MIRICO Project aims to develope substantial and procedural concepts for the management of diversity in ethnically and culturally diverse states helping to prevent and overcome conflicts with a view to make these issues horizontal issues in all common EU policies through mainstreaming conflict prevention into the programming of Community external aid programmes.

Resulting from these objectives a lasting success of EU's policy towards the Western Balkans, especially Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo, but also for the new neighbourhood policy should be feasible.

Research into post-communist transition and consolidation of democracy has tended to overlook the critical question of the position of minorities and the development of effective instruments for their accommodation. Disaffected minorities may give rise to interethnic conflict, which can destabilise states in transition.

Liberal democratic theory rests on the assumption that the homogenous nation-state is the foundation of a functioning democracy. This key assumption also underpins the transition literature re-conceptualised it as the 'stateness' question and viewed it as a critical dimension. Many post-communist states are highly heterogeneous and do not approximate to the ideal type of the homogenous nation-state. Consequently, these states are seen as susceptible to an 'ethnification of transition politics' with little scope for institutional accommodation of diversity. The question is whether in conditions of multi-ethnicity and deep diversity, as prevails in most of the East European states, traditional nation-state building around a homogenizing and assimilatory concept can produce a stable outcome, or whether new forms of governance, citizenship and identity are required for political stability? This core question of the research is crucial for the wider goal of European integration - a process that can only progress in conditions of stability in Eastern Europe broadly defined.

MIRICO Project is funded under the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission