by Jay Stuller

About the author: Jay Stuller is a free-lance writer in San Francisco. His articles have appeared in several magazines, including Audubon and Smithsonian.

Fueled by intense blood-feud passions that few Americans have experienced, or can even fully understand, ethnic animosities once again are burning throughout the world. This tribal revival is rapidly becoming the international epidemic of the 1990s. Today, we see it as the ethnic violence that is destroying Yugoslavia and may yet fracture India. But it also may make headlines as hypernationalism—when a single ethnic group dominating one country, say Germany or Japan, feels threatened by a changing world. It was ethnic conflicts, after all, that helped start both world wars. Ironically, the breakup of the Soviet Union has catalyzed much of this tribal revival. If left unchecked tribalism may become...