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Synopsis
The years since the collapse of communism in 1989 have witnessed a dangerous renewal of religious intolerance and nationalist demands across Eastern Europe. Underlying these phenomena has been a set of assumptions about rights, entitlements and legitimacy that Sabrina Ramet terms the doctrine of collective rights. In this work, she analyzes the social and political consequences of this doctrine and explores the tension between individual and social rights on the one hand and collective rights on the other. The Bosnian war is surely the most dramatic illustration of the destructive forces that the doctrine of collective rights can unleash, but other examples are equally crucial for an understanding of the issue. Ramet focuses here on cases taken from societies at peace, concentrating on theocratic currents in Poland, the plight of Hungarians in Slovakia and the repression of Albanians in Kosovo.
