"For those of us interested in the spread and consolidation of democracy, whether as policy makers, human rights activists, political analysts, or democratic theorists, there is a greater need now than ever before to reconsider the potential risks and benefits of federalism. The great risk is that federal arrangements can offer opportunities for non-democratic ethnic nationalists to mobilize their resources. This risk is especially grave when elections are introduced in the sub-units of a formerly non-democratic federal polity—as they were in the USSR and the former Yugoslavia—prior to democratic countrywide elections and in the absence of democratic countrywide parties.1 Of the nine states that once made up communist Europe, six were unitary and three were federal. The six unitary states are now five states (East Germany has reunited with the Federal Republic), while the three federal states — Yugoslavia, the USSR, and Czechoslovakia — are now 22 independent states. Most of postcommunist Europe?s ethnocracies and ethnic bloodshed has occurred within these post-federal states. Yet in spite of these potential problems, federal rather than unitary is the form most often associated with multinational democracies. Federal states are also associated with large populations, extensive territories, and democracies with territorially based linguistic fragmentation. In fact, every single long-standing democracy in a territorially based multilingual and multinational polity is a federal state.2 Although there are many multinational polities in the world, few of them are democracies. Those multinational democracies that do exist, however (Canada, Belgium, Spain and India), are all federal. Although all these democracies have had problems managing their multinational polities (and even multicultural Switzerland had the Sonderbund War, the secession of the Catholic cantons in 1848), they remain reasonably stable. By contrast, Sri Lanka, a territorially based multilingual and multinational unitary state that feared the ?slippery slope? of federalism, could not cope with its ethnic divisions and plunged headlong into a bloody civil war that has lasted more than 15 years..."