The fall of communist regimes and the breakup of the multinational Soviet and Yugoslav states produced a remarkable experiment in regime change. Twenty-eight old, new and revived states emerged. While most adopted democratic institutions, many others evolved new variants of authoritarian rule. Some new democracies maintained much higher standards in upholding formal democratic rules and complementary freedoms of the press and political organization. How is this variation in initial democratization to be explained? Among countries that initially adopted democracy, how is variation in the survival and development of democratic freedoms to be explained?

In the 1992 elections to the national legislature, Lithuania became the first country in Eastern Europe to return its former communist party to power. Headed by Algirdas Brazauskas, the former First Secretary who had led the party in its split from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in December 1990, the party had rejected the Soviet past and renamed itself the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party (LDLP). Declaring itself a social-democratic party, the LDLP supported democracy and a free market “with a human face.” In the 1992 elections the LDLP campaigned as a party of experienced, competent administrators capable of managing the reforms in such a way as to lessen their social impact. As a result the party won a resounding victory in the elections of that year to the national legislature, winning 73 of the 141 seats in the Seimas.

It has already been pointed out by many scholars that the supranational Soviet state meets many sociological criteria of an empire. Thus, it is populated by many different ethnic groups; they did not join the state voluntarily, having all been conquered in the past or incorporated into the state by force; and they are still forcefully kept together, even though force is far from being the only factor. Last but not least, the Soviet empire, like any other, has one dominating nation: the Russians. Thus, many regularities in other empires may also be applicable to the Soviet Union.

The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the major political consequences that the August 2008 war had (or did not have) for Georgia: how the war affected Georgia's internal political dynamics and its policies toward its separatist conflicts, its neighbors, and the world. I start by briefly summarizing my views on the nature of and reasons for the war, and on its impact (or the lack thereof) on the global security architecture. These constitute the backdrop against which changes in Georgia can be understood.

In 2000, when conducting a household survey as part of my research on consumption and ethnicity in the small western Macedonian town of Kumanovo, I received explicit proof of how important education has become for ethnic Albanians. It was a Friday afternoon on a hot summer day. I was in my top-floor apartment, working with my research assistant, Adnan, a 28-year-old ethnic Albanian man who had been helping me for the past year. We had grown to be a well-synchronized team. It was his turn to dictate while I entered data from the survey into the computer. The questionnaire concerned interior decorations, but it began with several general questions about the ages, education, and number of family members. After we finished entering around thirty of the questionnaires completed in Albanian, Adnan suddenly stood up without a word. He went into the kitchen, and started drinking water from the first thing he saw, which was an empty olive jar drying on the dish rack. Then he came back, clearly upset. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the upper part of his hand, and exclaimed,

The Czech–German borderlands are an archetypal European border region. They evoke not only Cold War histories, but also shelter layers of European memories of the ethnic reshaping of early post-war Europe. By means of life story interviews with German speakers of the border region, this article analyzes the symbolic meaning of and the individual dealing with the local Iron Curtain. It will shed light on the biographical and narrative interconnectedness of experiences of ethnic cleansing in the early post-war period and retrospective perceptions of the Iron Curtain in these borderlands. In particular, it inquires whether and to what extent the local Iron Curtain intensified fractures caused by the region's post-and pre-war attempts to halt the multiethnic composition of the border communities. The article suggests that the local Czech–German Iron Curtain would have never endured as strongly if the border communities’ common identity had not already been severely damaged in the course of the region's traumatic history and forced population transfers.

This article examines the impact of nationalism theory, and specifically the theory of national awakening, on Kurdish historiography. Kurdish experts cite several famous nationalism theorists, but seem most impressed by Anthony Smith's model of a singular transformation in which a not-yet-national community becomes a proper nation. Kurdish experts do not always use Smith's terminology, however, and often invoke other scholars in support of the singular transformation model. Kurdish historiography disagrees what the singular transformation entails, and different thresholds of nationalism imply wildly different dates for the birth of Kurdish nationalism. Stage theories of national awakening have had little impact, and ought to be reconsidered.

The article aims to compare the conditions of migrants from Central Asia into Russia with that of migrants from the Maghreb into France. Despite many similarities in conditions (related to the experience of social exclusion), there are deep differences. The precarious legal status of the majority of Central Asian newcomers in Russia has prevented them from embarking on an effective struggle for public recognition; this is in sharp contrast with North African newcomers in France who have been engaged in such struggle since the 1980s. In addition, Islam plays different roles in the migrants’ perceptions by host societies and in identification of the migrants themselves. Whereas Islam has become a marker of overarching collective identity among the Maghreb migrants’ descendants, this is not the case with Central Asians in Russia, for whom Islam remains part of their individual identity, rather than the basis of social consolidation and political mobilization.

The collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed a number of violent, usually secessionist ethnic conflicts. These conflicts were typically intensified (or “escalated”) by foreign intervention. Although there is a great deal of consensus about the fundamental forces driving these conflicts and their escalation, there remain considerable theoretical differences about how to understand these factors and assess their relative importance. These differences mirror debates in the broader literature on national identity and its consequences. This article seeks to clarify these debates by elucidating some theoretical distinctions among the factors taken to contribute to the outbreak and escalation of violent ethnic conflicts. These distinctions are then applied to post-Soviet conflicts in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan. The case studies bear out the relevance of the theoretical distinctions, but also reveal the difficulty of applying them unambiguously in any given case. These examples form the basis for some concluding suggestions. These suggestions aim to maximize the clarity with which theoretically distinct causal factors are empirically distinguished for purposes of testing hypotheses.

This article focuses on the nature of Japan’s foreign policy formulation and legitimization through a study of its interaction with Central Asian countries. The article examines foreign policy discourse that constructs Japan’s “self” vis-à-vis Central Asian “other.” It reveals the textual mechanism through which reality, objects, and subjects are constructed, and it interprets the official statements contained in several foreign policy initiatives, in particular, the “Eurasian (Silk Road) Diplomacy,” the “Central Asia plus Japan,” and the “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity,” as an attempt to understand the intersubjective knowledge and analytical lens through which Japanese foreign policy makers conceive and interpret the constructed “reality,” produce foreign policy choices, and choose among identified alternatives.

This article analyzes the early stage of the Ukrainian “sixtiers” movement as a semi-autonomous space of cultural expression that was tolerated by the authorities and defined, developed, and inhabited by young Ukrainian intellectuals. In contrast to present-day Ukrainian representations of the sixtiers as a force acting in opposition to the Soviet regime, the spatial angle employed here reveals an ambiguous relationship with official institutions. The Ukrainian Komsomol organization in particular appears to be both a controlling and an enabling agent that, together with the Writers' Union, provided meeting venues for the sixtiers until the mid-1960s. This complex symbiotic relationship continued even after some creative youth pioneered the first attempts to claim public space for cultural events without the authorities' permission. The cultural terrain inhabited by young Ukrainian intellectuals was not fully separate from mainstream Soviet Ukrainian culture or in opposition to it, although their vibrant cultural space also reached into a world of non-conformist culture unregulated by the state. A series of government crackdowns beginning in the mid-1960s dramatically shrank this open, ambivalent space of semi-free cultural expression, imposing firm boundaries and forcing intellectuals to make political choices.

This introduction to the special issue looks back at 30 years of nation-building in the post-Soviet states. Initial hopes that national self-determination would reinforce democratization proved misplaced. While that synergy worked well in the Baltic states, elsewhere authoritarian leaders embraced nationalism, while democracies like Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine lost control of parts of their territory to secessionist movements backed by Russia. Each of the post-Soviet states promoted a national language (except for Belarus) and forged a new historical narrative for their “imagined community,” but in most cases they remained multi-ethnic and multi-lingual communities. In recognition of this persisting ethnic diversity, nation-building was accompanied by policies of ethnicity management. The international economic environment was rapidly changing due to globalization, posing new challenges for nation-builders. The gender dimension is important to the new national identities being forged in the post-Soviet space: the categories of race and class, less so. The article concludes with a review of the salient features of each of the newly-independent states.

Among various features of Ukrainian society that the world has started paying more attention to since the beginning of Russia’s full-blown invasion in February 2022, many commentators have pointed to a surprisingly strong and encompassing national identity. However, scholars of Ukrainian language and identity matters had for years demonstrated an increased civic attachment of Ukrainian citizens, including Russian speakers, and its greater salience compared with ethnic, linguistic, and regional identifications. This article seeks to highlight the main accomplishments and challenges of research on Ukrainian ethnic and national identity. It focuses on a gradual shift from the essentialist understanding of ethnicity as embodied in bounded groups to the interest in individuals’ contextually determined identifications by categories with a changing meaning. Another prominent part of the analysis is the relationship between Ukrainian ethnic and national identity and the amalgamation of these two apparently distinct phenomena into what I propose to call ethnonational identity.

The aim of the article is to analyze Armenia’s limited capacity to function as a patron of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR). In the article, the author focused on the analysis of 3 levels of relations on the line Yerevan-Stepanakert: (1) the political dimension of bilateral relations; (2) the economic dimension of bilateral relations; (3) the security policy dimension, in particular the significance of the last phase of the armed conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh (2020) for the further shape of relations. In addition, the features that distinguish Armenia’s relations with the NKR from Russia’s relations with the de facto states for which it is a patron are highlighted. The results prove that mid-level states have a limited capacity to be a patron for de facto states, including being a guarantor of their survival.

Since I work for the government, I must stress, by way of introduction, that whatever I say reflects my opinion and not necessarily the opinion of the U.S. government.

Using examples of American Latvians, Estonians and Ukrainians in the states of Minnesota, New Jersey and New York this article explores the ambiguous nature of integration of nationalities groups inside the Republican Party during the 1960s-1980s. Based on the analysis of available archival information, it is shown that the Republican Party intentionally brought in the ethnics during the discussed period and created the Nationalities Sections within specific electoral campaigns, Nationalities Divisions inside the state party organizations and the National Republican Heritage Groups (Nationalities) Council within the Republican National Committee in order to recruit the ethnics and engage in the partisan struggle with the Democrats. Consequently, the nationalities were given a sense of importance, but little real power to actually influence the internal processes inside the party. At the same time, the nationalities eagerly responded to the invitation to join the Republican national and state-level organizations specifically designed for the ethnics. Yet in doing this they perceived themselves primarily as ethnics with a distinct, mainly anti-communist, agenda and only secondarily thought of themselves as Americans dedicated to Republican politics. Consequently, the Republican political strategy of creating Nationalities Sections and Divisions seemed to integrate the ethnics on the surface, while in reality intensifying political separation and even ghettoization of the ethnics in American politics. This research initiates a larger project, which will compare the Republican and Democratic strategies of directly involving ethnic groups and minorities inside the party organizations in the second part of the twentieth century.

‘Only unity saves the Serbs’ is the famous call for unity in the Serb nationalist doctrine, but even though this doctrine enjoyed widespread ideological adherence, disunity has been a dominant characteristic of Bosnian Serb politics since the first multiparty elections in 1990. In this context of intra-Serb rivalry, the dominance of the Serb Democratic Party (Sprska demokratska stranka, SDS) has nevertheless been an almost constant feature. The SDS was founded in July 1990, under the leadership of Radovan Karadžić, and in a nationalist landslide in the elections four months later, the party secured around 85% of the Serb vote. Following the marginalisation of the competing non-ethnic parties the SDS enjoyed a largely monolithic status in the Serb community, but after the outbreak of war, and an initial closing of ranks, Serb opposition parties soon emerged. Such competition intensified after the signing of the Dayton Agreement, when the SDS's ability to use repressive powers against competitors was significantly reduced. Despite this persistent competition, the SDS has remained the dominant political force among the Serbs in Bosnia and until 1997 its control was close to being absolute. This dominance was decisive for the development of conflict and war in Bosnia, but analysis of the conditions that allowed the SDS to achieve and maintain its dominance is nevertheless lacking. In this article, the dynamics of intra-Serb party competition in Bosnia will be analysed and the following questions will be sought answered: What was the basis of the SDS's continued dominance? What resources were decisive in the party competition? How did the ethnification of politics affect these dynamics? How did the existence of intra-ethnic challengers affect the SDS's position?

On 2 August 1919 in the Upper Adriatic port city of Trieste (as it was called in Italian) or Trst (as it was referred to in Slavic languages), nationalist youths harassed socialist children returning from a group outing. The incident escalated into a riot. Police opened fire, and one nationalist was killed. On 12 July 1920, a nationalist mob incited by Fascists looted and burned Narodni Dom, the Slovene cultural center. The carabinieri, Italy's state police, collaborated in the attack, or at the very least stood by and watched as the building was torched using gasoline obtained from the nearby barracks. The next day, Italian nationalist demonstrators torched the Croatian-managed Adriatic Bank. Police at the scene stood on the sidelines and watched the bank burn. In the autumn of 1920, Fascist squads attacked a funeral procession mourning a socialist worker killed in a general strike. The socialists erected barricades in the streets of the San Giacomo quarter, a working class neighborhood. Police leveled the undefended barricades and intimidated the quarter's residents during a house-to-house search. In 1921, a firebomb exploded in the offices of Il Lavoratore, the local socialist newspaper. Police watched the premises burn. In all five instances, the forces of public security in Trieste stood by, unable or unwilling to stem violence and restore order in the city newly annexed to Italy from the Habsburg empire. The Italian liberal authorities officially disavowed mistreatment of ethnic minorities and members of the political opposition, but they found themselves unable to deal effectively with the clash among ethnic groups and political parties precipitated by the transfer of the territory to Italian sovereignty. They sympathized with those adopting extra-legal and violent strategies that they perceived as useful to further state political agendas and promote assimilation, or at least quiescence, of the border population.

Three costly revolutions began in Poland between spring 1944 and summer 1946. The first two were primarily state-sponsored political and socioeconomic revolutions initiated by a minority comprising the Moscow-appointed and -controlled Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, P.P.R.) and their allies. Although they dominated the commanding heights of regional and national politics and administration, the P.P.R. and its supporters faced fierce opposition and waged these revolutions with only partial success, relying heavily on fraud and force. These ongoing state-sponsored transformations established an uneven hold on Polish society and depended upon the police power of the new Polish state and, ultimately, the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union was no longer willing to support its satellites in Eastern Europe by force of arms and the Polish people dismantled their regime's coercive power, much of the laboriously developed political and socioeconomic superstructure of the People's Republic of Poland collapsed.

The Slovene-speaking minority in Austria—when compared with many other linguistic minorities in Europe—is in an enviable position. Superficially, its minority rights are both constitutionally guaranteed and, for the most part, legally enforced; in the province of Carinthia/Kärnten/Koroška (the home of nearly all the minority; see Map 1) bilingual education is available in many communities at the primary level, and there is a thriving bilingual secondary school; Slovene is officially used in many offices and churches, and can be heard in many shops and on many street corners; there are two weekly newspapers. The picture below the surface is not quite as pleasant: there is anti-Slovene discrimination in several forms, and the pressure on minority members to Germanize themselves is strong; in particular, it must be emphasized that although the minority enjoys virtually full support from the federal government in Vienna, the provincial government in Carinthia has seldom been as favorably disposed. Still, most of the other minorities in Central and Eastern Europe can only dream of living in conditions like those of the Carinthian Slovenes.