The late 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by the sudden rise of nationalist movements in almost all Soviet ethnic regions. It is argued that the rise of political nationalism since the late 1980s can be explained by the development of cultural nationalism in the previous decades, as an unintended outcome of Communist nationalities policy. All ethnic regions are examined throughout the entire history of the USSR (49 regions, 1917–1991), using the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach. This paper aims to make at least three contributions to the field. First, it is a methodological contribution for studying nationalism: a “quantification of history” approach. Having constructed variables from historical data, I use conventional statistical methods such as SEM. Second, this paper contributes to the theoretical debate about the role of cultural autonomy in multiethnic states. Finally, the paper statistically proves that the break between early Soviet and Stalinist nationalities policy explains the entire Soviet nationalities policy.

COVID-19 struck a world already suffering under a scourge – a rash of right-wing populist, exclusionary nationalisms. Whether it is Donald Trump in the USA, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orbán in Hungary, Modi in India, the past decade the world has witnessed the rise of leaders claiming the nation for dominant ethnic groups, excluding and targeting ethnic minorities and immigrants. In this article I argue that this preexisting plague of exclusionary nationalism has made the COVID-19 pandemic more dangerous for our body politics than it might otherwise have been. Following from our evolutionary tendency to associate foreigners with disease, all epidemics hold the potential to raise boundaries between ingroups and outgroups and scapegoat the latter. Yet this noxious seed of division latent in all contagions has flourished in the case of COVID-19, as it was planted in the fertile soil of exclusionary nationalism where boundaries between countries, and majority and minority-group boundaries within countries, were already furrowed deep. I delineate how through the pandemic, right-wing, populist, exclusionary nationalist governments have further exacerbated both these types of us-them divides. In concluding, however, I point out how in line with its well-known Janus nature, nationalism has also played a more constructive role during the pandemic.

The connection between nationalism and sport seems at once both obvious and manifest, with the most lavish praise of the nation often arising at sporting events. While a sizeable body of academic literature exists on the connection between the two concepts, it remains overlapping and unstructured. This state of the field review essay accounts for the major works in this field and categorizes it according to the function it fulfills in the subfield. Specifically, it focuses on sport as a mechanism for the diffusion and creation of nationalism, sport under conditions of globalization at Sporting Mega Events (SMEs), and the connection between sport and the distinction between civic and ethnic definitions of nationality.

This paper posits that a great deal of cross-national variation in clientelistic investment strategies can be explained through an examination of the different forms of risk faced by the political elite of different types of regimes. It also maintains that demand from clients/potential clients is, by itself, insufficient to explain the level or scope of clientelistic investments. The argument is advanced through an examination of the linkages (and non-linkages) between patrons/potential patrons and clients/potential clients amongst the ethnic Uzbek populations of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. In Kyrgyzstan, a semi-authoritarian state, electoral risk predominates; however, the character of electoral risk in Kyrgyzstan provides Uzbek members of the political elite with an incentive to diversify their clientelistic investments. Consequently, many engage in direct exchanges with their constituents while simultaneously investing in private, cultural organizations that serve party-like functions. Alternatively, in contemporary Tajikistan, best described as an authoritarian state, electoral risk has been replaced with the risk of expulsion from the presidential clientelistic network. As a result, members of the Tajikistani political elite have a disincentive to publicly invest in constituent clients as this investment may increase the risk of expulsion.

The Roma or Gypsies entered Romania's historic provinces, Wallachia and Moldavia, in the twelfth century. Over the next 200 years, the Roma, who had come to the Balkans from northern India, were enslaved. By the fifteenth century, the practice of Gypsy slavery was widespread throughout the two provinces. In part, their enslavement came about as a means of securing Gypsy skills as craftsmen, metalsmiths, musicians, and equine specialists. Over time, a complex body of laws was passed in Wallachia and Moldavia to strengthen the control of Romanian noblemen over their Gypsy slaves (robi). However, by the eighteenth century, some mild efforts were undertaken to better the plight of Romanian Gypsy slaves.

This article analyzes the status of difficult historic events in Ukrainian collective memory. Difficult elements of collective memory are defined as those which divide society on basic matters, such as identity and national cohesion, and events which are being actively forgotten because of the role of Ukrainians as perpetrators. Three such issues were analyzed: World War II and the role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Holocaust, and the ethnic purge of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–1945. Utilizing data from quantitative and qualitative studies, the author showcases the significance of these issues for contemporary Ukrainian identity and Ukraine's relations with its neighbors. In particular, the evaluation of World War II and the role of the UPA in Ukrainian history polarizes Ukrainian society to a great degree. At the same time, this element of national history is used to construct a common, anti-Russian identity. The difficulty of relating to the memory of the Holocaust and the ethnic purge in Volhynia is of a different character. These events are problematic for Ukrainian collective memory because they demand a painful settling of accounts with the past. At present, only Ukrainian elites are willing to work on these subjects, and only to a limited degree, while the common consciousness either denies or ignores them altogether.

Even though self-critical dealing with the past has not been an official criterion for joining the EU, the founding of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research and the Holocaust conference in Stockholm at the beginning of 2000 seem to have generated informal standards of confronting and exhibiting the Holocaust in the context of “Europeanization of Memory.” Comparative analysis shows that post-Communist museums dealing with the World War II period perform in the context of those informal standards. Both the Jasenovac Memorial Museum in Croatia and the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica were founded in the Communist era and played an important role in supporting the founding myths of the two countries. Both were subjected to historical revisionism during the 1990s. In the current exhibitions from 2004/2006, both memorial museums stress being part of Europe and refer, to “international standards” of musealization, while the Jasenovac memorial claims to focus on “the individual victim.” But stressing the European dimension of resistance and the Holocaust obscures such key aspects as the civil war and the responsibility of the respective collaborating regime.

One of the greatest challenges currently facing the new states in Central and Eastern Europe is educational reform. After obtaining independence in the early 1990s, these states were confronted with the immense task of transforming an outdated centralized education system, which was aimed at delivering a loyal communist workforce, into a modern system that would be much more responsive to consumer demands and would recognize and further individual talent. The immensity of the undertaking lies in the fact that three discourses make simultaneous demands on the education system: nation building, democratization and globalization.

The article concerns debate about the memory of the Holocaust in Ukraine. It covers the period 2004-2008.

This article analyses how migration has affected the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) since they entered both regions in the Middle Ages. It explores the importance of migration in the culture and history of the Roma and looks at how forced migration has harmed the Roma and helped build some of the negative stereotypes and prejudices that have haunted them until today.

The basis of a civil nation is common goals, common values, trust in the government, and the understanding that the government serves us. The main task of the people [now] is to avoid military service, taxes, and the authorities in general. Under such conditions, it is impossible to form a civil political nation.

The leaked email accounts of Putin’s aide on Ukraine, Vladislav Surkov, are vast primary source collections that shed light on the backstage happenings of the Kremlin’s politics in the Donbas war. Surkov is an excellent dramaturg; he writes scripts, casts actors, analyzes their performance and narratives, runs promotions, and puts the repertoire into motion to achieve intended reactions of the target audience. Methods and resources employed against Ukraine have much in common with political technology that helps the Kremlin to manipulate public opinion as well as election systems using pseudo-experts, technical parties, fake civic organizations and youth movement such as Nashi, and covert media techniques. Moscow tactically promoted the myth of “Novorossiya”—later the circumstances forced Surkov to replace it with “Donbas.” These tactics gave false credibility to “separatists” who would voice Moscow’s objections to any attempts of Ukraine to drift westward, creating an illusion in the domestic and international audience: the separatists are not puppets of Moscow but desperately fight against Kyiv junta for their localized identity, and Russia is just there to offer them a helping hand. The Russian policy toward Ukraine after the 2013 fall is an extension of its “virtual” domestic politics, but not traditional diplomacy at all.

The article analyzes the material or objectified reproduction of the Basque demos since democracy was established in Spain in 1980. Spain holds within its territory diverse regions and political communities and the Basque case is a highly illustrative example of how the development of regional state institutions is fundamental for the reproduction of distinct democratic demoi not merely in their political but also socio-economic dimension. This paper argues that, in our current European context, political distinctions cannot become effectively objectified and instituted power structures without state institutions being able to uphold a differentiated system of stratification.

The political participation of immigrants has received increased scholarly attention over recent decades. However, comparisons between the electoral behavior of immigrants in their countries of origin and of residence are still limited. This article addresses this gap in the literature and seeks to identify the determinants of Romanian immigrants' electoral participation in the local elections of four West European countries (Germany, France, Italy, and Spain) as compared to their turnout in their home country's legislative elections. Looking through the lenses of exposure theory, we hypothesize that contact with institutions, people, and values from the countries of residence are likely to have different effects in the two types of elections. We test the explanatory power of four main variables - time spent in the host country, social networks, degree of involvement in the local community, and the type of relationship with citizens of their host countries - to which we add a series of individual-level controls such as age, education, gender, and media exposure. To assess our claim, we employ binary logistic regression to analyze original web survey data collected in the summer of 2013. The result supports the empirical implications of exposure theory.

This article analyzes official discourse of the nation during Vladimir Putin's third presidency, as reflected in Russian television coverage of Islam and migration. It argues that the replacement of earlier deliberately ambiguous definitions of Russian nationhood with clearly framed exclusive visions reflects the change in the regime's legitimation strategy from one based on economic performance to one based on its security record. In this context, the systematic promotion of Russian ethnonationalism for the purpose of achieving the regime's general stability began not at the time of Crimea's annexation, as it is often assumed, but at the time of Putin's reelection amidst public protests in 2012. The goal of representing the authorities as attentive to public grievances in a society where opinion polls register high levels of xenophobia has prompted state-controlled broadcasters to use ethnoracial definitions of the nation that they had previously avoided. The media campaigns analyzed here also reflect abrupt changes in the precise identity of Russia's main Others. Such instrumentally adopted sharp discursive swings are unlikely to constitute an appropriate tool for societal consensus management and for the achievement of political stability in the long term.

The outbreaks of major pandemics have historically been associated with the proliferation of conspiracy theories. This article explores what role conspiratorial narratives have played in the development of different “imagined communities” in the premodern, modern, and contemporary worlds. I argue that premodern conspiratorial narratives were mostly focused on eschatological and theological images, aiming to blame and delegitimise the religious Other. In these imaginary plots, spread of disease was interpreted as an attack on one’s religious beliefs. The prevalence of religious conspiracies helped reinforce religiously based, yet temporary, “imagined communities.” With the rise of nation-states and the decline of empires and patrimonial kingdoms, the periodic outbursts of epidemics gradually attained more nationalist interpretations. Hence in the modern era, pandemics often triggered the growth of nationalist conspiracies. In these narratives the threatening Other was usually nationalised, and even traditional religious groups became reinterpreted as a threat to one’s national security. In recent times, new technologies and modes of communication have created space for the emergence of global conspiracy theories. The onset of Covid-19 has been associated with the dramatic expansion of such conspiracies. Some scholars have interpreted this as a reliable sign that nation-states and nationalisms have lost their dominance. However, this article shows that many global conspiracies in fact reinforce nationalist ideas and practices and, in this process, foster the perpetuation of national imagined communities.

This paper focuses on the complex nature of post-war multilingual landscapes in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, as shaped by the country's political shift after independence in 2008. We aim to contribute to this sociolinguistically underexplored territory through an examination of the relative predominance and visibility of the capital's most dominant languages: Albanian, Serbian, and English. Our central aim is to empirically problematize the shared co-officialdom of the Albanian and Serb languages, as put forward in the “Ahtisaari Plan” in 2007 and subsequently adopted in the State Constitution in 2008 and Language Laws in 2006 and 2008. We posit that the multilingual language policies which paint an inclusive, multi-ethnic picture of Pristina do not coincide with its monolingual Albanian reality. In addition to these empirical findings, our second aim is to contribute to the theorization of authorship in the public sphere. With reference to the Pristina context, we problematize the analytical categorization conventionally made between top-down and bottom-up agency and distinguish a third category of semi-official authorship. This third category enables us to examine the dynamic nature of the discrepancy between Kosovo's language policy and Pristina's urban linguistic reality in more detail.

The striking affinities that have developed between radical-conservative movements in Western Europe and Russia since the end of the Cold War have been widely noted. This essay considers these affinities through the example of the Soviet historian and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992). It argues that Gumilev and the European New Right developed perspectives that were highly comparable, founded on similar principles, and articulated through similar images and allusions. Yet despite the powerful resonances in terms of basic concepts and theoretical orientation, there were nonetheless deep differences in terms of the conclusions regarding the practical implications for their respective societies that Gumilev and the Europeans deduced from these principles.

The number of internally forcibly displaced persons is growing every year across the globe and exceeds the number of refugees. To date, Ukraine has the highest number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Europe, with about 1.4 million people forced to flee from the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Employing Massey’s concept of ‘power geometry’, the modalities of borders, and taking an intersectional approach, this article theorizes how IDPs are situated politically within a protracted conflict. Such an approach offers the chance to see how the reaction to the war brings authorities to see displaced people as a static category and reproduces a war-lexicon in policies, which fractures the space of everyday life. Drawing upon qualitative research on IDPs, the civil society, international organizations, and public officials in Ukraine, the article concludes that intersections of gender and older age with displacement, and the lack of state recognition of these differing groups of IDPs, together with the lack of the economic resources for social policy, produces multiple forms of social exclusion.

Does religion motivate and intensify nationalism, or does religion moderate and even suppress nationalism? Six kinds of relationships between nationalism and religion are critically reviewed: nationalism as a modern religion in competition with traditional religions; religious origins of the “Chosen People” as the mythomoteur of nationalism; religious exclusion as nation-building; religious influences on national policies; influence of religious observance on national identification; and religiously based “civilizations” transcending nationalisms. Western Christian experience with nationalism is not generalizable due to the institutional autonomy and supranational organization of the Catholic Church. Western European nationalisms were premised on religious sectarian homogeneity, and the homogenous “confessional state” served as the template of European nation-states. Furthermore, I argue that the late medieval eradication of Muslims and Jews across Western Europe prefigured sectarian and ethnonational purges of the following centuries. Finally, I argue that different configurations of religion and nationalism depend on two critical conditions: the degree to which the dominant religious tradition is doctrinally supraethnic and institutionally transnational, and the religious identity of the main adversary in the constitutive conflict that culminated in national statehood. The crises of Marxism and liberalism provide the context for the resurgence of religion and nationalism at present.