All the changes of statehood, political and administrative interventions in the last century have influenced … the national, demographic, cultural, economic and social composition of Istrian villages as well as the coastal towns they surround. Thus it is not strange that today when Istrians discuss borders what they are really discussing is themselves and their identity, strategies for everyday life and the practices with which they have symbolically and physically interpreted the existence of borders on the multicultural and multiethnic territory of Istria.

A photograph of Pope John Paul II shaking hands with Ján Čarnogurský, First Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, at the Vatican appeared in full color on the cover of the February 1990 issue of Rodinné spolocčenstvo. Čarnogurský symbolizes the speed of Czechoslovakia's political revolution and the important role that individuals who had gained political experience as dissidents played in Czechoslovakia's post-Communist government. Just 2 months before meeting with the Pope, Čarnogurský, a Roman Catholic activist in Slovakia, had been awaiting trial in Bratislava for editing the Slovak secret church's most politically-oriented samizdat periodical. Hundreds of demonstrators, organized by the Slovak secret church, had already been protesting his arrest for several weeks when the Velvet Revolution began in Prague on 17 November 1989.

This article examines the role of the intergenerational memory of the Second World War (WWII) in identity formation and political mobilization. An existing explanation in the ethnic-conflict literature is that strategic political leaders play a crucial role in constructing and mobilizing ethnic identities. However, based on 114 open-ended interviews with individuals born in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia, conducted in Serbia during 2008–2011, nearly a third of the respondents make spontaneous references to WWII in their statements, usually drawing parallels between the cycle of violence in the 1990s and that in the 1940s. The question this article asks, then, is why some respondents make references to WWII spontaneously while others do not. It is argued that intergenerational narratives of past cycles of violence also constitute a process of identity formation, in addition to, or apart from, other processes of identity formation. The respondents mention WWII violence in the context of the 1990s events because they “recognize” elements, such as symbols, discourse or patterns of violence, similar to those in the intergenerational narratives and interpret them as warning signs. Hence, individuals who had previously been exposed to intergenerational narratives may be subsequently more susceptible to political mobilization efforts.

The reconstruction of Mostar could have been a symbol of renewed multiethnic coexistence. Instead, it has become a synonym for failed institutions and divisions, mirroring the difficulties of the whole country. While imposition of both the 1996 and 2004 statutes establishing the city's administrative units was connected with crisis, the city has also faced two major deadlocks, in 2008–2009 and 2012. In the first, a solution was imposed by the international community's High Representative (HR). But the second remains unresolved, as the HR resists intervening. The aim of the paper is to analyze these impasses – moments when institutional change should have occurred, but for some reason did not. Even the solutions – acts of external imposition – might be treated at best as institutional pseudo-change that shows that imposed institutions have a particular inertia that resists change. The topic will be presented from the perspective of historical institutionalism, with special emphasis on the path-dependency approach, which refers here not only to the formal institutional structure of the city, but also to the decision-making processes in the moments of stalemate.

This paper examines the Russian migration and citizenship regime as encountered by forced migrants from Ukraine who fled to Russia during the period of 2014–2016. Based on legal and other official documents, media articles, and interviews, it gives an account of these migrants' reception in Russia in theory and practice. Russia made great efforts to accommodate them, and in Russian media they were often spoken of as an easily integrated labor resource and as potential citizens. In 2015–2016, around 165,000 Ukrainians acquired Russian citizenship. While ethno-cultural similarity does privilege Ukrainian migrants in Russia, full asylum has been granted sparingly, and citizenship is not unconditionally granted. As this paper shows, Russian authorities have rather tried to control and distribute these forced migrants for the benefit of the state, according to principles of selectivity and economic interests — giving privileged access to permanent residency and citizenship to working-age people willing to settle in regions where population growth and more workers are deemed necessary. However, permanent residency and citizenship are also available to those able to circumvent or pay their way through the obstacles encountered — taking advantage of the flexibility inherent in a system that is not totally consistent.

In late June 1941, Nazi Germany stormed the borders of the Soviet Union, occupying the three Baltic republics within weeks. By the end of 1941, a significant proportion of the Jewish population had been murdered by German forces and local collaborators. In the days before full Nazi occupation of the territory, Latvia's Jews confronted the question of whether to flee into the Russian interior or stay in their communities. History shows that this would be a critical choice. Testimonies and memoirs of Jewish survivors illuminate the competing motivations to leave or to remain. This article highlights the key factors that figured into these calculations and the interaction between individual agency and structural opportunities and obstacles in determining where Latvia's Jews were when Holocaust in their homeland began.

This article focuses on the novels and short stories written about the ethnic cleansing of Dersim in the Turkish Republic in 1937–1938. Dersim 1937–1938 has become increasingly popular both as a political debate as well as a storyline in cultural productions over the last decade. The historical episode, once kept a secret, is almost an “industry” (“Memory: Concepts and Theory,” 2014) and an example of “memory boom” [Winter, Jay. (2002). Remembering War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press]. The aim of this article is to analyze the politics of memory and identity through literary works. It examines novels and short stories that focus on Dersim 1937–1938, or consider the ethnic cleansing in Dersim in a specific part of their storyline. By examining competing descriptions of Dersim memory and identity in these works, my purpose is to understand the mechanisms of literary competition, as well as Dersim's fragmented collective memory and identity.

This article draws upon ethnographic research which was conducted among young Cossacks (members of officially registered and informal Cossack clubs) in southern Russia. It presents young people's participation in the Cossack “nativism” as a physical and material mode of socialization into the mnemonic community. The research puts forward an argument that such corporal and sensorial experiences is effective in recruiting some young members to the Cossack movement. At the same time, the performative character of neo-Cossack identity destabilizes contemporary Cossacks' claims of authenticity related to the status of the legitimate heirs of historical Cossackdom. At the more general level of discussion this paper juxtaposes bodily activities, social memory, and revivalist discourses.

This article surveys nation-building in post-Soviet Azerbaijan over the country’s first quarter-century of restored independence. It examines the core dimensions of ethno-demographic and national minority issues, language policy, and the role of religion in the development of the state’s formal ideology Azerbaycançılıq (Azerbaijanism). The article highlights the nexus of nation-building and regime-building as a dominant trend over the last two decades, generating what we term “civic dominion”: the domination of a regime tradition, legitimated through the imagery and ideology of civic nationhood. Finally, the article considers the role of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict as a long-standing exception to the ostensibly civic ethos of post-Soviet Azerbaijani nation-building.

In the early nineteenth century, several Slavic intellectuals believed in a single Slavic nation speaking a single language, though positing various taxonomies of the nation's component “tribes” and the language's component “dialects.” Nevertheless, recent scholars, both historians and linguists, prove so extraordinarily unwilling to acknowledge the existence of Panslavism that several falsify the historical record so as to make historical figures conform to modern national and linguistic thinking. This paper discusses Jan Kollár, Ljudevit Gaj, and L'udovít Štúr as three sample Panslavs, documents the misrepresentation of their ideas in recent historiography, and explores why so many scholars seek to erase Panslavism from the historical record.

On 27 June 2004, Serbian voters went to the polls for the third time in a year to choose a president. The winner of the first two rounds of voting, Tomislav Nikolić, Deputy to the President of the extreme right Serbian Radical Party (SRS), lost the third round of voting to the more liberal Borisav Tadić by just under 8 percentage points (53.2 to 45.4), and the Radicals failed to form a ruling coalition in government. Nevertheless, more than five years after the last war in the disintegration of the Yugoslav state, the largest political party in the largest of the successor states has been characterized as the most extreme right party in the Balkans today. Indeed, the Radicals have been an enduring force in Serbian politics for the past decade and a half, sometimes ruling in coalition with Slobodan Milošević's Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). SRS founder Vojislav Šešelj, a flamboyant, obstreperous, highly influential figure, and his fellow Radicals have sought and in many ways succeeded in shaping the post-communist transformation of Yugoslav politics and society, calling for a return to the true spirit of Serbia, when the nation was strong because its men defended its honor as well as its borders.

Based on statistical sources, this paper examines to what extent citizens of the most advanced provincial cities in fin-de-siècle Hungary were multilingual. I argue that multilingualism was a far less present phenomenon than scholarship suggests. The exact features of multilingualism were closely connected to the local social relations (religion, gender, etc.) and market of languages. The growing nationalism promoted by the Hungarian government and the expansion of Magyar public space had an ambiguous impact on multilingualism, depending on the local society.

Imagine all history written as if all people, even women, mattered. Until a couple of decades ago, that was at most an aspiration for those of us working on East European history. Since then, however, and especially with the fall of Communism, feminist scholars have made significant inroads toward achieving this goal. This review essay reflects on the contributions made by five such studies that focus on different aspects of women's lives under state socialism in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Poland, and Romania. In one way or another, each author asks similar questions about the relationship between the Communist ideological emphasis on gender equality as a core moral value, on the one hand, and the policies and actions of these regimes with regard to women, on the other hand. Moreover, all studies focus on how women themselves participated in articulating, reacting to, and in some cases successfully challenging these policies. In short, they present us with excellent examples of how pertinent gender analysis is for understanding the most essential aspects of the history of Communism in Eastern Europe: how this authoritarian regime transformed individual identity and social relations.

The Czech philosopher Tomáš G. Masaryk was a scholar and nation-builder; the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga was a scholar and nation-builder; the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi was a scholar and nation-builder; Paul Robert Magocsi is a scholar but not a nation-builder. Unlike the first three distinguished figures, the North American Magocsi never lived in any country among any people that was in need of being “built.” At best he may be considered an advocate or a promoter of a nationality; that is, a people in search of a distinct identity recognizable to themselves and to others.

In early 1989, the Soviet Germans established the Wiedergeburt (“Rebirth”) All-Union Society. An umbrella-organization originally designed to protect and advance ethnic-German interests in the USSR, the “Rebirth” Society adopted the most effective legal means by which it could confront the regime—namely, political dissent based on Lenin's notion of national self-determination. The “Rebirth” movement evolved in this context and represented the fifteenth-largest Soviet nationality numbering more than two million in the 1989 Soviet census. By 1993, official membership in the “Rebirth” Society included nearly 200,000 men and women. Ironically, at the very moment the Soviet Germans became more politically conscious, the Soviet Union and the ethnic-German community were disintegrating.

The processes of democratic social and political changes in Poland that have gained momentum since 1989 have radically altered the foundations and the goals of Polish foreign policy. In addition to re-establishing Polish interests as the basis for foreign policy, they have also started the process of establishing a new element of Polish diplomacy, namely its eastern policy. In these altered political conditions it was the right time to ask the question of how to establish new relationships in the East, how to normalize relations with the USSR and, finally, what stance should be adopted towards the increasing independence claims of individual Soviet republics. The process of establishing a democratic Poland was concurrent with the reconstruction, and later, with the fall of the USSR. In addition, the convoluted history of Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Lithuanian relationships from the very beginning hindered the attempt of Polish diplomacy to establish new contacts with its eastern partners.

Economic nationalism was an important element of political conflict between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia. As the Czechs developed their own (avowedly national) industrial and financial base, they not only competed with the Germans in an economic sense, but they also challenged German Bohemians' prominence in business associations and in local and provincial government. While the Czechs embraced an “optimism of work,” German Bohemians felt a need to defend their economic superiority.

Serbia's ethnic Hungarian minority, concentrated in the northern province of Vojvodina, is little known compared to other ethnic minorities in the Balkans. Unlike Kosovo Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs, and Croatian Serbs, the Vojvodina Hungarians were not involved in violent conflict during Yugoslavia's disintegration of the 1990s. The Hungarian minority is not without its grievances or its political demands, however. Over the past two decades, Vojvodina Hungarians have organized a campaign for greater cultural accommodation and political autonomy for their community. They argue that the province as a whole has lost most of its meaningful autonomous powers, that the Hungarian minority does not have adequate political representation and cultural institutions, and that the state does not fully protect the minority from growing threats of ethnic violence and discrimination. The minority's campaign directs most of its appeals to the Belgrade authorities, but increasingly it looks beyond Serbia's borders for support as well. Especially when the Serbian government appears hostile or indifferent to their appeals, the Vojvodina Hungarians look to make alliances with foreign actors, including the Hungarian government, the US government, EU institutions, and assorted other media outlets and NGOs. The minority leaders expect that by sending these foreign actors accounts of the human rights abuses that Vojvodina Hungarians suffer, they will ally themselves with the campaign and pressure the Serbian authorities to compromise with its demands.

When the American suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947), one of the founders of the International Alliance for Women's Suffrage, came to Prague in 1908 to lecture before German-speaking groups of women in the city, a beautiful young teacher asked her to address Czech women as well. Catt readily obliged. She could not have known, then, that this determined Czech feminist and nationalist, Františka Plamínková (1875-1942) would become, in time, a familiar figure on the international circuit of women's organizations, known as “Madame Plam” and would be executed by the Nazis as a member of the Czech resistance.

For her fight against fascism and for the liberation of her nation Plamínková was awarded, posthumously in 1950, the Czechoslovak Order of the Gold Star by the Ministry of National Defense. But then her name disappeared, along with thousands of other names from the First Czechoslovak Republic, as Stalinist repression set in. A plaque affixed to the building once her residence on Staroměstské Square tells us little about this energetic, dedicated patriot and fighter for women's rights. In 1993, the Gender Institute in Prague opened its doors, and, today, as feminism begins to awaken in the Czech Republic, the work and accomplishments of Františka Plamínková should be instructive.