Foreign Policy
Summer 1998

Tribal Wisdom

“For centuries, [Yugoslavia] marked a tense and often violent fault line between empires and religions. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of that country . . . surfaced all those ancient tensions again . . .”
   —U.S. president Bill Clinton, addressing the U.S. Naval Academy in 1994

“We are confronted by contradictory phenomena in which both the factors of integration and cooperation and the tendencies of division and dispersal are both apparent. The technological and communications revolution is offset by the eruption of nationalist conflicts and ethnic hatreds.”
   —Egyptian foreign minister Amr Moussa, before the UN General Assembly in 1996

“In this Europe of ours, where no one would have thought a struggle between ethnic groups possible, tragically this has come about. It may serve to open people’s eyes to the unspeakable possibilities in the future, even in unexpected places. Today we are threatened by the danger . . . of racial, religious, and tribal hatred.”
   —Italian president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro in 1997

“Yet even as the waves of globalization unfurl so powerfully across our planet, so does a deep and vigorous countertide. . . . What some have called a ‘new tribalism’ is shaping the world as profoundly on one level as the ‘new globalism’ is shaping it on another.”
   —His Highness the Aga Khan, at the Commonwealth Press Union Conference in Cape Town in 1996

“. . . all over the world, we see a kind of reversion to tribalism. . . . We see it in Russia, in Yugoslavia, in Canada, in the United States. . . . What is it about all this globalization of communication that is making people return to more—to smaller units of identity?”
   —Neil Postman, chair of the department of culture and communication at New York University, in 1995