Over the last decades of the century fundamental changes have taken place in the global order. As is evident ethnopolitics has generally gained an unanticipated dynamism almost in all regions, emerging in the long established and relatively young nation-states of the world at the same time.

The specific impact of post-cold war and post-communist developments have further increased the significance of this process. Increasing trends of regional integration, global and multicultural intercourse, in parallel, have also onset such new sets of relations that the very political, economic and cultural foundations of the nation-state are being seriously challenged. Consequrntly, there has emerged both a theoretical and a practical necessity to reconsider historical legacies and conceptual constructs surrounding teh phenomenon of the nation-state at large.