Any society sufficiently cohesive to evolve even the most rudimentary political structure will also, as a matter of course, develop a set of shared concepts about the nature of that society and a justification of its political structure. Scholars usually ascribe the word “Ideology” only to a set of values which is highly abstract, rational, and articulated in the form of theoretical treatises, so that in the modern period liberalism or Marxism is considered as an ideology, but this is not entirely warranted. Medieval states frequently expressed their social and political myths through the medium of ceremonial and symbol, hence the considerable attention to artistic evidence given by the great scholar of medieval political theology Ernst Kantorowicz or by his student Michael Cherniavsky, whose field was Medieval Rus',1 Even in medieval western Europe, but overwhelmingly in medieval Rus', much political thought, like our current symbolic respect for the “flag,” was expressed in extremely laconic terms. Phrases, concepts, and titles served in lieu largely of theoretical treatises, and ideologues demonstrated their creativity and originality in the manipulation of these phrases, concepts, and titles, not the elaboration of intellectual definitions of their significance. Such definitions were superfluous to contemporaries who all understood the shared vocabulary of political discourse, what we might call a political culture, but their absence compels the modern-day historian to rely upon his informed imagination to decode such social and political myths in order to establish their intended meanings. This is not to imply that modern political ideologies lack overarching myths. Indeed the very opposite is exactly the case; in Russian history the myth of the “people” (narod) in Populist thought and the myths of the proletariat or (later) the Party in Marxist/Bolshevik writings spring readily to mind. The lack of elaborate theoretical discussions of comparable myths in pre-Petrine history inevitably requires different methods of study from those one can apply to subsequent centuries.

The vast body of inquiry into nationalism has traditionally seen Europe as a main center for the emergence of nationalism, but scholars of “national indifference” have countered with the idea that nationalism may not matter much at all as a motive for most people. The concept of national indifference calls into question the power of nationalism as a motive for action and the mass appeal of nationalism. Studies of national indifference have constructed an alternative non-national narrative, but face particular challenges accounting for major themes and episodes of discrimination and violence. At its core, national indifference paradoxically both rejects and accepts binary notions of identity and incorporates binary assumptions about motives. It is tempting to resolve the contest between parallel accounts of pervasive, powerful nationalism and national indifference by choosing a victor, but this contrast between models shows the fluidity and dynamism of nationalism. The debate between the now classic accounts of nationalism and the alternative of national indifference points to the importance of often overlooked variables: frames and sense of time.

Since the end of the Georgian-Abkhaz war, the often-precarious status of the Georgians displaced from Abkhazia has received significant academic attention. In contrast, the consequences of displacement from the reverse perspective—how it has affected the people who stayed behind—remains underanalyzed. Drawing on narratives collected during several months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article argues that although ethnic Abkhazians see themselves as victims of ethnic violence rather than perpetrators, the re-distribution of Georgian property nevertheless caused significant distress. Many condemned the practice of appropriation, suggesting that taking what is not one’s own is not only a violation of the property of the original owner, but also of the Abkhaz moral code and therefore shameful. To them, the trophy houses were a curse, both literally—as spaces haunted by former occupants—and metaphorically, as a source and reminder of a certain “moral corruption” within Abkhazian society. However, while the stories around the trophy houses reflect substantial intra-communal divisions, I suggest that they are also an expression of a shared postwar experience. Like the horror stories of Georgian violence, and the tales of Abkhaz heroism, they have become part of an intimate national repertoire constitutive of Abkhazia’s postwar community.

This paper examines the adoption of a multiethnic liberal-democratic model of governance in post-independence Kosovo and the dual task of state-building to secure unity and manage diversity. This article explains why in post-conflict and post-independence Kosovo, its domestic sovereignty and legitimization have become conditioned by the integration, accommodation, and protection of its minorities. While the existing literature has mainly focused on the shortcomings deriving from the exogenous character of state-building in Kosovo, this paper aims to challenge and complement this view by drawing on the “state-in-society” approach developed by Joel Migdal, which highlights that the actual states have less coherence than their theoretical counterparts. Analysis of post-independence Kosovo reveals the legislation-implementation gap and the unintended consequences arising under the impact of endogenous factors. Overall, this article shows that multiethnic state-building in Kosovo has been crucially transformed and “limited” by local idiosyncrasies.

Borders and boundaries can represent old narratives, which often, however, cannot deal with new realities. Borders are inflexible, but reality is flexible and fluid. This is augmented in crisis situations. Multi-ethnicity and history run in parallel, as shared cultures often precede and transcend Westphalia and institutionally imposed borders. For cultures with roots in antiquity, top-down established borders appear to lack legitimacy, as these cultures place more emphasis on historical similarities and traditions of peoples. Thus, what is more important: cultural and historical commonalities or institutional top-down constructions? This article examines the impact of the prioritization of top-down ethno-religious homogeneity over lasting conflict resolution. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the article draws a number of hypotheses from the fields of conflict resolution, territoriality, and nation building and tests these hypotheses on the specific case of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange (CPE) between Greece and Turkey and the dual role of the Mediterranean as a security bridge or barrier. This article highlights a “how-not-to” scenario in conflict resolution and argues that efforts to form apparent homogeneous nation-states led to short-term, incomplete conflict termination with a lasting impact, while conflict resolution remained elusive.

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) was created for strengthening the development of a European soul. But generally speaking, one can say it has been used as a tool for nation-branding, and as a means for Central and Eastern countries to “return” to Europe, in particular after the fall of their Communist regimes. In the difficult social, economic, political, and historical context of the Republic of Moldova nowadays, the ESC furthermore allows the discursive construction of the nation and the building of a particular self. Accordingly, based on a method inspired by the Critical Discourse Analysis methodology applied to three local newspapers, the research demonstrates how the ESC acts as a sound box when building the Moldovan self. The Moldovan identity that emerges from the articles seems to be an identity in crisis which proves much different from the usual political constructions of the nation. This bottom-up identity put forward by journalists has indeed to be related to the twofold crisis in which Moldova is at the moment: social and economic, on the one hand, and linked to a permanent struggle between a separate Moldovan or an integrated Romanian identity, on the other.

The article analyzes Chechen women's everyday experiences of war and violence and outlines their multiple effects on women's roles and identities. Particular attention is paid to how these effects are shaped by generational differences. The study is based on 35 oral history interviews with Chechen women in Austria, Germany, and Poland. The experience of two Russo–Chechen wars reinforced domesticated forms of femininity. It also exposed women to intensified nonmilitary forms of gendered violence. At the same time, some of the traditional roles were transformed, for example, when women became the main breadwinners for their families. Women's heightened realization of their importance in securing the well-being of their families and communities empowered them and created a sense of solidarity and responsibility reaching beyond their households. This has generated a level of insecurity among some sections of Chechen society and the Moscow-backed Chechen administration of Ramzan Kadyrov puts considerable effort in instructing women about their “proper place.” In exile, women's ability to continue fulfilling their gendered responsibilities in a new environment serves as an important coping mechanism. Different generations of women adopt distinct adaptation strategies that relate to their roles during the war as well as to the conditions of their socialization.

This article examines the social and political effects produced by the most recent wave of emigration in postwar Bosnia, widely understood to be the result of continued political instability and economic decline that followed the 1992–95 war. Drawing on ethnographic research in a deindustrialized Bosnian town and analysis of popular discourses seeking to make sense of this new wave of departures, I show how the phenomenon of postwar exit impacts those staying behind and inspires new forms of reflection that link past histories of violence to more recent forms of dispossession. The emergence of such forms of historical consciousness reveals that postwar migration is haunted both by the memory of wartime expulsions and ethnic cleansing, as well as by the often-unacknowledged violence of postwar economic restructuring glossed as the postsocialist transition. In asking what happens to nationalist regimes, as well as scholarship on nationalist politics, when the “people” leave, I demonstrate the need to analyze the ongoing out-migration both in terms of Bosnia’s historical specificity and global political-economic dynamics. In so doing, I show how absences created by these departures create new vantage points that bring to light and expose unsettling political configurations left behind by the Bosnian war.

Identity has been treated in relevant literature predominantly as a dynamic, fluid, multidimensional, and ongoing process. Currently, identity is viewed as a process, as something achieved, and as a product of social relations. Scholars have acknowledged that members of minorities and diasporas can have very complex multiple identities, which are both dependent on social context and changeable over time. This article explores the national and ethnic identifications of Slovaks living in Serbia. Its main objective is to examine how the members of the Slovak diaspora identify themselves and what kind of national and ethnic awareness and pride they hold. As well, this paper explores their opinions and attitudes on language and cultural identity. This study used a web-based survey and basic statistics. The results of the explorative study indicate that members of the Slovak diaspora living in Serbia have multiple identities that coexist, do not conflict, and vary in their importance for respondents. Distinct national and ethnic identifications are perceived in different ways and have divergent emotional intensities. This study proposes further research on the importance of civic and ethnic values and on different perceptions of identity, citizenship, length of residency, and minority rights for collective identifications of minorities and/or diasporas.

The article explores ways in which the nineteenth-century Prussian military architecture has been used and promoted as a part of the local heritage in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Accommodation of the old fortification buildings to tourism and museum work has been publicly discussed since the beginning of the 2000s, but neither local nor federal authorities have proposed a plan to adapt them to non-military purposes. As a result, these structures, which are protected by federal heritage laws and uniformly built of characteristic red bricks, have become an arena for various initiatives, experiments, and games with the past. Strategies of virtualization discussed in the paper reveal a lack of open public discussion about dark episodes of Russian and Soviet history. Consequently, it is important to learn more about how and why contemporary Kaliningraders appropriate the local German legacies, use globally accepted strategies of heritage construction, and develop cooperation with the EU countries, while remaining receptive to official historical narratives promulgated by the national center.

Ethnic cleansing, with its severe repercussions of millions of refugees and internally displaced people in addition to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the massive destruction of property, has necessitated the study of this phenomenon with a view to understanding its causes in order to find ways to prevent its recurrence or alleviate its consequences. “Ethnic cleansing” is not what lawyers call “a term of art,” i.e. it lacks legal definition and also a body of case law. For the purposes of this paper “ethnic cleansing” is taken to mean a systematic policy designed by and pursued under the leadership of a nation or ethnic community or with its consent, with a view to removing—by means of force and/or intimidation—a population deemed “undesirable” because of its ethnic, national or religious origin. Although ethnic cleansing can be a gradual, low-intensity process, carried out incrementally over a long period of time, the following analysis concentrates mainly on large-scale cases of ethnic cleansing, that is, cases in which the number of uprooted people is upwards of tens of thousands.

There have been few areas of the world during the past 150 years that have been as shaped by Jewish influences as East Central Europe. The prominent Czech writer Milan Kundera observed seven years ago that in the years before Hitler, the Jews were the “intellectual cement,” the essentially cosmopolitan and integrative element that forged the spiritual unit of this region. It was this small nation par excellence which added the quintessentially European color, tone and vitality to great cities like Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, not to mention Cracow, Lemberg and Czernowitz further to the east. The Nazi mass murder of the Jews, to which Stalin added his own macabre postscript after World War II, brought about the disappearance of this fructifying Jewish leaven and crushed for forty years the independence of the smaller East European nations sandwiched between Russia and Germany. Since the European revolutions of 1989, these nations, re-emerging from a semi-totalitarian deep freeze, have been recovering their national identities and historical roots long repressed under Communist rule.

This article, through comparative historical analysis, examines the traditional marriage rituals of the Dungan diaspora in Kazakhstan. Dungans are Chinese-speaking Muslims who were forced to migrate to present-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan after the defeat of their revolt against the Qing dynasty from 1877 to 1888. The article focuses on the diversity of wedding ceremonies in three zones where Dungan settled in Kazakhstan: Zhalpak Tobe and Sortobe, two rural areas in the Zhambyl region; and Zaria Vostok, near the city of Almaty. I find that the local variations in traditional wedding ceremonies stem from their close intercultural and social cooperation with non-Dungan peoples—primarily Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Uyghurs, and Russians. The example of wedding rituals shows that, while Dungan existence in another cultural environment has stimulated the consolidation of their ethnic group, preserving many of the traditional archaic cultural features, it has also led to the transformation of the marriage ceremonies. I address a much-neglected pathway—the nature of borrowed elements in Dungan wedding rituals—and ask why the extent of borrowing varies from community to community even though the Dungan arrived from China with similar traditions.

The Republic of Tatarstan is located between Europe and Asia. It is important to emphasize geographical location, which is a key element in the processes of identities formation and transformation. Tatarstan is located in the core of the Russian Federation, situated in the European part of Russia and 800 kilometres from Moscow, at the confluence of the Volga and the Kama Rivers. The capital of Tatarstan is Kazan. The economic potential of the republic is based mainly on raw materials (including oil and gas), industry and agriculture. According to the constitution of the republic (approved on 6 November 1992) Tatarstan (previously known as Tataria) is defined as a multiethnic republic, with two official languages, Russian and Tatar. The largest ethnic groups are Tatars and Russians; as a consequence it makes sense to talk in terms of a bicultural society with two main confessional groups, namely Muslim and Orthodox Christians.

With these words, the Romanian–Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian expresses within his private diary some of the darkest moments of a World War II “transfigured” Romania, populated as they are by the gothic characters of legionaries, Nazis, and antisemitism. His death soon followed in 1945, when Romania was at the threshold of fascism and communism. However, with the discovery and the subsequent publishing of Sebastian's diary in 1996, and following 50 years of communist mystification of the Jewish Holocaust, the entire chaotic war atmosphere with the fascist affections of the Romanian intellectual elite was once again brought to light with all the flavor and scent of the dark past. In this entry from Sebastian's diary he speaks of his friend, Eugen Ionescu who, born of a French-related mother and a Romanian father, was living in Bucharest at that time. He would later become known to the world as Eugène Ionesco, the famous French playwright and author of the well-known plays The Bald Soprano and The Rhinoceros. The above quote from Sebastian's journal, predating the international fame of Ionesco, but already marking the end of Sebastian's career under fascism, remains a traumatizing testimony of the Jewish Kafkian torment as “guilt,” a deeply claustrophobic identity that many Eastern European Jewish intellectuals have learned to internalize. Beyond this symbolism, the publishing of Sebastian's diary in Romania unintentionally challenged an existent post-communist tendency of legitimizing inter-war fascist personalities within the framework of a general lack of knowledge about the Jewish Holocaust in both the communist and post-communist periods.

The article analyzes violent practices – dedovshchina – among the recruits of the Soviet Armed Forces, which became commonplace during the late socialist period, but were not publicly discussed until the advent of glasnost'. By focusing on individual men's testimonies, it intends to capture male experiences and interpretations of this phenomenon as well as the significance and value they attached to it in the context of their individual life scripts. The study is based on 20 theme-oriented interviews with young, recently demobilized men conducted in the framework of a sociological project in 1988/1989. They are interpreted with the help of a narrative analysis. Having experienced various forms of violence as army soldiers, the young men's narratives embraced dedovshchina as a functional tool of self-organization within the otherwise dysfunctional military institution and stressed the values of endurance and maturation central to male identity. Considering the unprecedented concurrent discussion of dedovshchina in the Soviet media, which scandalized the phenomenon and raised moral and political questions concerning the state's failure to secure the physical wellbeing of its soldiers, these testimonies attain additional significance. They demonstrate attempts to contest the stories and interpretation generated by the media and to reassert individual morality in the face of personal involvement in practices now condemned as wrong.

One of the most frequently heard phrases in Communist Poland was the notorious nie ma “there is not, is not available, is out of stock,” reflecting the permanent shortage—of virtually everything—that was so characteristic of what was labeled “real socialism.” The phrase disappeared shortly after the introduction of a market economy overnight filled the hitherto empty shelves with an abundance of goods which had been unheard of throughout the postwar decades. The phrase became almost forgotten—only to make a sudden and seemingly unexpected (although foreseen by some) comeback, when the “post-Communists” were returned to power by the September 1993 parliamentary elections. It may not (yet?) concern Warsaw, which devours an unfair share of what the country can produce, and it may not (yet?) concern other larger Polish cities, but across the countryside chronic shortage is often felt only too bitterly. In spite of this most alarming development, however, the strong opinion prevails that there can be no return to the old centrally steered socialist economy. The changes have gone too far, enabling the people to resist attempts at revising the impressive economic, social and political reforms in Poland.

This article is the third in this Nationalities Papers series, following “Part 1: The Legacy of Early Institutionalism: From Gypsy Fiefs to Gypsy Kings,” which covered the period from the arrival of Gypsies to Europe until the mid-nineteenth century (Vol. 32, No. 3), and “Part 2: Beginnings of Modern Institutionalization,” describing the birth of the first modern forms of ethnically-based political and social organizations established by Romani elites from the nineteenth century up until the Second World War (WWII) (Vol. 33, No. 2). The article concentrates on developments between two significant landmarks in the history of Romani mobilization—the end of WWII in 1945 and the institutionalization of a permanent international Romani body in the form of a World Romani Congress, held for the first time in 1971. The time period covered in this article is distinguished from the previously covered periods by the emergence of the following phenomena: (1) modern Romani political organizations at the national level, (2) their unification through international Romani umbrella organizations, (3) some limited Romani participation in non-Romani mainstream political or administrative structures, (4) an international Romani evangelical movement, (5) reconciliation between Romani political representation and the Catholic Church, (6) national institutions created by various governments to aid the administration of policies on Roma, (7) rapid growth of non-governmental organizations addressing Romani issues, and (8) some limited cooperation between Romani organizations and intergovernmental organizations.