sometimes one tribe conquered the territory inhabited by another tribe without expelling or killing all the "natives." In other cases, racially or ethnically disparate people were imported as slaves or indentured labor, or welcomed as voluntary immigrants.

It has also happened in past centuries that diversity emerged out of a previously homogeneous population, without any transfer of people. During the Protestant Reformation in Europe scattered clusters of people suddenly changed their religion, thereafter either to kill their neighbors who no longer belonged to their in-group, or to live side by side peacefully for centuries. The Reformation thus fragmented large regions of Central Europe into a leopard spot map colored "Catholic" and "Protestant." The political sorting out of this fragmentation led to the Thirty Years War, a most calamitous, cruel, destructive war with a great deal of "religious cleansing."

Leopard-spot maps colored by religion were created also by the spread of Islam (largely through the expansion of the Ottoman Empire) in parts of Africa and in the Balkans. These religious conversions--although occurring in a flash, so to speak--have shown a curiously stubborn persistence, surviving from generation to generation as if they had been locked into the genetic code of families. Building on this persistence, history has played a most cruel joke: it has repainted the religious leopard-spot map with "ethnic" colors. Just as the religious colors on the map of the Balkans (and other parts of Europe) were being bleached by the agnosticism and religious indifferentism of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, history freshened up the spots garishly with ethnicity.

The Muslim villages in what used to be Bosnia-Herzegovina, a province of what used to be Yugoslavia, had been inhabited--prior to their recent ethnic cleansing--neither by new immigrants and asylum seekers, nor (with a few blurred exceptions) by descendants of Turk conquerors from Ottoman times, but instead by descendants of "natives" who had been converted to Islam, centuries ago.

NOW THE Bosnian landscape has been repainted again, with the ashcolor of burnt villages and the mud-color of fresh mass graves. It has become pandemonium, a gathering place of wickedness and old demons, a most recent instance of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan's latest book Pandaemonium is about. Despite the subtitle that stays neutral between good and evil, Moynihan's book is about the demonic side of ethnicity. It is about ethnic conflict that has exploded into...