Britons and Iranians do not wax poetic when they discover that “one, two, three” sound vaguely similar in English and Persian. Finns and Hungarians at times do. When I speak of “Finno-Ugrian cooperation,” I am referring to a linguistic label that joins peoples whose languages are so distantly related that in most world contexts it would evoke no feelings of kinship. Similarities in folk culture may largely boil down to worldwide commonalities in peasant cultures at comparable technological stages. The racial features of Estonians and Mari may be quite disparate. Limited mutual intelligibility occurs only within the Finnic group in the narrow sense (Finns, Karelians, Vepsians, Estonians), the Permic group (Udmurts and Komi), and the Mordvin group (Moksha and Erzia). Yet, despite this almost abstract foundation, the existence of a feeling of kinship is very real. Myths may have no basis in fact, but belief in myths does occur. Before denigrating the beliefs of indigenous and recently modernized peoples as nineteenth-century relics, the observer might ask whether the maintenance of these beliefs might serve some functional twenty-first-century purpose.

The history of Judaism in the Soviet Union is not a happy one. The Soviet Union, in a policy reminiscent of the premodern age, has persecuted the Jewish religion and not—with the exception of the 1948-53 period—Jews as persons. This does not mean that there was not discrimination. Anti-Jewish discrimination began about 1944 and presumably still continues in spite of Gorbachev's reported attempts to ease it. But we see no clear signs that the purges of the thirties were directed at Jewish party members as such. Recent research also does not credit the once common belief that the liquidation of the “Evsektsiia” (Jewish sections of the Communist party) in 1930 was an anti-Jewish act.

If Lenin were alive today and to find himself in Stalin's hands, without any doubt, he would have confessed being a German spy – and, maybe, with some more justification [than others who had done so in 1937-1938]. (Georgii Fedotov after the third show trial (as quoted in Liuks [Luks], Istoriia Rossii i Sovetskogo Soiuza 258)).

After its establishment in 1918–1919, Czechoslovakia was a multinational state and some of its minorities protested against their being included into it. The nationality problem was related to the collapse of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1938 and the loss of some of its territories to Germany, Poland, and Hungary. It may be pointed out that the 1920 Constitution did not recognize a separate Slovak national identity and that the Czechs and Slovaks were termed “Czechoslovaks.” The post-Munich Second Republic recognized a separate Slovak nationality; however, the state came to its end in March 1939. In 1945, after its reestablishment as a national state of the Czechs and Slovaks, the country's government attempted to liquidate the national minorities' problem in a drastic manner by transfer (expulsion) of Germans and Hungarians.

The world changed on August 19, 1991. On that date, a self-styled “Emergency Committee” of conservative Politburo members attempted to derail and reverse the process of structural reform that had started some six years earlier under the sponsorship of Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The coup backfired two days later because its leaders misunderstood a central political fact of life after perestroika—namely, that political events could no longer be scripted to suit the changing tastes of the party elitte. While the plotters probably suspected as much—indeed, that was one of the reasons why they initiated the coup in the first place—their mistake was in overestimating their capacity to put a stop to this “state of anarchy.” While the vast majority of Soviet citizens acted precisely as the Emergency Committee expected them to—with utter indifference to the ultimate outcome of this elite power struggle—a small minority did not. It was this opposition, not only in the streets, but within party, military, and security organs, that defeated the coup and ushered in the momentous changes that we are experiencing today.

On 14 December 1995, an agreement as the Elysée Treaty (earlier initialled in Dayton after weeks of difficult negotiation) was signed in Paris by the Heads of State of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Croatia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. One of the witnesses at the ceremony was the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and, in a real sense, it marked the nadir of his term of office. In June 1992, amidst the euphoria of U.S. President George Bush's articulation of hopes for a new world order, Boutros-Ghali had presented a report to U.N. members entitled An Agenda for Peace which painted an ambitious picture of the opportunities for constructive involvement of the U.N. in conflict resolution. Yet ironically, this was almost the moment at which the intensification of intergroup conflict precipitated Bosnia-Hercegovina's slide into social and political disarray. The ultimate humiliation for the U.N. came in July 1995 when the massacre of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces in the U.N.-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica triggered the chain of events which saw responsibility for Bosnia-Hercegovina decisively removed from the U.N.'s grasp, and assumed by the United States and its NATO allies. The U.N. may recover from the shame of its Balkan entanglement, but the scars are likely to prove permanent.

Konrad Henlein founded the Sudeten German Heimatfront (SHF) in October 1933 and in less than a year and a half it would become the largest party in the First Czechoslovak Republic. This achievement is all the more remarkable in light of the initiative undertaken by the Czech and German Social Democrats, as well as the Communists to have the SHF banned in the year before the elections. This initiative would most likely have succeeded had the matter not been referred to Czechoslovakia's ailing President, Tomáš Masaryk. After the state had banned both the Sudeten German Nazi and Nationalist parties on account of their alleged ties to Hitler, Masaryk concluded one month before the 19 May 1935 general elections that the SHF should be allowed to campaign.1 Masaryk, however, mandated that the Heimatfront must change its name to the more democratic “Sudeten German Party” (SdP). Despite the specter of a ban that still haunted the party in the month before the election, the SdP succeeded in transforming itself from a political pariah into a majority German party by using the legal protections and security forces of Czech democracy to wage a legalistic campaign against the state. In light of this stunning success, how then did the party leadership perform this act of political alchemy and what strategies did it deploy in campaigning against the state?

In 1920 the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic emerged upon the ruins of German and Polish occupation. It replaced the short-lived Belarusian Democratic Republic as the embodiment of national statehood. The ensuing decade came to be an important but ambiguous period in Belarusian history. New state institutions such as the Commissariat of Public Enlightenment, the Institute of Belarusian Culture, and the Belarusian State University carried out unprecedented “nation-building” policies designed to reverse the effects of tsarist Russification and foster the development of Belarusian national culture. Parodoxically, many of the same institutions also implemented various aspects of “Sovietization.” A myriad of measures under the label “socialist construction” served to integrate ever more closely Belarus into the Soviet Union.

Much has been made in the social sciences of the ambiguity of nationalism in Central Asia, where not only the boundaries between republics but between nations, languages, and peoples were drawn by the Soviet state. The similar ambiguity of Central Asian religiosity, however, has remained largely ignored. Perhaps religiosity, unlike the more recent idea of nationalism, is considered too fixed a construct for the modern and artificially created states of Central Asia. The division of religions into specific sects, each with its own explicit doctrine and precepts, would seem to preclude definitional necessity. Yet in the 1980s it was religiosity, malleable and stubborn, which proved as essential to the decline of the Soviet Union as did nationalism. As a vital component of identity, religion can exist without any clergy, place of worship, or understanding of sacred text, much as a nation can exist without a state or a government. The illusory aspects of religion, the comforts and mystery of rite and ritual, are as difficult for a state to control as national sentiment, and often prove the impetus behind the latter.

After a two-year tug-of-war between the US, the UN, and Phnom Penh, the Cambodian government, supported by massive international intervention, brought some of those accused of committing Khmer Rouge atrocities to trial before an independent court. The atrocities, which verged on genocide, were perpetrated between 1975 and 1979. The plan was to create a special tribunal consisting of both indigenous and foreign judges to try the perpetrators. Newspapers from 2002 reported that the first indictment would be issued some time during that year. As we know today, this proved to be a rosily optimistic prediction.

Most European early-modern states transitioned from composite monarchies into centralized ones. Essentially, composite monarchies were “more than one country under the sovereignty of one ruler.” As Moscow expanded and acquired the surrounding principalities either by inheritance or force, its grand princes enacted a series of legal and administrative reforms to dissolve the differences among its territories and create a centralized monarchy. These political reforms began under Ivan III, who instituted a standardization of Muscovite legal practice and formalized a defined system of social precedence, mestnichestvo, which accorded high rank to his newly acquired provincial elites within the Muscovite social system. Change could not happen overnight, and further legal reforms by Ivan IV, in addition to new religious reforms to eradicate differences of practice among his subjects, centralized the Grand Prince's political and religious authority.

In Russia, the memory of the Second World War has been at once deeply personal and profoundly political. Largely erased from official memory until Stalin's death, the story of the war became, in the 1960s, a key means of legitimizing the Soviet state. The mythic “20 million”—more recent estimates are closer to 30 million war dead—became the heart of a lasting and state-sanctioned collective memory of shared suffering, patriotism, and redemption. As historian Nina Tumarkin has argued, the official “cult” of the war began to crumble in the mid-1980s, and what she calls “raw human memory,” personal stories untainted by the myth created from above, began to emerge. Tumarkin contends that the “winds of glasnost' and perestroika” effectively “ravaged” both the state-sanctioned “myth” and the “shared memory” of the Great Patriotic War. Personal tragedies began to replace the official tale of national triumph.

An academic gathering – be it a symposium, a conference, or a round-table – to examine the work of a fellow scholar is invariably timely. At the very least it presupposes a consensus on the basic significance of the subject being addressed and a collective decision to address it. As a launch of a new book (in Ukraine a phenomenon known as prezentatsiia), it provides the welcome opportunity to discuss a new contribution and with that to fill in and redraw our map of the field. If more than one work or project is involved, it provides a still greater opportunity, and indeed poses a scholarly obligation, to see the larger picture and to engage in stocktaking and rethinking. By contextualizing, problematizing, and where need be, deconstructing, we recalibrate our understanding and thus revive the field and our commitment to it. Clearly, the process of laudatio, of paying homage to achievements spanning a whole career, also contributes to this.

My discussion of the position of the Slovenes in “Post-modern” Europe is based on certain premises. First, I perceive the present and the future situation of Europe as one in which so-called post-modern phenomena and values are being realized; secondly, I perceive the current developments in Slovenia as processes of cooperation with and participation in European processes; and thirdly, I view the state independence of Slovenia achieved this year as a prerequisite of the above-mention cooperation and participation. However, these premises require explanation and verification. In providing the explanation and the proof, I would like to point to the problems of a small state existing in the modern world, and outline the challenges that await us, Slovenes.

The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes inherited a considerable number of Germans along with its ex-Habsburg territories when it was established in December 1918. The two most important German communities in inter-war Yugoslavia were the Germans of Slovenia and the Germans of the Vojvodina and Croatia-Slavonia, the so-called Donau Schwaben (Swabians). There were also scattered pockets of ethnic Germans in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Yugoslavian ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche), like the other Yugoslavian non-Slav minorities, were objects of discrimination by the Yugoslavian government. The Slovenian German community responded to this hostility by developing a virulent German nationalism which, after 1933, rapidly turned into Nazism. The Swabian community, on the other hand, generally tried to cooperate with the central government in Belgrade. The Swabians remained rather ambivalent toward the rising Nazi movement until the tremendous successes of the Third Reich in 1938 made Nazism irresistibly attractive. In the face of the government's anti-German policies, why did each of these German communities manifest such different attitudes towards the Yugoslav state during the inter-war period? This article will show how several factors of history, demography, and geography combined to produce the different reactions of the two groups.