Russias attitudes on minority rights may differ from attitudes in america because:

The removal of communist authority structures has led to the longstanding ethnic antagonisms in many East European states being expressed with renewed vigor. In this region, ethnic heterogeneity is the norm rather than the exception, and majority and minority ethnic groups can be expected to differ with respect to their acceptance of the value of inclusive principles of citizenship and their tolerance of political and social differences (on this see, among others, Bahry et al., 1997; Bremmer, 1994; Diamond and Plattner, 1994; Evans, 1998; Evans and Lipsmeyer, 2001; Gibson, 1998; McIntosh et al., 1995; Miller et al., 1998; Stepan, 1994). Most of all, they can be expected to differ in their willingness to accord rights to other ethnic groups; what a minority demands, the majority may wish to prevent. Many former-communist democracies, thus, have the potential for ethnic polarization at a level that could weaken collective community action, provoke inter-group antagonism, and undermine the capacity of the state to manage conflicts of interest—as events over the last decade in the Balkans have demonstrated.

Nonetheless, the extent to which this potential for inter-group antagonism exists varies considerably across Eastern Europe. Although all countries in the region have undergone a transition from authoritarianism and command economies to some variant of markets and democracy, they vary considerably in their past experience, current state of ethnic relations, and in the degree to which they contain the conditions, which might facilitate or inhibit the presence of more or less harmonious inter-group relations. Eastern Europe, thus, provides a context in which the effects of several factors that may influence the extent of inter-group polarization can be investigated empirically. This allows a test of the efficacy of several social scientific theories of ethnic polarization.

In the light of these considerations, the aim of this paper is, first, to investigate the extent of differences in attitudes towards the question of minority rights among different ethnic groups in East European societies; and second, to test general social scientific explanations of the extent of these attitudinal differences. In the conclusion, we also consider country-specific explanations of national differences that cannot be accounted for theoretically. The data for the analysis are taken from national surveys of the populations of all former-Communist countries under Soviet influence in Eastern Europe.

The analysis has two features that distinguish it from much previous research into attitudes towards minority rights. First, we employ multilevel modeling techniques that allow the simultaneous estimation of both individual variation over attitudes towards minority rights and regional and national variations in such attitudes (see also Quillian, 1995). Using these models, we examine the contribution of contextual factors, independent of the measures of individuals’ circumstances and experiences. Second, we focus on the attitudes of the members of minority groups as well as those of the majority. This allows greater insight into the potential for ethnic differences to be translated into political divisions between majority and minority groups.

Explanations of ethnic polarization over attitudes towards minority rights

There have been numerous scholarly examinations of ethnic relations in Eastern Europe. Many of these have been narrative accounts of either a historical or a contemporary character and have tended to focus on the behavior of dominant ethnic groups towards minorities (Bujaski, 1995; Cuthbertson and Leibowitz, 1993; Jowitt, 1992; Khazanov, 1995; Park, 1994) or have examined the situation of formerly ascendant minority groups and their reactions to their changed status and treatment at the hands

Testing the explanations: levels of analysis

The above explanations can be operationalized at different levels. For example, we can examine whether individual members of ethnic minorities have different opinions about minority rights from the majority if they do not speak the majority language. In this case, we refer to polarization at the ethnic group level. We can also examine whether in a country there is more polarization over minority rights if a smaller proportion of the minority speak the majority language. In this case, we refer

Measuring ethnic polarization

Ethnic polarization is operationalized as the difference between the positions taken by members of the ethnic majority and members of ethnic minorities on issues concerning minority rights. As membership of an ethnic group can be difficult to establish on ‘objective’ grounds, we use respondents’ self-definitions to allocate them to majority or minority groups. Majority group membership is indicated by self-definition as a member of the titular majority in each country. Minority group membership

The creation of the region variable

In most countries, a part of the sampling procedure involved stratified selection by region. However, in Bulgaria, there was no information about the region. Also, because Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have so few minorities among their populations (see Table 1), these three countries were treated as one region—otherwise, we could not estimate the dependent variable, ethnic polarization over minority rights. In the final analysis therefore we used 59 regions from the following

The general findings of the analysis

We have seen that ethnic polarization between majority and minority groups is explained most effectively by social distance, as indicated by the extent of ethnic inter-marriage and social interaction. In addition, cultural differences, as indicated by variations in the extent of majority language acquisition by minority groups and group differences in religion between regions, account for a significant proportion of the regional variation in the extent of polarization. Regions with minorities

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