“Our culture was virtually annihilated. The great paradox is our children study German, French and English in school. They can use Latin letters for these foreign languages, but not for their native language.” Thus spoke Mikhail Chimpoi, a prominent literary critic and candidate for the national legislature in 1989; as, in the spirit of the “new” Moldova, restrictions were loosened on what officials were allowed to say in public about the language situation.

Ernest Renan argued over a century ago that belonging to a nation entails forgetting just as much as it required remembering past events. Certainly this is the case in East Central Europe, where not infrequently different nationalities create out of a single historical event utterly opposing historical memories. In the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, one historical event that has been variously interpreted by different nationalities is the Insurrection of 1863. To simplify somewhat, prerevolutionary Russian historians generally interpreted this key event as a mutiny against the established legal order—the term miatezh (mutiny) was always used in such accounts—while the Poles interpreted the uprising as perhaps naive and foolish, but in any case a noble attempt to regain rights usurped by the Russian occupiers. With such a sharply opposed memory of the uprising as a whole, it comes as no surprise that the figure who did the most to crush the insurrection in the Northwest (Lithuanian and Belarusian) provinces, Count M. N. Muraviev, should also be a controversial figure, praised by conservative Russians and demonized by Poles, Lithuanians, and liberals of all nationalities.

Croatian President Dr. Franjo Tudjman's announcement on 12 January 1995 that, as of 31 March, he was withdrawing Croatia's “hospitality” to the 12,000-person U.N. Protection Force (UNPROFOR), stationed in strategic locations on its territory, was a calculated gamble. As subsequent events showed, the risk was not as great as it first appeared. The departure of the UNPROFOR buffer force seemed, on the one hand, to expose Croatia and its army, the HV, to a resumption of hostilities with the rebel Serb forces of the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska Krajina (RSK) and their Serbian allies in Bosnia (RS—Republika Srpska) and, possibly, the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia-Montenegro). The UNPROFOR presence had largely kept such hostilities in check since early 1992, and the outcome of their resumption was at best uncertain.

The sheer enormity of Soviet losses at the hands of German forces during the Second World War staggers the mind. During the immediate post-war period, Stalin did not want the West to know just how badly the Soviet Union had been mauled or the fact that far more Soviet soldiers had died than German ones (up to three times as many); consequently, the Soviets clamed that the total number of dead was 7 million, while Western estimates were between 10 and 15 million Soviet dead. It was only during the Khrushchev era that the true scale of the disaster was revealed and the more accurate figure of 20 million dead was generally accepted. Of these, only half were soldiers. The rest were at least 10 million civilians, including 2 million who died as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. The death toll has more recently been put at 25, 27 and even 30 million, though I suspect the latter figures also take into consideration the decline in birth rates. In April 2009 Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev appointed yet another commission to give a final accounting of Soviet losses.

Three full brothers were building a city,

Three full brothers, three Mrljavcevices:

The first brother was King Vukasin,

The second was Voivode Ugljesa,

The third was Mrljavcevic Gojko;

They were building Skadar on the Bojana,

They were building for full three years,

For three years with three hundred masons,

But they could not lay the fundament,

Much less raise up the turreted city:

What the masons built by the day

The highland oread destroyed by night.

Upon the dawn of the fourth year,

The oread cried from the mountain:

“Do not torment yourself, King Vukasin,

Torment yourself and waste your treasure;

You cannot, O king, lay the fundament,

Much less raise up the turreted city,

Until you find two kindred names,

Until you find Stoja and Stojan,

One a sister and the other brother,

And wall them up in the fundament,

So that the fundament will be maintained,

So that you will build your turreted city.”

[From a Serbian epic song “The Building of Skadar,” quoted by Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, p. 406.]

The article focuses on two sets of autonomist demands that the far-right Sudeten German Party (SdP) in Czechoslovakia put forward during 1937–38. Its central thesis being that both sets were marked by a profoundly close interplay between territorial and non-territorial approaches at accommodating national diversity, it sets to explore this relationship, highlighting the underlying dynamic. Although the 1937 Volksschutzgesetze posed as an ostensibly “pure” case of non-territorial autonomy, whereas the 1938 Skizze über Neuordnung der innerstaatlichen Verhältnisse entailed major territorial provisions, in both cases the practical end-goal implied territorial autonomy. A closer look into their inner logic and intellectual origins however, also reveals a shared, essentially non-territorial underpinning. While the SdP agenda was firmly centered on national territory, its specific völkisch and organicist understanding of nationality manifested a clear preponderance of non-territoriality. Both sets of autonomist demands may thus be treated as a potentially maximalist combination of territorial and non-territorial arrangements resting on a fundamentally non-territorial notion of Volkspersönlichkeit. Encompassing all the members of the national group, the latter was simultaneously conceived as the basic carrier of political will. Volksschutzgesetze and Skizze thus represented clear examples of illiberal (re-)conceptualization of national autonomy, informed by contemporary völkisch sociological, legal, and political thought.

This article analyzes the relationship between the relative position of an ethnic group, as measured by its majority/minority status at a subnational level, and attitudes of its members toward immigrants of different origins. Based on the Russian case, it addresses the question whether the effects of in-group majority status within a region on attitudes toward the general category of immigrants hold regardless of out-group origin and, if not, what may drive this variation. Using data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of the Higher School of Economics and Bayesian hierarchical structural equation modeling, the study demonstrates that the relative position of an ethnic in-group is of varying importance as a predictor of attitudes toward migrant groups of European versus non-European origin in Russia. A group’s majority status within a region proved to play a role in predicting attitudes toward migrants originating from the “south” (encompassing North and South Caucasus; Central Asia; and China, Vietnam, and Korea) but not toward migrants coming from the “west” (Ukraine and Moldova). We draw on arguments related to the source and the level of threat induced by the out-groups, ethnic hierarchies, and group cues to explain this pattern of results.

Thousands of Roma were killed in Ukraine by the Nazis and auxiliary police on the spot. There are more than 50,000 Roma in today’s Ukraine, represented by second and third generation decendants of the genocide survivors. The discussion on Roma identity cannot be isolated from the memory of the genocide, which makes the struggle over the past a reflexive landmark that mobilizes the Roma movement. About twenty Roma genocide memorials have been erected in Ukraine during last decade, and in 2016 the national memorial of the Roma genocide was opened in Babi Yar. However, scholars do not have a clear picture of memory narratives and memory practices of the Roma genocide in Ukraine. A comprehensive analysis of the contemporary situation is not possible without an examination of the history and memory of the Roma genocide before 1991.

The popular, stereotype perception of Russian anti-Semitism is marred by a number of misconceptions. It is generally believed that it originated among the peasants, partly as a result of religious bigotry and partly as a reaction against an alleged Jewish exploitation. In actual fact, pogroms almost invariably started in towns and cities, and the main instigators were artisans and merchants and other people who plied the same trade as the Jews, later also professionals such as lawyers. Hence, economic competition rather than exploitation was the most important driving force. This is reflected in the writings of Russian anti-Semites and is also how most contemporary Jews understood their causes behind their ordeals. The Jews could be targeted for persecution because they were a diaspora group and did not enjoy the same protection as the indigenous population. Thus, even though the tsarist regime can be cleared of any suspicion that they deliberately whipped up the pogroms, they contributed to them by failing to give the Jews the same rights as other subjects of the empire.

Moving the focus away from the epicenters of the antibureaucratic revolution, this article looks at the echoes of this movement in the provincial, multinational, working-class community of Priboj, Serbia. A microstudy of Fabrika automobila Priboj, the town’s largest employer, and its surrounding community through records of self-management and party meetings and through the local press reveals some of the less-researched aspects of the social mobilizations in Serbia in the late 1980s. Without downplaying the spread of national grievances, this study highlights parallel phenomena taking place on the ground, such as labor solidarity, growing socioeconomic grievances, and the participation of non-Serb (in this case, Muslim) populations. The argument is that the presence of a large factory with a multinational workforce in the center of the municipality as the organizational core of the mobilizations and their focus on local problems helped Priboj’s antibureaucratic bevolution resemble the proletarian, pro-Yugoslav image that the leadership of the Serbian party often hoped to project.

A significant body of literature argues that American evangelical missionaries working in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century directly contributed to the rise of Armenian nationalism. While acknowledging that missionaries had an effect on Armenian nationalism, this article finds that the impact of missionaries was much more unintended than is commonly assumed and resulted primarily from Armenian reactions to growing missionary influence. Employing new data on the biographies of Armenian nationalist leaders as well as comparative-historical methods, the article offers evidence that missionary influence spurred a backlash among the Armenian community that intensified preexisting local initiatives, increased investment in mass education in the provinces, and modernized its schooling system, all of which popularized and strengthened Armenian nationalism.

The territorial composition of governments (that is, the geographical origin of its members) has received little attention from political scientists. However, prime ministers, ministers, and junior ministers clearly have a territorial characterization and preferential attachments to specific places that can potentially affect the way decisions are made and resources are allocated. In this article, we focus on these aspects, showing the evolution of the territorial representativeness of Italian governmental elites over the last four decades and proposing some interpretations of its changes. In particular, we describe the transition from a balanced regional representation (the “parity norm”) to a multitude of different patterns of territorial representation that we observe across parties nowadays. We propose three explanations for such changes: the first is based on the transformation of the party system in the nineties, with the emergence of parties such as the Northern League, with a specific regional focus; the second is based on the regionalization of the Italian state and its consequences on political career paths; the third is based on the increasing recruitment of technocrats in ministerial offices.

How can and should we analyze mass mobilization and its outcomes in authoritarian (and potentially democratizing) states as social scientists? Are there any distinctive features to the study of mass mobilization and its outcomes in Eastern Europe? And how much should we focus on comparative analyses versus context and country specificities? The case of the 2020 mass mobilization in Belarus offers an opportunity to engage with and answer these questions in a reciprocal dialogue between scholars of protest and activism, politics of competitive authoritarian and democratizing contexts, and regional and country experts. This symposium brings together a diverse set of scholars and combines comparative and case-specific analyses and empirically driven and interpretive analyses that focus on different political, social, and cultural angles of this episode of mass mobilization and its aftermath.

This contribution looks into nationalization and education in European borderlands in the early post-World War II period. Belonging to Belgium and Poland, respectively, in the interwar years, the Eupen–St. Vith–Malmedy and the East-Upper Silesia regions came under German rule during World War II. Returned to the Belgian and Polish nation-states once the war was over, the regions experienced a pronounced upheaval in the population profile as a result of population transfers and reorientations in education curricula. The aim of these measures was to guarantee the national reliability of borderland inhabitants, with a special role being designated for teachers, who were perceived as crucial in the raising of children as national citizens imbued with certain core values. This contribution compares the methods employed by the authorities in selecting educational personnel for their borderlands, the nationalizing role teachers were to play and the way teachers gave meaning to their professional practices.

In October 2014, Serbia's European Championships qualifying match against Albania was abandoned after a drone flew onto the pitch in Belgrade with a banner showing Kosovo as part of a Greater Albania, provoking a fight between both teams and their fans. While the flight of the drone was a technologically novel reminder that the nation's territorial space is not two-dimensional but three-dimensional, the subject of a politics of verticality and volume (Weizman 2012,12; Elden 2013), the imagery of its invasive entry and violent ejection from the symbolic territory, and the battlefield of the nation underlined a point that could have been made at any point since the institutionalization of international sporting competition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: that controversies over sports, between and within nations, reveal the deeper conflicts about territorial and cultural boundaries that are the very process of constructing national identity. Yet all this has taken place within a framework of supposed internationalism and sporting fraternity; indeed, it is the very structure of organized, scheduled competition between nations that makes these sporting encounters regular and possible.

Values play an important role in any culture, shaping attitudes and aspirations, and supporting economic activities. They are widely acknowledged to be defining elements of business culture for managers and workers alike, despite difficulties in tracing the exact linkages they have with behaviors and events (Connor and Becker 1994). They impact individuals’ ability to make critical adjustments under conditions of accelerating technological change and unprecedented expansion of information transfer (Rothschild 1992). They also are thought to affect how well technological changes and economic activity are integrated with dominant social-political structures, helping to make public policy harmonious with frames of reference individuals hold, and lending meaning to appeals for courses of action (Buchholtz 1986).

For decades the residents of Taos, New Mexico have been afflicted by a low frequency humming—sometimes louder, sometimes almost inaudible—but never completely absent. On almost every college campus in North America, the buzz about using technology in teaching can be almost as annoying—and with each passing year, it gets louder. Although recent events in the American stock market have taken a good deal of the shine off of the idea that the Internet will fundamentally transform the economy, in higher education there seems to be no corresponding waning of enthusiasm for the infusion of new media into the educational experiences of students.

In the first days of August 1914, as enthusiastic crowds hailing the German declaration of war on Russia and France swarmed in front of the imperial residence in Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II famously declared that he no longer knew political parties, only Germans. The remark was intended to be rhetorically inclusive, of course, to signal the surmounting not only of party-political divisions but also of the empire's chronic class, confessional, and regional tensions. But for one of the empire's most marginalized groups of subjects—those millions who did not consider themselves of German descent and who spoke Polish rather than German as a native language—the Kaiser's invocation of a common German identity was more effective in underlining the limits rather than the promise of civic solidarity. Unlike the Habsburg Monarchy or (to a lesser extent) the Czarist Empire, where Polish nationalists could hope to reconcile commitment to their national cause with faithfulness to an imperial dynasty or even a diffuse sense of patriotism to a multinational state, the Hohenzollern monarchy had, over the previous half-century, become virtually synonymous with hostility to all things Polish. Upholding the Prussian monarchy, it seemed, was functionally inseparable from promoting a culturally homogenized German nation-state.