“Tell a man today to go and build a state,” Samuel Finer once stated, “and he will try to establish a definite and defensible boundary and compel those who live inside it to obey him.” While at best an oversimplification, Finer's insight illuminates an interesting aspect of state-society relations. Who is it that builds the state? How and where do they establish territorial boundaries, and how are those who live within that territory compelled to obey? Generally speaking, these are the questions that will be addressed here. Of more immediate concern is the fate of peoples located in regions where arbitrary land boundaries fall. Are they made loyal to the state through coercion or by their own compulsions? More importantly, how are their identities shaped by the efforts of the state to differentiate them from their compatriots on the other side of the borders? How is the shift from ethnic to national identities undertaken? A parallel elaboration of the national histories of the populations of Karelia and Moldova will shed light on these questions. The histories of each group are marked by a myriad of attempts to differentiate the identity of each ethnic community from their compatriots beyond the state's borders. The results of such overt, state-initiated efforts to differentiate borderland populations by encouraging a national identity at the expense of the ethnic, has ranged from the mundane to the tragic—from uneventful assimilation to persecution and even genocide. As an illustration of the range of possibilities and processes, I maintain that the tragedies of Karelia and Moldova are not exceptional, but rather are a consequence of their geographical straddling of arbitrary borders, and the need for the state to promote a distinctive national identity for these populations to differentiate them socially from their compatriots beyond the frontier.

Every newly emerged and nationalizing state has to confirm its legitimacy and, more often than not, employs a cultural-historical approach for that. It is even more so, if, under an authoritarian regime, the given society presents itself as a cultural-historical entity rather than a civic one based on political cohesion. The less democratic a society the more it is eager to depict itself as an organic community based on a well-bound culture and deeply rooted in the given soil. In this case the idea of an ancestral heritage is used as a substitute for political legitimacy.

Recent literature on discursive opportunities shows broad consensus on the importance of media communication in determining the success of minority mobilization. However, the impact of media discourse on formal forms of political participation is less clear. This article examines to what extent, if any, media coverage on immigrant minorities shapes the parliamentary activities of “minority representatives” in the Netherlands and the UK. We investigate whether salience and tone on minorities have impact on how often and in what ways minority members of parliament address ethnic and/or religious constituencies. To study this relationship between media coverage and parliamentary activity, we conduct two separate content analyses of parliamentary questions and newspapers between 2002 and 2012 in the Netherlands and the UK. Multivariate analyses reveal that a more negative tone in newspaper coverage results in more suppressive framing in the Dutch parliament. Our findings for the British case indicate a negative effect of media salience and minority presence on parliamentary salience.

This article reviews the current scholarship around racism and nationalism, two of the mostly hotly debated issues in contemporary politics. Both racism and nationalism involve dividing humanity into groups and setting up some groups as innately superior to others. Until recently, racism and nationalism were both widely seen as unpleasant relics of times past, destined to disappear as the principles of equality and human rights become universally embraced. But both concepts have proved their resilience in recent years. Scholars have been devoting new attention to the “racialization” of ethnic and national identities in the former Soviet Union and East Europe, the regions that are the main focus of this journal. The article examines the prevailing approaches to understanding the terms “racism” and “nationalism,” which are distinct but overlapping categories of analysis and vehicles of political mobilization. Developments in genomics have complicated the relationship between perceptions of race as a purely social phenomenon. The essay explores the way racism and nationalism play out in two self-proclaimed “exceptional” political systems – the Soviet Union and the United States – which have played a prominent role in global debates about race and nation. It briefly discusses developments in other regions, such as the debate over multiculturalism in Europe.

The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive explanation for the reasons behind governments' decisions to relocate and build new capital cities. The process of capital-building is not a mere phenomenon of urbanization; rather it is a process of “text inventing” for nation-building projects. To emphasize implications for identity behind city constructions, the paper will discuss urbanization practices of Soviet Yerevan and post-Soviet Astana. However, to verify the validity and generalizability of the proposed argument, the article will also briefly provide historical analysis of relocation of capitals from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and from Istanbul to Ankara. The reconstruction of the capital of Soviet Armenia, Yerevan, in the 1920s is important in understanding the role of Utopias in initiating identity transformations. The central conceptual premise of the article is Samuel Huntington's theoretical concept of a “torn country” and the redefinition of civilizational identity. One reason capitals have been relocated and new capitals have been built throughout history is a need to initiate a long-term transformation of identity.

The article examines a key attribute of Russian national identity—national pride—as it is reflected in mass consciousness. To trace the dynamics of multiple facets of national pride and related phenomena from 1996 to 2015, we use data from five surveys. The results demonstrate a substantial growth in Russian national pride in specific country achievements and general pride in Russian citizenship over the last 20 years. This change is the result of the population’s and state’s need for positive social identity as well as from both real and imagined progress in the Russian economy and political influence, and it started long before the Crimea mobilization and Olympics of 2014. The structural difference in pride in various achievements persisted for the 20 years examined here, but became less distinct. Across the years examined here, Russian national pride has become more strongly related to belief in the superiority of the country and is therefore increasingly competitive.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent independence of Latvia, a minority group became a majority and a majority group became a minority. This has been the situation for Latvians and Russians after August 1991. The Baltic States led the way towards first autonomy and then independence. The nationalist movement in the Latvian SSR was primarily a minority nationalist movement. Why do minorities mobilise? Gurr finds that minorities rebel for two reasons: relative deprivation and group mobilisation. Relative deprivation answers the question of why and it characterizes the status of the Latvian language and culture vis-à-vis that of Russia during the Soviet period. While relative deprivation has come under considerable criticism because of its inability to explain when a group will mobilise, the notion can be found in the nationalist rhetoric before and since the restoration of Latvian independence. Group mobilisation goes further in explaining when minorities may assert political claims. Considered in terms of changes in the political opportunity structure, the changing politics of glasnost allowed the nationalist movements to mobilise in the Baltic States.

In 2006 the Croatian singer Severina Vučković attempted to represent Croatia at the Eurovision Song Contest with a song arranged by Goran Bregović, the ex-Yugoslav musician from Sarajevo. Before the song “Moja štikla” [My Stiletto] had even been released, the Croatian (and Serbian) mass media had questioned its “Croatianness” in an escalating sequence of claims and counter-claims to authenticity. Its use of musical elements based on folk song and dance left it open to allegations that it had compromised folk music's authenticity; those elements’ regional associations (especially ganga and rera singing from Lika and Herzegovina) connoted spaces which had been marginalized as “eastern” or “Balkan” in comparison to privileged inland and coastal traditions; the involvement of Bregović (represented as Serbian throughout the Croatian mass media) enabled suggestions that the song presented “Serbian folklore” or belonged to the Serbian genre of “turbofolk”—and all this in the particularly sensitive context of a competition which was supposed to symbolize Croatia's full European membership.

Drawing on field theory, this paper aims to shed light on the development and functioning of the Kurdish literary world in Turkey, characterized, in particular, by the use of a non-official language. It argues that this “small literary world” is to be understood in relation to a “double macrocosm”: the sphere of Kurdish politics and the national Turkish sphere, which provide specific constraints and resources. The paper argues that in such a context the emergence of a literary field, autonomous from other social fields and independent from political stakes, follows an unpredictable path, and will not always be achieved political dimension of the literary act stresses its dependency on political stakes and the field of politics. This however does not impede the emergence of autonomous literary institutions. The multilingualism of the actors involved drives also toward another heteronomy: this small literary world is also to be understood in relation to the Turkish literary field. The paper first presents the macrocosms in which Kurdish literary activities developed. It then examines the progressive integration of a field freeing itself from political constraints. Lastly, it focuses on the trajectories of a few writers, the analyses of which show the intertwining of the different worlds.

From the estimated ten million refugees in interwar Europe, more than 250,000 were ethnic Bulgarians who found their way in the Bulgarian Kingdom following Bulgarian defeats in the Second Balkan War and World War One. For a country with a population of five and a half million in the mid-1920s, this refugee flow constituted a significant challenge from economic, political, social, and cultural viewpoints. Similarly to Germany, Hungary, and Austria, the refugee presence served as a constant reminder of national failure because Bulgaria lost territories, perceived as a part of the national homeland, to all of its neighbors. The Bulgarian state received refugees from the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Romania, and the interwar governments were compelled to deal with a large and diverse population that suffered harsh socioeconomic problems and psychological traumas. Due to the Convention for Emigration of Minorities between Greece and Bulgaria of 1919 as well as the Greek-Turkish War of 1921–1922 and the obligatory population exchange it initiated in the period 1922–1924, refugee flows in the Balkans lasted well into the mid-1920s. Hence Bulgarians were on the move throughout 1924 and 1925. Despite these strenuous circumstances, interwar politicians boasted the successful integration of the refugees. Immediately after World War One, the government provided temporary assistance to the newcomers. In 1926, an international loan allowed the agricultural settlement of the most destitute new arrivals, and all refugees were granted the rights of Bulgarian citizens. A second loan in 1928 guaranteed the continuation of vital infrastructure projects. By the end of the 1930s, both domestic and international agencies involved in the refugee accommodation viewed the process as a successfully completed mission.

This paper combines two sources of qualitative data, focus group interviews and ethnographic research, to discuss gender as a factor in changes to work and identity in a rural Ukrainian village. Analyzing data from focus groups I conducted in the winter and fall of 1997 at my dissertation field site in Transcarpathia, I argue that in this community gender differences are as important as generational differences in shaping participants' evaluation of work opportunities before, during and in particular after the Soviet period. The important relationship between gender and work opportunities in this village stems both from traditional divisions of labor and the loss of professional jobs, such as teaching and administrative positions, available to women during the Soviet period.

This article argues that the “declarative” parastate of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) claiming sovereignty over Western Sahara is better understood as a hybrid between a parastate and a state-in-exile. It relies more on external, “international legal sovereignty,” than on internal, “Westphalian” and “domestic” sovereignty. While its Algerian operational base in the Tindouf refugee camps makes it work as a primarily extraterritorial state-in-exile de facto, the SADR maintains control over one quarter of Western Sahara’s territory proper allowing it to at least partially meet the requirements for declarative statehood de jure. Many case-specific nuances surround the internal sovereignty of the SADR in relation to criteria for statehood: territory, population, and government. However, examining this case in a comparative light reveals similarities with other (secessionist) parastates. The SADR exists within the context of a frozen conflict, where the stalemate has been reinforced by an ineffective internationally brokered peace settlement and the indefinite presence of international peacekeeping forces. Global powers have played a major role in prolonging the conflict’s status quo while the specific resilience of the SADR as a parastate has been ensured by support from Algeria as an external sponsor. The path to sovereignty appears to be blocked in every possible way.

Civil society, to the extent that it exists today in Bosnia, has developed alongside the recasting of women's roles in public life. Researchers equate civil society in Bosnia today almost exclusively with non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The early post-war NGOs grew out of the peace movement that took shape before and during the open conflict of 1992–1995. Peace organizations evolved to a large extent from feminist organizing and organizations in the Yugoslav republics of Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia. Thus, to study the origins of Bosnian civil society, we must begin with the struggle for equal rights for women in modern Yugoslavia.

Rather than focusing on often-explored mnemonic practices (memorials, national celebrations, commemorations etc.) the article addresses the role that remembering, as a part of a wider political culture, plays in situations where images of the past are not visible per se, but are implied or even openly invoked to explain and (de)legitimize choices political actors make. By analyzing the interactions of memories and new institutional arrangements related to minority rights in the case of the Bosniak minority in Serbia, the article shows how recollections in political claims and policy-making were used as a medium for negotiations and the contestation of both political interests and competing “group-making projects”.

A personal note frames this essay. In recent years I have travelled with my Finnish colleagues from the University of Tampere to a number of international seminars and conferences organized in various European locations. While socializing with the other participants, my self-identification as Romanian has, on several occasions, prompted the question “are you Hungarian or Romanian …?“ No other options were ever offered, even though Romania has a quite sizeable Roma minority and a number of Saxons, though ever declining, still live in the country. At the same time, the ethnicity of my Finnish colleagues has never been questioned. True, Finns describe their country as a homogeneous place, yet Finland is a country with two official languages—Finnish and Swedish—ever praised for the treatment of its Swedish-speaking minority. And some other ethnicities—for instance, Roma and Sami—also live in Finland. Nobody interested? Or maybe there is more to it than simply a question of curiosity (or a lack of it). That the ethnicity of the Finnish participants was deemed irrelevant, whereas my ethnic identity seemed a topical issue for informal discussions during coffee breaks or conference lunches elicited my interest in the issue of national and ethnic identity. I have started to ask how collective identities, and especially national and ethnic identities, have been conceptualized and how those theoretical concepts have been deployed in the study of Central and Eastern European identities. Are there any differences in how Central and Eastern European identities are studied compared with Western identities?

Following Stalin’s interpretations of the Lenin’s thesis on the merging of the nations, the Yugoslav communists first needed to “push” all nations to the same level of development. After the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, the soft Yugoslav nation-building project was accelerated. During the 1950s, national Yugoslavism was stimulated in a latent way through language, culture, censuses, and changes in the constitutional and socialist system. By the end of the 1950s, the Yugoslav socialist national idea reached its peak with the 1958 Party Congress. Nevertheless, with the economic crisis in the early 1960s, and the famous Ćosić-Pirjevec debate on Yugoslavism, the Yugoslav national idea declined. This was evident on the level of the personal, national identifications of the Party members, but also in the ideological shift of the Party’s chief ideologue Edvard Kardelj. Yet, the concept of Yugoslavism was redefined in the second half of the 1960s without ethnic or national connotations. Two Yugoslavisms were created: a socialist one propagated by the Party and a national one that lived among the population in small proportions. Although the Yugoslavs were never recognized as a nation, that did not stop them from publicly advocating for their national rights.

Following World War I, the Allied Powers signed Minority Treaties with a number of Central and Eastern European states. These treaties delineated the status of religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities in their respective countries. Turkey would be one of the last states that sat down to the negotiation table with the Allied Powers. In the Turkish case, the Lausanne Treaty would be the defining document which set out a series of rights and freedoms for the non-Muslim minorities in the newly created nation. The present article explores how and why the non-Muslim minorities were situated in the fringes of the new nation. In doing so, the article highlights the content of the discussions in the Lausanne Conference and in the Turkish Grand National Assembly with an emphasis on the position of the Turkish political elite.

In late 2010, Azerbaijan tried to introduce a ban on hijab in all secondary schools, referring to an article of the new Law of Education that mandated school uniforms. The supporters of the ban argued that the hijab was inimical to Azerbaijani culture and law because it violated the separation of religion and state, was a propaganda tool of Islamist fundamentalists funded from abroad, and was a foreign form of clothing that did not exist in Azerbaijani culture. This article examines why hijab is the focus of controversy in Azerbaijan. The supporters of the ban offered simple oppositions, such as secularism versus theocracy, modernity versus backwardness, and national versus foreign, to explain and justify the ban. However, these dichotomies do not capture the complexities of Islam in Azerbaijan. Rather, they are polemics that blur more than they reveal. In this article, I argue that the debates around the hijab controversy in Azerbaijan are a political discourse aimed at building a nation. The key contribution of this article is to examine the wider historical trajectory of the political discourse that constructed hijab as fundamentalist, backward, threatening, and alien, through discussing the topics of secularism, Islamist politics, modernity, and nationalism.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 is widely framed as an outside-in process, not only enabled but also enacted by the Kremlin. Prevailing accounts privilege geopolitical analysis and place those developments in a broader narrative of tension and competition between the West and Russia. Such a narrative downplays the involvement of local actors and the importance of the choices they made prior to and during those events. This article revisits the period leading up to March 2014 through a focus on critical junctures, critical antecedents, a near miss, and the path not taken. It argues that a full account of Crimea’s incorporation into Russia – while acknowledging Moscow’s role – cannot ignore the local contingencies that preceded and shaped it. We understand the region’s annexation as a key moment of institutional change in Ukraine and focus our attention on explaining how that outcome was determined, identifying the path to such a political outcome. Yanukovych’s decision to “catapult” political-economic interest groups from Makeevka and Donetsk into the peninsula led to the marginalization of the local elite. Regime change in Kyiv and a slow and cumbersome response from the new authorities in February-March 2014 triggered, but did not cause, Crimea’s exit option.

This article compares the nation-building processes in four well-established Eurasian de facto states. Although all four pursue a set of identity politics that would legitimize the separatist cause, comparing them reveals important differences in boundary-making strategies. While maintaining the image of the enemy parent-state and of an imminent external threat is a common endeavor, they face different challenges and thus have pursued different strategies of identity-building. Transnistria and Abkhazia are two ethnically heterogeneous entities while Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia are more homogeneous since (forced) displacements, mostly of non-titular ethnicities, took place. The Abkhazs, Ossetians, and Armenians claim titular status in their respective regions, but only the latter two have kin in neighboring countries with whom they want to unify. Meanwhile, the “Transnistrian people” is a newly invented construct. Despite their lack of international recognition, the article demonstrates that – apart from a special emphasis on cultivating the image of the “enemy parent-state” – the nation-building mechanisms in the de facto states do not substantially differ from the processes at work in other post-Soviet states presented in this Special Issue.