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This timely paper by Dr. Sandole is part of a continuing project at the Institute intendedto analyse and recommend remedies for the resurgence of overt and violent conflict in Eastern Europe. It takes the form of a consideration of the manner in which the "security problematic" for Europe as a whole has changed as a result of the end of the confrontation there between the USSR and the USA, and how this has become a matter of coping with conflicts that are internal or transnational, arising from long suppressed ethnic rivalries. Such conflicts have not been wholly unknown in Western Europe since 1945 - Alto Adige, Catalonia, the Basque country, Northern Ireland - but since the ending of Soviet control in Eastern Europe and the development of the idea of a "common European home" the world has become all too familiar with the management and mismanagement of conflicts between Croats and Serbs, Russians and Lithuanians, Czechs and Slovaks, Georgians and Ossetians. In these, and many more, ethnicity and the search for ethnic identity and security play major roles.