The multi-national composition of the interwar Polish state was one of its most serious domestic problems. The established supremacy of the Poles in all phases of national life provoked bitter resentment from most of the country's non-Polish inhabitants, who compromised over one-third of its total population. When the Polish government consistently obstructed the attempts of these ethno-religious minorities to preserve and develop their cultural identities, assure their economic well-being, and participate fully in political life, the affected groups responded with a resistance to state authority that intensified with the passing of the two decades of Polish independence. The relationship of the government to a substantial proportion of its citizens had so deteriorated that, on the eve of World War II, a virtual condition of “undeclared warfare” existed betwen the Polish state and the leading minorities. Consequently, Warsaw could not count on any meaningful support from the Ukrainians, Belorussians, or Germans residing within its borders when the Nazi attack fell on September 1, 1939, and the Soviet assault followed on September 17. Unfortunately for these three peoples, the war brought them monumental suffering and an even crueler fate than they had endured under the Polish Republic.

Influential scholarship on the Brezhnev era has described the instrumental official support for Russian nationalist themes and pre-socialist imagery in public discourse as a deliberate “politics of inclusion,” designed to co-opt certain nationalist intellectuals and the sympathies of the state's core of ethnic Russians for the purpose of popular mobilization. How this policy related to and interacted with the ubiquitous official commemoration and mythologization of the Great Fatherland War during this period, however, has remained unexplored. Based on a number of the most important Russophilic publications in the censored press - the writings of the so-called “Chalmaevists” - this article contends that despite unambiguously russocentric, single-stream readings of history in general, when it came to the war in particular, nationalist intellectuals tended to muffle their russocentrism through opaque language or an avoidance of the war's larger significance, or conformed to the war's official (supra-ethnic, socialist) reading. It was only in samizdat that the essentially Russian, primordial nature of victory in 1945 could be fully articulated. The present study thus probes the limits of the concept of inclusionary politics and underscores the party leadership's apparent commitment to maintaining the war myth's predominantly supranational, socialist significance as a means of fostering all-Soviet, rather than Russian national, solidarity.

The purpose of this article is to investigate to what extent civic commitment and the political culture from the Estonian first republic survived communism at an individual level. Have representatives of the Estonian inter-war generation who endured Soviet occupation been able to remain civically committed even though they were disconnected from democratic institutions for a major part of their lives? Sometimes labelled “republican,” this generation matured into early adulthood during an unusually formative period in Estonian history, when the new democratic state was taking shape in between the two world wars. Hence, it fulfils the criteria of a political generation as “a group of human beings who have undergone the same basic historical experiences during their formative years.” The analysis contributes to two different, although in this context interrelated, discussions. The first addresses the roots of Estonia's successful post-communist experiences, the second the extent to which early socialization endures dramatic institutional shifts.

In Afghanistan, there has been much talk about, and international support for dealing with past injustices by developing transitional justice mechanisms. Reconciliation is being promoted as a nation-building strategy. This article argues that the implementation of transitional justice poses several challenges. First, a significant component of such a strategy is based on reconciliation taking place internally among competing armed groups and ethnic identities with the goal of transforming Afghan society. This assumes the cause of past conflicts to be internal and along ethnic divisions which limits the accountability for war crimes. It also considers violence and crimes of war as a thing of the past, ignoring the present situation. Furthermore, given the ongoing war between the US-led forces and the Taliban, insecurity and escalating levels of violence one has to question whether transitional justice can take place during a war. This article concludes that transitional justice is interconnected to perceptions of security and stability. The analysis of the present situation in Afghanistan poses critical questions as to whether memories of victims can be considered as the past in the midst of war.

Despite the fact that the former Soviet Union was perhaps the most multinational state in the world, until recently data were not available to undertake a systematic investigation of patterns of nationality population, distribution, redistribution and segregation within Soviet cities. However, nationality data were recently published for the 32 rayons of Moscow for the last two census years of 1979 and 1989.

On 4 March 1914 the Young Czech party newspaper Národní listy published the startling accusation that a prominent Czech politician, the National Socialist Karel Šviha, was a paid informant of the Habsburg imperial police. The paper alleged that for several years Šviha, who was the chairman of the National Socialist party's parliamentary club, had exchanged information on the activities of his colleagues for a police stipend. In the weeks that followed, the public was treated to a daily diet of charge and counter-charge in the Prague newspapers, a carnival of mutual recrimination that concluded with an elaborately staged public trial of Šviha in an attempt to settle once and for all whether he was truly an informant. During the proceedings leading figures of most of the main Czech political parties either sat in judgement of Šviha or testified for one side or the other, many of them displaying for all to see a level of personal animosity previously reserved for the Bohemian Germans or the Imperial government. As one observer (a National Socialist) put it, by the summer of 1914, “there was no nation in Europe as internally disorganized as were the Czechs” and according to another (a Young Czech), political life in Prague had reached a state where it was “everyone against everything.”

This article focuses on Miroslav Hroch's book titled Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe and it tries to build on Hroch's model of small nation-formation mainly on a methodological level. The aim is to incorporate the “subjective” dimension in Hroch's analysis of the “objective” factors that lead to nation-formation, by opening up the discursive level to investigation. I suggest that the comparative study of nation-formation needs to remain connected to the study of nationalism as a phenomenon, including the investigation of the discursive plane, of the political languages, and histories of concepts. In this sense, the article seeks to link Hroch's work to Begriffsgeschichte and to present a range of interpretations on how these two could work together, on a methodological level. The answers come mainly from Reinhart Koselleck's theorizing on the relation between social history and the history of concepts. This article also addresses compatibility problems that aim to encourage a more integrative type of analysis that would entail an in-depth and critical revisiting of Hroch's model. At the same time, Hroch's model proves to be flexible enough to be situated at the intersection of more types of history writing.

In 1950, in the aftermath of the Second World War and after flight and expulsion had come to an end, there were about four million Germans still living in East, East Central and Southeast Europe. Between 1950 and 1975, a total of about 800,000 Aussiedler (immigrants who are recognised by the German authorities as being of German descent) passed through the West German border transit camps, and 616,000 more arrived between 1976 and 1987. Then, with the opening of the Iron Curtain, mass immigration of Aussiedler began. Against the background of glasnost and perestroika in the USSR, their numbers increased rapidly from 1987 onwards. During the next nearly two decades, three million Aussiedler entered the Federal Republic of Germany. In all, more than four million migrants of officially recognised German descent migrated into Germany during the second half of the twentieth century.

From the historical and scholarly perspective, Russian-Ukrainian relations occupy a unique niche in inter-ethnic relations, as they are framed by long-standing “fraternal rivalry,” imperial and colonial experience, and a complex understanding of identity, which are still at work today. Although the phenomenon has been the subject of numerous studies, little has been done to explore their encounter in emigration. The scope of these works has been limited to examining the relations between these two groups in the familiar territory of their homelands (i.e. either in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or in the period following the dissolution of the Soviet Union), and scholars have usually not made a strict delimitation between the concepts of the homeland and hostland. But certainly, the Russian–Ukrainian encounter in emigration in the interwar period created its own discourse, which differed from the pre-revolutionary and Soviet discourses. Its main features are (1) further alienation and a feeling of difference between the two groups; (2) a growing metaphysical view of the homeland, accompanied by ethno-symbolic manifestations of national identity; and (3) a sense of mission to preserve their culture and identity from erosion engineered by the Bolsheviks.

Popular publications produced in Russia on the events in the Balkans in 1877–78 offer a valuable opportunity to examine how the historical and political background of the Russo-Turkish War was conveyed to common readers, some of whom were potentially involved in the military action, or persuaded to support the cause by other means. The conceptions produced and distributed in these booklets were firmly based on pan-Slavistic ideas of Russians’ duty to help their “Slavic brothers.” The publications presented the reader with propagandistic images of Turkish enemies, which were compared to Islamic enemies of the Russian national narrative. The result was persuasive and simplified imagery leaning on dualistic representations of ethnic groups and graphic depictions of violence, effectively justifying Russia’s involvement in the events and taking a stand in the internal issues concerning Muslim minorities, too.

This article explores how the meanings individuals ascribed to kin-state citizenship change in the long term. Previous research has looked at the real-time acquisition of citizenship and established three dimensions of meanings individuals ascribe to citizenship: identity, instrumental, and legitimacy. Building on the case of Croats from Herzegovina (BiH), who acquired citizenship back in the 1990s, the article demonstrates how meanings individuals ascribe to citizenship change over time across each dimension—subject to the perception of inclusion into the kin-state, type and the extent of opportunities kin-states provide, as well as the routinization of citizenship practices. By disaggregating each dimension further, the article extends the understanding of kin-state citizenship and shows how individuals respond to the policy implementation’s overall dynamics by aligning the meanings they ascribe to citizenship. Therefore, future work should look more closely at the interplay between state policy dynamics and its impact on individuals.

This article assesses Moldova’s political evolution during its first 25 years of independence. It argues that while the country has gone through 3 very distinct periods of governance during that time, the underlying conditions that have hobbled efforts to establish a stable democratic regime remained consistent. These included the country’s precarious location in the international system, weak institutions and the rule of law, and a deep cleavage regarding national identity. Consequently, the country settled into a pattern of systemic corruption and, at best, a deeply flawed form of democracy. By the end of this period, Moldovans faced the task of mounting a renewed effort to regain control over their political institutions.

The study of nationalism in North America has focused heavily on national identity. Much of the scholarship in the region indicates that most individuals define their respective national identities as attainable and inclusive. In contrast to these findings, other evidence from nationalism and ethnic politics scholarship in North America suggests a strong racial link to national understandings. Focusing on national identity research in North America, primarily the United States, but also findings from Canada and Mexico, I try to address the connection between national identity, its political effects, and the boundaries of national identity content. This article identifies important findings from research in North America and proposes that scholars look beyond the current research to study national development – understood both historically and through the study of individuals’ constructive deployment of nationalism in everyday life.

This article raises questions about the relationship between theory and practice, legality and illegality in the late Soviet nationalities policy, and the role played by various branches of power. It focuses on the Veps, an indigenous ethnic minority in the northwest of Russia. In the Brezhnev era, quite a few officials and census takers refused to register the Veps nationality in personal identification documents and during censuses, claiming, incorrectly, that the Veps were not in the official list of nationalities or that they were a people (narodnost'), not a nationality (natsional'nost'), and hence could not be registered as one. The Veps were counted as Russians instead. These bureaucratic practices, widespread in Leningrad and Vologda oblasti, but not in Karelia, contradicted official nationalities policy, passport regulations, and census instructions. It seemed that the Soviet state no longer recognized the Veps as an ethnic community. The article claims that the mass refusal to register the Veps nationality was intentional and directed by the regional authorities. The goal was to accelerate the assimilation of the Veps, a policy that worked well. The official number of Veps decreased extremely rapidly in the 1970 and 1979 censuses, only to recover in 1989, after the manipulations had ended.

The Habsburg Monarchy has often been called a “Europe en miniature.” A diversity of political territories and spaces, nations and nationalities, languages, denominations, and churches was typical throughout the 19th century. This article addresses the complexity with a fresh approach. Drawing on the new history of emotion, it combines new perspectives of territories, spaces, and loyalties in order to shed fresh light on nation building processes within the empire.

This article focuses on the privately created commemorative practice of getting the official portraits of three former socialist leaders as a tattoo: Nicolae Ceauşescu, Josip Broz Tito, and Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Stalin). The mnemonic actors who have indulged in this practice after the 1990s contribute to a culture informed by vernacular memorials that conform to neither the official politics of remembrance and its aesthetics nor its content. Correspondingly, this article focuses on the aesthetic, political, and epistemic intricacies of remembering through the inked body. Unlike memorial tattoos that mark the recognition of a group that has suffered the same trauma, the commemorative tattoos analyzed in this article reflect a centrifugal set of identity concerns, ranging from Yugonostalgia to individualized spaces of self-healing and identity affirmation. The argument put forth is that tattoos can act as vernacular commemorations collected into a body archive of nostalgia for the ontological security of the past and “great leadership.” Thus, the overarching question is not how and why people materialize memories through their bodies but rather to what ends the inked body accommodates commemorative representations of former political leaders who are usually depicted in public memory as “unworthy” of commemoration.