Early in the twentieth century, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the ensuing chaos in the Balkans, a new verb entered the English language: "Balkanize," defined by the O.E.D. as "to divide (a region) into a number of smaller and often mutually hostile units, as was done in the Balkan Peninsula in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries".
That in turn might draw in mutually hostile neighbors such as Turkey and Greece.
In the central region of Nigeria, for instance, where much of the ostensibly Christian-Muslim violence takes place, the mutually hostile groups are often motivated as much by disputes over land and longstanding ethnic friction as they are by religion.
Diversities of these sorts make it necessary for products to be marketed in local terms and for political candidates to appear to be friends of each of perhaps a dozen or more mutually hostile ethnic groups, of the educated and the uneducated, and of the very wealthy as well as the poverty-stricken.
As farmers, Ancestral Pueblo peoples and their nomadic neighbours were often mutually hostile; this is the source of the term Anasazi, a Navajo word meaning "ancestors of the enemy," which once served as the customary scientific name for this group.
The two markets are mutually hostile.
In reality, the relationship was often mutually hostile, not least during the First World War.
Iraq's mutually hostile Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish elements were hastily thrown together when Britain and its allies carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Modern Iraq has little experience as a free and stable nation.
AS THE American administration accelerates its efforts to drum up international support to unseat Saddam Hussein, it faces open dissent from two of its most prized, and most mutually hostile, allies: Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds.
The international response was hostile as well.
