In the wake of communism's collapse, dire predictions of intractable ethno-religious conflict throughout the post-Soviet and East Central European territories were the order of the day. Although ethnic violence overshadowed opportunities for political transformation in the Caucuses and Balkans during the 1990s, many of the potential fault lines of ethnic conflict have weathered the tumultuous period of transition either without incident or via institutionally regulated means. While it is fortunate in human terms that the latent ethnic tensions in most instances fell short of their genocidal potential, the failure of political science and sociology to predict accurately the scope of ethnic conflict resulting from the implosion of communist regimes highlights the limitations of social science, especially when the events it purports to explain are rapidly unfolding. With a firm grasp of these limitations and 15 years of hindsight, Zoltan Barany and Robert Moser, in their edited volume, reassess the impact that regime change and state collapse have had on identity and ethnicity and, in turn, how ethnicity and nationalism have shaped the transitions from real socialism.

Adopting an explicitly constructivist tone, the editors selected contributions that focus on the manner in which ethnicity, identity, and nationalism function as both dependent and independent variables in the states and societies of postcommunist Eurasia and Europe. The flexibility endemic to such an approach affords the contributors an opportunity to explore the manner in which ethnicity contributes to our understanding of a range of political topics with general appeal in a circumscribed geopolitical region. Their book is rife with theoretical insights and empirical findings valuable to comparativists of various stripes and thin on major errors and omissions.

First, the temporal distance between the events comprising the collapse of communism and the publication of this volume affords a timely consideration of ethnic politics that speaks definitively about very specific events, trends, and outcomes while remaining highly relevant to the transitions—democratic or otherwise—experienced by postcommunist societies. However, one striking feature of the book that Roger Peterson's conclusion highlights (pp. 225 and 233) is the collective downplaying of the importance of the “legacies of communism,” popularized in Barany and Ivan Volgyes's edited work, The Legacies of Communism in Eastern Europe (1995), to ethnic politics in the region. While Peterson, perhaps, is correct in his belief that legacies play an important role in shaping the landscape against which ethnic politics take place, their conspicuous absence from most works indicates correctly that as we move further away from 1989 and 1991, communism's immediate and causal impact will wane.

Second, this work intersects in important ways with broad literatures in comparative politics. Mark R. Beissinger's chapter concerning the imperial nature of the former Soviet Union and the implications of its collapse for minority politics and national self-determination should be of particular interest to students of regime change and democratization. Many of the other chapters draw heavily upon ethnic conflict and politics literature as they squarely engage, challenge, and affirm many of the traditional approaches to the topic, including primordialist, instrumentalist, and rational choice theories. Furthermore, a privileging of constructivist approaches lends itself to alternative explanations of ethnic political behavior, such as the impact of international regimes (Will Kymlicka), elite leadership (Daniel Chirot), political institutions (David Laitin, Moser, and Charles King), and structural factors (Barany). Finally, this work should appeal to comparativists interested in ethnicity or the postcommunist world and makes important contributions on the institutionalization of international rights (Kymlicka), migration and the trafficking of women (King), elections and party system development (Moser), requisites of social mobilization (Barany), and citizenship and assimilation (Laitin).

Third, this volume effectively transcends the empiricist versus area studies debate promulgated first by Philippe Schmitter and Terry Karl (“The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go?” Slavic Review 53 [Spring 1994]: 173–85) and Valerie Bunce (“Should Transitologists Be Grounded?” Slavic Review 54 [Spring 1995]: 111–27). While contributors to Ethnic Politics after Communism were selected by the editors on the basis of their expertise on the politics of ethnicity and the breadth and depth of their knowledge of the postcommunist world, the deftness with which their arguments are advanced and the attention given to the region's historical and cultural peculiarities are inspiring and illustrative of thorough research.

A major strength of this collection is the manner in which it is tied together exceptionally well by the theme of empire collapse eloquently advanced by Beissinger. While the sustenance of the imperial theme is not readily apparent in the subsequent chapters by Laitin and Barany on linguistic assimilation and ethnic mobilization, respectively, the impact of the communist empire's collapse is revisited in various forms and with increased clarity as the book proceeds until it crescendos in King's chapter on migration. And Kymlicka's chapter on attempts to define, codify, and implement international regimes to protect minority rights serves as an appropriate coda to the volume as a whole. But it is from this chapter that a key opportunity to bring the theme of empire back full circle is missed by the editors. The degree of influence and cultural hegemony exerted by the European Union, especially on European postcommunist states, to defend the rights of ethnic groups parallels closely Beissinger's evaluation of the former Soviet Union as “the first of a new form of empire whose crucial contributions were its denial of its imperial quality and its use of the very cornerstones of the modern nation-state system … as instruments of nonconsensual control over culturally distinct populations” (p. 17). While direct comparisons of the former USSR to the European Union as empires might be tenuous if not objectionable, one is left with a distinct impression that ethno-religious groups' potential to achieve national self-determination, political rights, or cultural autonomy may be truncated by the gravitational pull of liberal empire to the West.