The Lezgin irredentist movement is one of the less-studied national movements in the post-Soviet space, despite affecting the strategically important Russian-Azerbaijani borderlands and the bordering process between the two post-Soviet states. This article aims to fill this gap and to examine the impact of the Lezgin national movement on the development of territorial nationalism in early post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Based on the analysis of media publications in three Azerbaijani newspapers between 1992 and 1996, I argue that the movement contributed to consolidating the territorial vision of the Azerbaijani nation as incorporating groups historically settled in this territory. While media coverage stressed friendship between ethnic Azerbaijanis and Lezgins, the responsibility for secessionist claims was placed on external forces, particularly Russia and Armenia. In the long term, this framing led to the securitization of ethnic minority activism as a major threat to Azerbaijani statehood.

Yugoslavia’s military internationalism was one of the most practical expressions of the country’s policy of nonalignment. Beginning with Algeria in the 1950s until its demise in the 1990s, Yugoslavia was an ardent supporter of liberation movements and revolutionary governments in Africa and Asia. This article argues that Yugoslav military internationalism was at the heart of Yugoslavia’s efforts to reshape the post-1945 global order and represented an extension of Yugoslav revolution abroad. Military aid was an expression of personal identification of Yugoslavia’s “greatest generation” with decolonization struggle. However, Yugoslav military aid to other countries went beyond a single foreign policy issue. Yugoslav military internationalism touched upon many other issues that included problems related to finances, economic development, the acquisition and transfer of military technology, relations with the superpowers, national security, ideology and politics, and prestige and status in global affairs. By the end of the 1970s, with the departure of the World War II generation and the looming economic crisis, Yugoslav military involvement in the Global South became increasingly driven by economic reasons. Former Yugoslav republics, after a short hiatus in the 1990s during the wars for Yugoslavia’s succession, are still present in the arms trade in the Global South.

This paper highlights campaigns for national rights among two non-titular communities in the Soviet Union and places them in local historical contexts. Drawing on archival sources and oral history interviews, the author not only delves into the campaigns themselves, but also explores broader debates about the nature of Khrushchev's Thaw and Soviet citizenship, which was far from an empty concept in the Khrushchev era. Petitioners invoked discourses that indicate both an awareness of national rights and an expectation of the state's obligation to protect them. Oral history interviews with surviving petitioners and community members support the notion that petition language can serve as a reflection of how petitioners viewed their place in Soviet society and interpreted the Soviet citizen contract.

The Ottoman-Turkish historiography has been largely concerned with the economic nationalism of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which consisted of four doctrines: elimination of foreign dominance on the Ottoman economy, removal of non-Muslims from the economic sphere, creation of a Turkish/Muslim bourgeoisie, and rapid industrialization. Through its focus on the economic activities of the Society for the Ottoman Navy, a CUP-affiliated charitable organization with enormous economic power, the present study investigates how the economic policies of the period can be regarded as a practice of economic nationalism. Based on archival material and in dialogue with secondary sources, this article argues that although the Unionist leadership and intelligentsia employed the language of economic nationalism, the operation of the economy in practice was considerably different from its rhetoric. War conditions, the lack of indigenous capital accumulation, and relations of the Ottoman Empire with foreign powers heavily shaped the implementation of the economic nationalism of the CUP.

The study explores the phenomenon of popular violence in the first months and years after the end of World War I on the basis of a comparison between the Bohemian lands, forming the central part of the newly established Czechoslovakia, and Austria, as another successor state to the former Habsburg monarchy. Aside from the continuities, new forms of violence increasingly emerged in the first years after the end of the war, and also the “language” of violence was transformed. While in Czechoslovakia, the framework within which people were learning to understand the new world was shaped by the national and republican discourse oriented to the future, in Austria the collective identities and mentalities were being formed along the lines of particular party political blocks. In both cases, the nationalization and politicization of violence respectively contributed to the emergence of new forms of popular violence; but at the same time they could also be used for its de-escalation, necessary for the re-integration of society disrupted by the wartime experience. However, even if both countries went out from the war on different paths, the violence stayed part of their political culture and it could be mobilized again.

The study of media nationalism has had a curious history. Some of the “classic” studies of nationalism have placed the media at the heart of their work but say very little about media theory or research. More recently, studies of populism and nationalist parties have talked quite a lot about the impact of digital technologies but have very little to say about nationalism. This piece first provides a brief overview of some of these classic studies before noting how insights from the study of media, and in particular audiences, began to filter through to nationalism research in the 1990s and early 2000s. It then addresses both the discursive and digital turns that influenced wider debates around the relationship between media and nationalism over the past decade or so, before outlining the limitations of such work and possible avenues for future research.

The Archive of the Town Curator of Monuments in the Polish city Poznań contains material about streets, monuments, Old Town Square, the cathedral, and other valuable constructions there. A folder labeled Nowy Ratusz (New Town Hall) attracted my attention, because I knew nothing about such a building. The folder contained photographs of a large neo-Gothic building. It looked like a typical Prussian public building, similar to hundreds of other postal, school, and government offices throughout the Prussian/German state. But what of this building? Had it been another casualty of the Second World War? The postwar images showed, that although seriously damaged, the building still stood in the ruins of the Old Town Square.

The Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic provides a unique opportunity for an examination of Soviet linguistic policy. Part of the difficulty in the analysis of the development of Soviet languages has been the lack of a control language or suitable basis for comparison between a language in its Soviet and non-Soviet environment. While it is impossible to determine how a language would have developed had there been no revolution or had it not been in the Soviet Union, some very general observations seem clear. The example of Turkish and Azerbaijani is instructive in this respect. The entire orientation of these two languages has changed drastically since their respective revolutions, particularly in the replacement of the Arabic alphabet by Latin and Cyrillic respectively, the handling of traditional arabisms and Persianisms, and the sources for neologisms (Western European languages and native roots for Turkish and Russian for Azerbaijani). There are, however, very few situations where a realistic comparison can be made between different versions of the same language, for the language abroad may represent only an emigre community or may exist in totally different circumstances, such as Iranian Azerbaijani, or the Soviet language may itself represent only a rump, such as Soviet Yiddish.

The establishment of the Nemzeti Casino (National Casino) in Pest helped establish civil society in nineteenth-century Hungary. Count István Széchenyi, hoping to modernize Hungary on the English model, established the casino in 1827 as a public forum for the Hungarian nobility. By transcending caste divisions between nobles and bourgeois elites, Széchenyi's casino served as an unofficial parliament and stock exchange, and generally helped cultivate Hungarian patriotism. The Pest Casino inspired a nation-wide trend for casinos, which in turn formed a civil society in opposition to Habsburg absolutism. Yet when the casino movement spread to Hungary's minority nationalities, Jews, Slovaks, Romanians, and particularly Croats, the casino also contributed to national divisions in Hungary's ethnically diverse population that affected the course of the 1848 Revolution.

In the years that have passed since NATO forcibly compelled Yugoslavia to withdraw its military and police forces from Kosovo and the province was placed under U. N. guardianship, the Kosovo crisis of 1999 has been examined from a variety of angles. Although many insightful analyses have documented the horrific and deplorable events that led up to the crisis, one important factor that has received relatively short shrift is the way in which the U. S. was drawn into the conflict. In particular, it has remained overlooked that the United States, qua superpower, had a significant impact on the policy formulations of the belligerent parties. This essay is based on the proposition that the United States does not formulate policy and operate in a vacuum, but rather that the U. S. is itself a critical factor in the calculations of other actors in the international system. These actors make strategic calculations based upon their expectations of American actions and reactions. The U. S. policymaking community, on the other hand, seems to formulate policies without considering the implications of the fact that other actors might anticipate U. S. actions or even attempt to provoke a desired response.

At the beginning of the 1930s, Portuguese political elites were committed to the recovery of the “lost glory” of the era of the so-called Portuguese Discoveries, a past age which was (and still is) often considered as the golden period of Portuguese history. The new Portuguese political regime, an outcome of a right-wing military coup d'etat in 1926, and its opposition on the left were united in arguing in favour of a Portuguese Empire. In 1934, during Portugal's I Exposição Colonial (1st Colonial Expo), the oppositionist newspaper O Diabo frequently praised the Portuguese Empire, setting the tone for the rest of the decade. In the second half of the 1930s, the glorification of the Empire by oppositionists became even more prominent, as exemplified by Portugal's Frente Popular's (Popular Front) programme, a political document that was the result of a convergence between Portuguese communists, socialists and republicans. Written in 1936, the programme is critical of “colonial imperialism's policy,” but not really of colonialism in general. According to Frente Popular, colonialism was morally acceptable because it can aid “other less civilized peoples, so that they can gradually join international life, until they reach the final stage of their complete autonomy.”

Just after becoming the first-ever successful, democratically re-elected President of Russia, Boris Yel'tsin ambitiously called for creating, within the next year, a new ideology that would reflect the new state of affairs in Russia—in essence, he was calling for “re-imagining,” or reinventing, the foundations upon which Russian national community is based. With this directive, Yel'tsin was confirming something that had already become clear to many observers of Russian politics: post-Soviet Russian political life not only continued to resist democratization and pluralism, but also appeared to exhibit signs of discomfort without an officially-sanctioned ideological reference point by which the political players could set their compasses. The Kremlin's quest for a restoration of Russia's credibility as a great power included serious consideration of religion, specifically Russian Orthodoxy, playing a leading role in helping to reformulate an ideology acceptable to diverse communities within Russia in order to replace the now-defunct Marxist–Leninist ideology of the Soviet state. The old French adage “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” seems particularly appropriate for the new Russia in its efforts to regain credibility as a great power, along with the prestige and respect to which it had become accustomed. This article examines the dynamics of the Russian search for a new ideology in order to help restore its credibility as a great power, as suggested by Yel'tsin's call for a new “national idea.” But the search for a new ideology began well before Yel'tsin made this statement, and, therefore, the following discussion focuses on the interplay between religion and politics in this quest, covering the first five years of a reconstituted, post-Soviet Russia, that is, the time period roughly from the collapse of the Soviet Union up to the Duma (parliament) elections of December 1995 and the two-stage presidential elections of June-July 1996.

A small advertisement in the first issue of España Popular, a weekly journal begun in February 1940 and edited by Spanish communists in exile, announced that it would be publishing chapters of The Terror of 1824. This 1877 novel by Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) was part of the second series of his National Episodes and served as a literary standard for reinforcing the master narrative of Spanish liberal nationalism at the turn of the century. Spanish communists considered The Terror of 1824 a representative work of common patriotic heritage that should be preserved and publicized among their followers. Built around the absolutist repression of liberals after the anti-Napoleonic War in Spain, the novel was given an updated political meaning. An implicit parallel was traced between the fate of nineteenth-century liberals and the recent exile of Spanish communists, with the former cast as the progressive forerunners of the twentieth-century freedom fighters in Spain. This was coherent with the Republican and socialist interpretation of the Spanish history of that period.

In December 2001, over 150 citizens of Russia, Israel, the U.S., Ukraine and some other countries gathered in Moscow in their capacity as former activists of the non-official Jewish movement in the USSR to celebrate the 25th anniversary of an event that had never taken place—an unofficial Moscow Symposium on Jewish Culture. The symposium, which had been forbidden by the KGB, acquired an important, but symbolic, meaning (as vivid evidence of the suppression of Jewish culture in the USSR) for the very fact of its non-performance. Celebrating this (non-)event 25 years later, members of the Jewish movement who had been active for some time in the period from the late 1960s to the late 1980s talked about their struggle against the Soviet regime, emphasizing the victory they had gained together with other dissenting groups. They called for the “political support of Israel, the United States, and Russia in their fight against international terrorism,” spoke on behalf of repeal of the Jackson–Vannick amendment, voted for the establishment of a transnational association of Russian (or Russian-speaking or former Soviet) Jews, and even discussed the “historical mission of Russian Jewry.” The issue of Jewish culture was virtually omitted from the discussion.

The creation of an Austrian province, titled “The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria” (“with the Grand Duchy of Cracow” added later) was the result of the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772. The addition of this territory to the already imposing number of Habsburg's realms was ostensibly based on the dubious claim of the Hungarian kings to sovereignty over the medieval Ruthenian (Ukrainian) realm of Galicia and Volhynia. Under the subsequent Polish rule, the southern part of this duchy was organized as the województwo ruskie (Ruthenian [Ukrainian] Province), which was one of the several provinces in the so-called Ziemie Ruskie (Ruthenian Lands) of the Commonwealth, or rather of the Korona (Kingdom of Poland), vis-à-vis the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Galicia as an Austrian creation included small parts of the adjacent Ruthenian provinces of Podilia (Podole), Volhynia and Belz, (i.e. Galicia proper), and in the west also the province of Cracow, with territorial enclaves, really medieval relics, such as the “Duchy of Oświȩcim [Auschwitz]” and “Duchy of Zator” (i.e. the non-historical “Western Galicia”). Under Austrian rule, Galicia became a common home for Ukrainians (officially called Ruthenians) in the eastern counties and Poles in the western counties. Many Poles lived in Galicia proper. The Polish or Latin-Polish culture deeply influenced the Ukrainian population. However, it stubbornly, though inarticulately, maintained a sense of ethnic community with the Ukrainians who lived under the Russian imperial rule. A prominent Polish historian (and for more than a decade President of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow), Stanislaw Smolka, ascertains the “common features” of the “ethno-historical indivudiuality” known in Polish history as Ruś (Ruthenia) which had been “dormant through the centuries but never moribund [obumarla].” This Ruthenia “at the present attempts to find for herself a new distinguishing name and wants it to be ‘Ukraine'.” He also determines “the historical continuity” in the past of the old Ruthenia of Yaroslav and Monomakh and the “Ruthenian Lands” of the Commonwealth.

This paper examines the history of the restoration, or more accurately, reconstruction of Bagrati Cathedral in western Georgia. Constructed in 1003, Bagrati Cathedral is an important cultural monument in the political and architectural history of Georgia. Destroyed by an explosion in 1691, the cathedral was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1994 in its ruined state. However, the Georgian government under President Mikheil Saakashvili and Georgian Orthodox Church (GOC) officials made the reconstruction and reconsecration of the cathedral a priority. The reconstruction of Bagrati Cathedral, completed in September 2012, brought the differing aims of Georgian politicians, GOC officials, and architectural historians – the major players in the process – into sharp focus. This paper maintains that the rebuilding of Bagrati Cathedral was part of Saakashvili's political agenda, which merged with the interests of the GOC and worked against the objectives of architectural historians and the aims of academic principles of restoration and preservation. The result is that Bagrati has been rebuilt but is under threat of removal from the World Heritage List. The story of Bagrati's reconstruction has implications for the future of monument preservation and restoration in Georgia.

Within the growing literature on de facto states and disputed territories, the parastate stands as the most contentious challenge to international sovereignty and one of the greatest threats to regional security. Parastates are territorial entities that have unilaterally declared independence and control territory claimed by another state. Though parastates have been a part of international studies since the 1960s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have produced a number of breakaway entities that have challenged existing understandings of state theory and security studies. Without full legal international recognition, the de facto statehood of parastates cannot transform into de jure sovereignty. This special section introduces our collaborative project on the nature, scope, orientation, and character of parastates; a small, select, and particularly problematic subunit of the de facto state family. Though many of these examples should be familiar to researchers of disputed territories, we feel some that have been previously categorized as de facto, contested, or even unrecognized states are better understood as parastates due to the indefinite frozen conflict they find themselves in for years, if not decades.

This article presents the case of the Suwałki Triangle region on the current Polish-Lithuanian border to demonstrate how local activists developed a “multicultural” interpretation of social relations to counter previously dominant nationalist narratives. It then contrasts this interpretation with a “decoloniality” framework to illustrate the limits of the multicultural approach. Decoloniality, developed by Walter Mignolo to theorize about Latin American historical experiences, finds continued hierarchies in the apparently plural social landscape, situates identity as a fluid response to these hierarchies, and privileges voices that are “delinked” from them. Decoloniality may explain the complex borderland identifications of the Suwałki Triangle – and potentially other territorialized communities – better than multiculturalism.

The Program of the CPSU adopted at the 27th Party Congress (1986) included a guarded reference to the nationality question. It observed that the “nationality question, as it has been inheritedfrom the past, has been successfully solved.” This reference to nationality problems as a remnant of the fading capitalist past was not designed to suggest that problems of a national character have ceased to exist in the Soviet Union today. Gorbachev made this point to the Congress delegates noting: “Our achievements should not create the impression that there are no complications in nationality processes. The contradictions characteristic of all development are unavoidable in this sphere as well.” The violent outbursts of a national character in Kazakhstan in December 1986 provide fresh evidence that ethnic tensions lurk just beneath the surface. These tensions have been held in check largely by the threat of reprisals from central authorities who have regarded meaningful expressions of nationalism as treasonous.