ETHNIC PROBLEMS IN EUROPE

Europeans are used to looking (rather smugly, it must be said) at states in Africa and Asia, and bemoaning the incidence of ethnic and tribal problems. Why can't these guys just get along, as we do? Forget the fact that many of those states were artificially created by Victorian mapdrawers that ignored realities on the ground. To take but one example, Tanzania had roughly 120 different tribes and languages at Independence, more than the whole of Europe. Forging a common identity from such a disparate population would have taxed anybody. 

But the elephant in the room is that Europe is not ethnic problem-free either. And I don't just mean in the sense that some countries' citizens are hostile to immigrants from other continents. The Yugoslav wars of the early 1990's ought to have been a huge wake-up call. Cyprus remains a divided country. The Basques have long considered themselves to be very different from the rest of Spain. Greece is squabbling with Macedonia about the latter's name. Belgium is barely a state. The Scots may end up cutting ties with the rest of the United Kingdom. There are disaffected ethnic Hungarians stuck in Slovakia and Romania. And so on.

I was reminded of this issue again this weekend. In Latvia's recent election, an ethnic Russian party called the Harmony Centre ended up with the most votes, 29% of the total. Latvia is unusual amongst the countries of the ex-Soviet Union in that it has a sizeable ethnic Russian minority that makes up about a quarter of the population. Clearly, in voting for an ethnic political party, that minority has demonstrated its discontent with the existing political system.

The other parties will probably gang together in order to keep the Harmony Centre out of power. But that will just store up trouble for the future. Ethnicity is not yet dead in Europe.

Walter Blotscher