Although the Greek citizenship tradition has contained both ethnic and civic elements all along, up until recently, at least according to the existing literature, it has replicated the geographical logic of a European divide between the East (ethnic) and West (civic). Lately, this tradition has been in flux as it appears to be moving along and changing positions across a hypothetical citizenship axis running along the two constitutional poles of nationality: ethnic descent and civic community. This paper attempts to shed light on this tradition in transit by bringing to the fore contemporary tensions between ethnic and civic elements of citizenship. More specifically, these ongoing frictions have been mostly manifested in the ever-changing conditionality of the terms of acquisition of Greek citizenship by second- and “one-and-a-half” generation migrant children. Most importantly, these antagonisms between an ethnicized (ethnic) citizenship and a politicized (civic) nationality became discursively played out within the arena of migrant integration discourse. However, one question remains: What can the Greek case tell us about the broader politics of citizenship and belonging in Europe and beyond?

In his autobiographical writings, the Russian-Jewish author and the founder of Zionist Revisionism Vladimir Jabotinsky constructed a retrospective self-image, according to which ever since becoming a Zionist early in the 20th century he exclusively clung to a Jewish national identity. This one-dimensional image was adopted by the early historiography of the Revisionist movement in Zionism. Contrary to this trend, much of the recent historiography on Jabotinsky has taken a different direction, describing him, particularly as a young man during the period of his early Zionism in Tsarist Russia, as a Russian-European cosmopolitan intellectual. Both these polarized positions are somewhat unbalanced and simplistic, whereas the figure of Jabotinsky and his worldview that emerge from reading his rich publicist writing in late Tsarist Russia present a far more complex picture of interplay between his deep ethnic-national primordial Jewish affinity, on the one hand, and an array of his different attachments to his non-Jewish surroundings including local, cultural, and civil identities, on the other. Focusing on Jabotinsky’s unexplored journalist writings that address the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, the article discovers a previously unknown identity pattern of the young Jabotinsky—his Russian state patriotism—and traces its relationship to his Jewish nationalism.

In this article, I focus on the context in which levees were constructed on the Lower Danube, along the Bulgarian–Romanian border. I argue that after World War II, while the two states shared the management of the river in this region, Romania pursued a techno-nationalist hydraulic policy, which led to the complete damming of the left bank of the Danube with levees. Bulgaria also succeeded in building levees on its side of the Danube, that is the right bank of the common border; however, Bulgaria used different technologies and its building works proceeded at a different pace. Techno-nationalism as delineated in this article considers nation-states as basic units in the analysis of technologies. Technological development is not a flowing process, as it becomes entangled with the interests of nation-states seeking legitimation. Hydraulic technology may strengthen nation-states, and in some circumstances leads to the emergence of nationalistic ideologies.

The material dimension of Russian foreign and domestic policy is accompanied by one of images and performativity. The Putin regime has affective-emotional and instrumental motives. Its main target audience is the Russian public. Its principal adversary is the United States. The decisive external audience is the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), a pluralist entity that is also concerned with past and present images of itself. Politics in this critical international triangle is infused with theatrical, mediatized, and psychological elements, and the (re)construction of national and individual personae.

In August 2015 the municipality of Sinj, located in the Dalmatian hinterland, celebrated the 300-year anniversary of a historic victory against the troops of the Ottoman Empire, one that is legendarily attributed to the divine intervention of the Virgin Mary. The Sinj Tourist Board launched an unprecedented campaign in organizing and advertising the various events - ranging from historical re-enactments, film and music productions, folkloristic performances, sports events, exhibitions, and fashion shows, to religious processions and conferences. Using a variety of media formats, these efforts were aimed at creating a new national epic, expanding the meaning of the miraculous battle of 1715 from a local narrative to a nation-wide symbol, representing Croatia in a European and global context. This article focuses on various theatrical re-enactments of the historic battle and the alleged Marian apparition, assessing the role of nostalgia and authenticity in contemporary living history performances. While one of the underlying motifs in the case of Sinj is to enhance the region’s attraction as a tourist destination, the article also theorizes the re-enactment’s epistemological and political claims by proposing that these interactive engagements with history take an active stance in promoting and/or re-inventing heroic olden times to advance socio-political conditions in the present (Gegenwartsbewaltigung).

This article examines the motivations of young Ukrainian immigrants to support the Euromaidan from abroad. Existing research has documented social movements within their national boundaries and the participation of young people in them. However, it has rarely examined the expansion of social movements beyond their national boundaries and the engagement of young immigrants in such movements. Drawing on a larger qualitative study, this article presents the findings about what motivated 24 young Ukrainian immigrants residing in the USA to support the Euromaidan movement of 2013–2014 and compares their motivations to those of the protestors in Ukraine. We argue that motivations of young Ukrainian immigrants to support the Euromaidan from abroad manifest themselves in symbolic or psychological causes. Our findings demonstrate that the individual motivations were driven by an ideological commitment to systemic change in Ukraine, manifested through young Ukrainian immigrants’ (1) desire to end injustice, (2) solidarity with fellow Ukrainians, (3) moral obligation to raise awareness among the US public, and, most prominently, (4) sense of agency to contribute to the long-awaited change in the homeland. Our findings also show that overall, the motivations of young Ukrainian immigrants to join the movement aligned with those of the protestors in Ukraine.

In 1925, two newspapers, both published in Uzhhorod, advocated using the Latin alphabet in the Czechoslovak province of Ruthenia. Efforts by the Czech Agrarian party to consolidate the Republic played some role, but the plans mostly emerged from a longer tradition of Slavic thought which imagined literacy in more than one alphabet, conforming to more than one literary standardization. We trace the nineteenth-century history of Slavic linguistic ideologies from the original Panslavism of Jan Herkel, the “Slavic Reciprocity” of Jan Kollár and his successors, to the Kollárian Czechoslovakism used to legitimate the first Czechoslovak Republic. We survey Ruthenia's status within Czechoslovakia and then contrast two 1925 Latinization schemes: a proposal from Czech chauvinist František Svojše and a proposal from Rusyn journalist Viktor Barany. While Rusyns mostly remained with the Cyrillic alphabet, arguments made for and against Latinization show that nineteenth century Slavic ideals endured far into the twentieth century.

Focusing on material culture, this article considers a range of issues concerning the cultural policies, ideologies, and identities that have underlain Serbian development since the Middle Ages, and tests some widely held yet previously uncontested views. In particular it questions the Serbs' perceived affiliation with the Byzantine Empire and challenges the view that this affiliation was so pervasive that it influenced Serbian development and national formation in the modern age. It is argued that Byzantium had little if any role in the Serbs' cultural development - neither in historical memories nor in surviving traditions. Serbia's Byzantine culture is largely a myth developed in the 1930s by the Serbian clergy as a corollary of the Russian-inspired Svetosavlje ideology. This myth was meant to dislocate Serbia's cultural identity from its secular European sources and reposition it closer to Orthodox Russia.

This article examines the OSCE HCNM experience with regard to situations where cultural autonomy arrangements exist and discusses the potential contribution of such arrangements to managing ethnic diversity. It reviews some of the salient issues that have arisen with regard to the legal and political framework of these arrangements. This article highlights the importance for bodies of cultural autonomy to comply with good governance principles, including respect for diversity within minority groups and insists on a more inclusive approach to autonomy.

This article focuses on the famous novel Koshpendiler (1976) by Ilyas Esenberlin. This literary work occupies a special place in Soviet Kazakh literature because it raises important problems such as the foundation of the state and nation, the sense of territoriality, and the struggle against Russian colonizers. The authors argue that this historical novel can be considered as an example of post-colonial discourse. The novel itself is an extrapolation of the 1970s’ Soviet reality when national Union republics, including Kazakhstan, were seeking greater independence. Kazakh cultural elites and the intelligentsia turned to the past history of nation-building to address the problems of the present day. Not having an opportunity to openly express their views, the Kazakh establishment preferred to express their national sentiments through the historical genre. In this work, the authors suggest their own vision of Soviet national literature from political science and historical perspectives.

In Galicia in 1848, petitions as to whether the province should be divided in two with a Polish and a Ruthenian region moved thousands of people to action. Although the petitions were among the largest in the history of the Habsburg monarchy, the petition lists have never been researched in detail. Whereas the initiators of the petition for the partition were anxious to present a narrative of national and confessional unity for a “Ruthenian” Eastern Galicia suppressed by “Poles,” the counter-petitionists disputed the very existence of a Ruthenian nationality and chose a narrative of peaceful, conflict-free living together. A close reading of the petition lists reveals both conflict and co-existence. The lists with a checkered contrast of Cyrillic, Latin, and Hebrew scripts bear witness to what was a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional society. More than that, these sources prove impressively that the three large religious and ethnic communities – Poles, Ruthenians, and Jews – were in continuous day-to-day contact with each other. While the history of emerging nationalism has so far been in the foreground in historiography of the revolutionary events in Galicia in 1848, the petitions' sources tell another story of everyday social interaction and of practices of social ambiguity in the Galician village and market communities.

This article elucidates the role of historians in times of war and the peculiarities of popular history narratives written by historians who became activists. The article focuses on historians who call themselves “Likbez. Historical Front.” This cohort gave rise to a new professional species—activist historians—who are different from so called memorians or propagandists, who work in service of authorities. Likbez historians tried to use their power to influence and promote their activist agenda not only in the realm of memory and history but also in reformation of state institutions. I argue that for Likbez historians, securitization of the past is the main strategy employed for producing historical knowledge. Historians’ work is a part of postcolonizing process observed in Ukrainian society since the Maidan protests. As the analysis shows, popular history narratives written with an open activist agenda are a result of many compromises made by scholars in the intersection of several factors: professional ambitions, political and civic aims, social and political context, popular expectations, and market environment. In line with the increased attention to agency in memory studies, this article demonstrates that historians have a much more nuanced relation to power than straightforward opposition or co-option.

The present contribution analyzes systematically diplomatic reports written by German, Italian, British, and Polish representatives in the Soviet Union at the time of the Great Famine. Based on both published documents and unpublished archival sources, the article examines comparatively the perception of the Great Famine in these four countries. After providing a short overview of the diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the four countries at the time of the famine, this article examines how German, Italian, British, and Polish diplomats explained three key issues for understanding the Great Famine: (1) the role of the conflicts between state and peasantry in unleashing the famine; (2) the issue of whether the Soviet government intentionally caused the famine; and (3) the role of intentions in the development of the famine and the relationship between the nationalities policy of the Soviet government and the famine.

Latvia’s far right has had a great deal of political influence since the late 1980s, when nativist movements played a key role in mobilizing political opposition to Soviet power. Far-right parties have been in 16 of the 22 government coalitions in Latvia between 1993 and 2023. Since 2010, the National Alliance (NA), a merger between an established far-right party and a more youthful political party, has come to dominate Latvia’s far right and has been a part of every government coalition from 2011-2023. This article begins with a discussion of Europeanization, the Europeanization of political parties, and the qualitative methodology used in the article to examine the impact of Latvia’s membership in the European Union on NA’s international links and program. The article then outlines the development and influence of Latvia’s far-right. The following sections examine links between Latvia’s far right and Europe’s far right and the impact of Europe on NA’s ideology and program. It finds little evidence of Europeanization of Latvia’s far right. Latvia’s far right is more hawkish toward Russia than the West European right and also enjoys greater domestic influence and respectability. “New nativist” anti-immigration and cultural Marxism themes have lower salience in Latvia where Russian-speakers are perceived as a bigger and more immediate threat than Muslims or “Woke” activists.

The nationwide prominence of Russian oppositional artists has inspired a fair number of studies analyzing the political aspects of their creative output. We argue that the new generation of Russian musicians, whose art became popular in the end of 2010s, brings political engagement to a qualitatively new level. Following Jacques Rancière, we reject the assumption that critical art can bring about political mobilization by exposing social evils. Instead, we juxtapose politics and police, distinguishing between transformative moments of discursive confrontation and the mundane activity centered on distributing places and roles. In this article, we look at three popular Russian musical collectives – IC3PEAK, Shortparis, and Monetochka – whose art disrupts the police order in a novel and subversive manner. Some of their works became even more timely with the outbreak of Russia’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine. We have performed multimodal discourse analysis of their audio and video clips, aimed at identifying the ways in which these artworks create the conditions of possibility for new politics by re-articulating the connection between the political and the universal.

One of the most important sources of demographic data concerning the Soviet nationalities is the official Soviet census reports. Considering the sensitivity of the nationality problem in the USSR today, however, how thorough and dependable are the published results of the Soviet censuses regarding the more than 100 Soviet nationalities? In January 1980, a preliminary and partial report on the 1979 enumeration was issued, and until the full reports are published, probably in a year or two, it is the best source of information concerning the current numbers and distribution of the Soviet nationalities. These figures have already been and will be used for comparisons with the 1970 census reports and projections, as well as for other analyses and computations. But how reliable are these most recent statistics? Can they be taken on face value as accurate, thorough reflections of the ethnic scene in the USSR in January 1979, when the count was taken?

While a large number of Kosovo Albanians before the war longed for international intervention in their province, after the “national victory” social and economic grievances put an end to the illusion of a “great” future in a “free” Kosovo. High unemployment rates as well as property and housing became the most vital issues for a majority of the Kosovar population. For minorities such as the Roma, Ashkali, Egyptians, and Serbs, issues of security and future integration in an eventually independent, Albanian-dominated country were added to the general economic crisis and to the difficulties of repossessing properties lost as a result of the war.

The Act of Ems of 1876 completely paralized the Ukrainian arts, including the theatre. The situation created with the enforcement of the Act in Urkaine was vividly described by the well known acter Marko Kropyvnytsky. During his visit to Kiev in 1879 he found the Ukrainian population of this city in such a state of fear, that, when he was asked to sing in Ukrainian at the house of Mykola Lysenko, a Ukrainian composer, someone stood watch outside. When strangers appeared on the street he was motioned to stop. Apparently, “volunteers” were ready to report any seditious activity to the Governor-General of Kiev, Alexander Drentelm.