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What factors best explain this overall pattern of ethnic conflict? It will be argued that the
crucial policy choices cannot be understood apart from the regime types that developed in the
Soviet Republics and successor states. In particular, the most important distinction was between
neo-communist regimes primarily interested in preserving their power, and reformist regimes
pursuing a more popularly-accountable program of national revival and development. Regime
preferences and methods were influenced by international ideological trends. Above all,
internationally transmitted self-determination ideologies and foreign models of political,
economic, and cultural development influenced the content and form of reform nationalist
alternatives to the communist or neo-communist status quo.
Policy choices in the service of regime preferences, as well as the responses of affected
ethnic minorities, were constrained by the ethnic balance of power. The ethnic balance of power
is here taken to include the impact of actual or expected foreign intervention in the conflict.
Policy choices were also influenced by the expected consequences of international economic
integration. However, the expected cultural and political consequences of ethnic majority or
minority self-determination were invariably at least as important as their expected economic
consequences. As will become clearer when the case studies are analyzed, it is often difficult to
determine the relative importance of expected changes in economic well-being, cultural
autonomy and integrity, and political autonomy. For example, if ethnic majority elites
successfully lead an anti-communist program of national revival, this involves inter-related
economic, cultural and political goals, and also affects their personal positions. Similarly, if
ethnic minority elites fear losing their positions in local or regional government and state
enterprise, this threatens all three objectives. The same can be said for the mass support bases of
both types of elites. Among neighbors of the former Soviet Union, such as Romania, Turkey,
Convention