Chaotic Unmixing

During the Soviet period a tight lid was kept on the nationalist and territorial aspirations of various ethnic groups. Suppressed ethnic grievances and territorial claims have come into the open as the result of the end of the cold war and the liberalization that contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. As new states seek to correct these grievances or assert claims, other ethnic groups are excluded. The response of many has been to migrate back to what they perceive to be their ethnic homelands. This massive, unplanned, and chaotic ethnic unmixing has had a negative impact on development and has led to increased poverty at a time when the states are also transforming their economies away from the centrally planned models they used for decades.

With most of the armed hostilities in the former Soviet Union having died down, much of international community’s attention has focused on the repatriation of 780,000 refugees and 800,000 internally displaced people and on the rebuilding of Kosovo. It should be kept in mind that the consequences of armed ethnic conflicts linger long after hostilities have ended and disappeared from the headlines. A number of potentially explosive situations remain in the former Soviet Union—and elsewhere in the region—to which durable political solutions have yet to be found. A number of "pseudo states" exist—regions within sovereign states that operate autonomously but are not recognized as independent by any other country. These include the Transdniester region of Moldova, Nagorno-Kharabak within Azerbaijan, the Chechen republic within Russia, the Ossestian and Abkhazian regions in Georgia, and the Kosovo region within Yugoslavia. In all of these areas the push for autonomy or territorial claims has resulted in ethnic violence and population displacement. The resolution of these conflicts may cause further displacement.

As a development institution, the World Bank has an obvious, albeit uncertain, role to play in the ethnic unmixing and forced migration taking place across Europe and Asia.

More States, More Migration

Migration has always played a role in state building or unbuilding. Thus, it should come as no surprise that there has been so much migration as the number of states in the Europe and Central Asia region has increased from eight at the beginning of the decade to the current 27. Only five states in the region remain within the same borders as at the beginning of transition. Most of the new, or newly independent states are the homelands of a titular ethnic group who have the goal of making state and nation consistent, often with greatly exaggerated or conflicting claims of homeland. This has led to a number of episodes of forced migration, as well as noncoerced ethnic unmixing. Little of the bloody ethnic unmixing of the former Soviet Union has been directed at Russians; however, the largest number of Russians have migrated back to Russia from areas where ethnic violence is the greatest.

In the new states of the former Soviet Union, much of the increase in ethnic homogeneity has been due to the return migration of more than 10 percent of the Russian diaspora population from the non-Russian states. The rate of return among the states varies considerably, ranging from 50 percent in the three Transcaucasus states and Tajikistan to barely 1 percent from Ukraine and Belarus. While the return migration of nearly 3 million Russians is considerable and has placed great strains on the depressed Russian economy to absorb them, most Russians outside Russia were reluctant to migrate. Russia realized the potential burden of absorbing 25 million Russians from non-Russian states, and discouraged migration while helping the expatriots feel part of the Russian nation by persuading the states to allow dual citizenship. Thus, with a few exceptions, most of the non-Russian successor states are embarking on state building with significant minorities of Russians and other nationalities.

The mosaic of nationalities in the Transcaucasus region has been the area of some of the most violent and severe ethnic unmixing in the former Soviet Union. The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over control of the Armenia-majority enclave of Nagorno-Kharabak has caused an estimated 350,000 Armenians to leave Azerbaijan, of which 260,000 went to Armenia, and 167,000 Azeris to leave Armenia for Azerbaijan. An estimated 550,000 internally displaced people remain in Azerbaijan. The separatist movements in Georgia by the Abkhaz and Ossetian regions has caused an estimated 275,000 displaced people. At its peak the civil war in Tajikistan, which lasted from 1992 to 1997, caused the displacement of 900,000 people, 700,000 of them internally. By mid-1997 a peace agreement had been reached and a majority of those displaced have returned. Even two of the relatively peaceful and prosperous Baltic states—Latvia and Estonia—have been taken to task by the international community over their exclusion of large Russian-speaking populations through restrictive citizenship and language laws.

The four-year war in Bosnia and current dispute in Kosovo are rather well known. At the end of 1997 more than 800,000 Bosnians remained internally displaced. More than 600,000 Bosnian refugees remained outside the country and 40,000 refugees from Croatia were in Bosnia. An intentionally decentralized state consisting of the Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Serb Republic Srpska continue the difficult rebuilding process there. The recent end to hostilities in Kosovo has allowed a tentative start to the repatriation of Kosovars and to the reconstruction of infrastructure. Still, the Serbian government views Kosovo as part of the Serbian homeland.

The transition states of the Europe and Central Asia region contain about 7 percent of the world’s population but have about 15 percent of the world’s refugees and internally displaced people. Other estimates place the region’s share of refugees and displaced people at closer to 30 percent. In most cases the conditions that caused these population displacements are unresolved and the affected people remain in a state of permanent migration.

Displacement and Consequences

During the 1990s some titular members of the newly independent states tried to correct what they perceived as historical wrongs by giving preference to their ethnic group, often by arbitrarily defining citizenship or introducing discriminatory laws. The majority of states, however, are trying to walk the fine line between creating a homeland for members of the titular nationality while also accommodating minority nationalities. Kazakhstan, with its large Russian population, is a good example of this balanced policy.

A number of factors dictate the level of migration and the degree to which it is forced. These have to do with the characteristics of the diaspora group, the homeland, and the host country.

This recent and ongoing population displacement has negatively affected social development in the region by increased uncertainty among those affected, fragmentation of social relationships, loss of livelihood and savings, increased poverty, and necessary adjustments to new surroundings and new social institutions. Many migrants have been forced to make difficult adjustments. Urban Russians from the non-Russian states, for example, have been directed to live in rural areas that they are unaccustomed to. Many of the displaced remain in limbo, wanting to return to their homelands or integrate into the resident societies, but are bared from doing so. At the same time, a country unable to handle its large minorities, and which forces them into uncertain status, will sooner or later be destabilized itself.