александр стихин

Посол Азербайджана в России Полад Бюльбюль-оглы заявил, что попытки дипломатически урегулировать конфликт с Арменией по Нагорному Карабаху доказали свою неэффективность, поэтому Баку готово выбрать "военный путь". "22 года идут попытки мирного решения этого конфликта. Ну сколько же можно? Мы готовы к мирному решению вопроса. Но если не будет решаться мирным путем, то будем решать военным путем", - заявил дипломат в субботу, 2 апреля в эфире радиостанции "Говорит Москва".

Reviewing the sudden spasm of violence between the Uzbek minority and the Kyrgyz majority in Kyrgyzstan recently, many commentators were at a loss to explain why the two peoples should so abruptly have turned upon one another. Explanations range from official pandering to Kyrgyz nationalism, to sheer police and army brutality, to provocations from Taliban-style militias hoping to create another Afghanistan, but none go very far in analyzing why intercommunal relations became so vicious so fast. As if to make the question still more opaque, several reports stressed the essential similarity—ethnic, linguistic, cultural—between the Kyrgyz and Uzbek populations.

But that in itself could well be the explanation. In numerous cases of apparently ethno-nationalist conflict, the deepest hatreds are manifested between people who—to most outward appearances—exhibit very few significant distinctions. It is one of the great contradictions of civilization and one of the great sources of its discontents, and Sigmund Freud even found a term for it: "the narcissism of the small difference." As he wrote, "It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of hostility between them."

These fine distinctions are an instance of what Michael Ignatieff, borrowing the term from Freud, has called the “narcissism of minor difference.” Analyzing the Serbo-Croat conflict, he writes:

Freud once argued that the smaller the difference between two peo­ples the larger it was bound to loom in their imagination. He called this effect the narcissism of minor difference. Its corollary must be that enemies need each other to remind themselves of who they really are. A Croat, thus, is someone who is not a Serb. A Serb is someone who is not a Croat. Without hatred of the other, there would be no clearly de-fined national self to worship and adore. In this sense the Sumgait pogroms could be said to have caused the first violent fission of a “Soviet” identity.