The New Tribalism

All over the world today, but most interestingly and frighteningly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, men and women are reasserting their local and particularist, their ethnic, religious, and national identities. The tribes have returned, and the drama of their return is greatest where their repression was most severe. It is now apparent that the popular energies mobilized against totalitarian rule, and also the more passive stubbornness and evasiveness that eroded the Stalinist regimes from within, were fueled in good part by “tribal” loyalties and passions. How these were sustained and reproduced over time is a tale that waits to be told. The tribes—most of them, at least, and all the minorities and the subject natio...