Unlike 2.0-r2, 2.1 fails to associate with AP if no CA certificate for the RADIUS server is specified on WPA-EAP. By extension, networkmanager fails as well.
This seems more like a bug in wpa_supplicant, or a configuration problem. Could you try and ask on the hostap mailinglist, since they are the developers of wpa_supplicant, and they know the software better than we do. You can find the mailinglist here: http://lists.shmoo.com/mailman/listinfo/hostap Having to proxy between this bug and the mailinglist will make it difficult to find out what is wrong :)
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 501828 ***