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This paper uses the conflict between Hungary and Slovakia over the Gabcikovo‐Nagymaros Dam to examine two foreign policy issues. The first is how states determine their interests and how perception of gains and losses arise and change. The second is the reality that international norms are rarely clear and often conflict, making answering questions of whether states have “internalized” or are abiding by norms problematic. This case is a good vehicle for addressing these questions as the dam dispute began during the communist period and has continued through the political and economic transitions to European Union membership. It also was the focus of a groundbreaking International Court of Justice case on the application of ecological necessity to treaty obligations. Fleshing out the model of a two‐level game with insights from other theoretical perspectives, this article argues the key to this stalemate is the interrelated process through which state identity and understandings of vital interests change, creating frames in each state around different international norms.

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Liberal pluralists have argued that minority cultural communities are necessary for the liberty of minorities. On the premise that individual rights are insufficient to protect these cultural communities, they argue that ethnic and national groups should be allocated some type of collective autonomy. In this article, we critically examine this claim through a discussion of policies regarding Hungarian minorities. We show that liberal pluralist approaches (1) privilege ethnic and national identities over other types of communal identities, (2) require that ethnic and national communities be clearly bounded, but do not address how lines should be drawn, and (3) increase the power of cultural communities over their members. Policies based on liberal pluralist ideas therefore violate principles of equality and are likely to harm the autonomy of individuals. Rather than looking to liberal pluralist theories as a panacea for minority concerns, we demonstrate why we should be sceptical about this effort to move beyond minority protections based on individual rights.Democratic theory has long wrestled with the possibility of majorities infringing on the liberty of minorities, a particularly salient concern when majorities and minorities are cultural groups. Even in long-established democracies, controversy remains over how permanent cultural minorities should be governed, sustaining debates about the nature of rights and justice, the importance of cultural identity, and the means to determine the boundaries of political communities. Since 1989 these debates have raged throughout East Central Europe, where multiethnic states remain in the process of constructing new democratic institutions. For Hungary and its neighbors, the Nations and Nationalism 11 (2), 2005, 285-305. r ASEN 2005 n We are grateful to the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) and the Ohio University Research Committee for research funds for this project. We are also grateful to Ira Katznelson, Charles Tilly, Debbie Schildkraut, Vicki Hseuh, Zsuzsa Csergo and Margit Bessenyey Williams for helpful comments on previous drafts. We would like to especially thank Bala´zs Jara´bik, Center for Legal Analysis (Bratislava) for his insights on Hungarian issues in Slovakia.

This article draws several conclusions. First, that elections provide critical information for shaping behavior, since in the second and third rounds, party elites and voters behaved in ways that were rational considering the outcome of the previous election. Second, on the whole, states have adopted a variety of systems and rarely changed them in major ways after the second round of elections, indicating that electoral systems quickly become constraining institutions. Where they have been changed, movement has been away from the extremes of either high disproportionality or proportionality. Third, results from the first three rounds of elections indicate declines in party system fragmentation, disproportionality, volatility, and wasted votes, indicating a growth in strategic voting. Finally, except in the very important case of party volatility, and Russia, the view that there is a generalized gap between the post-Soviet cases and the East European cases is not supported by the evidence.While the collapse of communism was heralded as a triumph for liberal democracy, there has been considerably less optimism about the actual process for translating popular will into coherent governance. Throughout the 1990s, there was fear that the presumed disappearance of the communist parties would be replaced by inchoate party systems filled with ephemeral movements reflecting unclear interests and reemerging ethnic identities (Bunce and