The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 exerted a deep influence on the international communist movement and greatly affected the political and economic outlook in Hungary. A less well-known legacy of the uprising is what may be called the refugee experience, a momentous chapter in the history of human migration and resettlement. An examination of this experience reveals that the appearance of the Hungarian refugees in Western Europe and the New World greatly changed the development of Hungarian ethnic communities already in existence there, and that the refugees’ presence in the West continues to have lasting influence on relations between Hungary and the West.

In the past, Hungary has been both a source of refugees and a refuge for them. Many times in her history has she offered refuge to persecuted minorities and fugitives driven out of their own countries by war or other calamities. She has also sent her own refugees to the four corners of the world, after such events as the Rákóczi Uprising of the early eighteenth century, the War of Independece of 1848-49, the revolutions of 1918-19, and the Second World War.

On 22 December 1918 Tomáš G. Masaryk delivered his first political message as president of the fledgling Czechoslovakia. Addressing the Constituent Assembly at Hradčany in Prague, he vowed that the frontier districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, which contained a predominantly German-speaking population (and which German nationalists eventually designated collectively as the Sudetenland) would remain in the new Republic. Inimical toward and unwilling to live in a state dedicated to the sovereignty of Czechs and Slovaks, virtually all German leaders at the time of Masaryk's address were working to separate German districts from Czechoslovakia and link them with Austria.

The unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo in February 2008 catapulted the Western Balkans back to the centre stage of international security concerns. Despite affirmations to the contrary, the recognition of Kosovo's independence by major Western powers is seen as a significant precedent in international law and the way in which self-determination conflicts are handled by the international community. At the same time, it raises major questions for the stability of borders across the Western Balkans region, and possibly beyond. At the centre of many of these questions is the role of the international community—defined by the international and regional organizations present in the region, as well as by their powerful member states—in tackling the complexity of interrelated self-determination conflicts, incomplete democratization processes, growing concerns about the economic viability of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia and an ever-increasing presence of transnational organized crime networks with significant reach beyond the region.

Between 1981 and 1991, Serbian intellectual and political life were energized by a movement to overcome the legacies of the Tito regime. Tito himself had died in 1980, but his political heirs, insecure and unimaginative, had proclaimed that even though Tito was gone, his image would continue to guide and bind the peoples of Yugoslavia: “After Tito—Tito!” In Belgrade, the anti-Titoist movement began as a struggle for free expression. As Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz, one of the leaders of the Committee for the Protection of Artistic Freedom (founded in 1982), said later, all political freedom flows from the right to free speech. Mihiz's commitment to the defense and nurturing of this right was consistent with values he had expressed throughout his career as a literary critic, playwright, and theater director. Yet the movement that he helped found in 1982 would be transformed after 1986 into something less obviously principled and much more visceral, as the issue of Kosovo's fate came to consume Serbia's intellectual elite. The movement for free speech segued into a movement to reclaim Kosovo for Serbia without missing a beat, thanks to the ability of Serbian intellectuals to frame the Kosovo problem as a product of the suppression of open dialogue in Yugoslavia. Kosovo replaced Gojko Djogo, Jovan Radulović, Dušan Jovanović, and other censored Serbian writers as the emotive fulcrum of the anti-Titoist movement in Serbia. The free speech movement was transformed into a movement of rage at the Tito regime's allegedly systematic injustices towards Serbs. Since the wars of Yugoslav succession began in 1991, commentators have conveniently forgotten that what ended up a violent and irrational movement in the late 1980s began in such a reasonable fashion. Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz was the face of the early free speech movement.

Shortly before the Christmas of 1860, the major bookstores in Prague put on display a German-language booklet entitled Bohemian Sketches: By a Native Writer. Although the book was published anonymously, its author soon became well known: he was Jan Palacký, the son of the prominent historian and leading Czech politician Frantis̆ek Palacký. But even his famous name did not spare the young man from stormy, harsh criticism that followed after the publication of the book. For weeks the newspapers both in Prague and in Vienna scrutinized the rhetorical nuances of the book, pointing out the author's national and political biases. Surprisingly, neither of the Czech-language newspapers, Národní listy nor C̆as, that had recently entered into the public arena, stepped forward in defense of the author. The critical response in the press raises one's curiosity: what was wrong with Jan Palacký's arguments? How could someone so closely connected with Czech national leaders write such a controversial account? Moreover, considering the censorship practices and vigilant police supervision of the time, it is also worth asking how the publication could have escaped the attention of governmental surveillance.

While some groups are discovering new opportunities in the shifting political and economic structures of the former Soviet Union, others are finding that their paths towards upward social mobility have become less clear or blocked. There are also growing regional differences in benefits and losses. Although privileges in the old system often translate into advantages in the new, a contracting economy and the redrawing of political boundaries are altering the social order.

Elections are one of the major ways in which democratic governments maintain legitimacy. Do elections serve the same functions in transitioning, non-democratic, or semi-democratic systems? Perhaps the relationship between elections and legitimacy is different in systems that are not fully democratic? And what of the media? Is their role the same or is the role they play dependent upon the type of system in which they exist? The Republic of Georgia offers an interesting case in which to look at these relationships. I would posit that in transitioning, non-democratic, and semi-democratic systems, elections serve a different function than in a fully democratic society and the media are one tool that leaders in such systems can use to enhance their legitimacy. When non-democratic leaders enjoy popularity, there is no need to finesse the media since positive coverage is easy to come by when you are popular. But if your popularity is waning and democratic habits are not well ingrained, the temptation to overtly or covertly subvert the media can be quite intense. So instead of maintaining legitimacy, elections may serve to create legitimacy or at least the appearance of legitimacy when legitimacy is lacking. To that end, regimes and leaders cannot afford to lose, and moreover need to win, elections by large margins if their legitimacy is questionable. Therefore, control over the media is more important when this is the case. In fact, there may be an inverse relationship between media freedom and regime insecurity, as the insecurity of the regime goes up, the freedom of the media goes down. Couple this tendency with the fact that the media in these transitioning systems have not fully become a “fourth estate” that is strong, independent, and can hold the government and political leaders accountable and you have a climate in which the media are harassed, biased, and often co-opted. Georgia, through the 2000 presidential election, is such a political system.

Nachkriegspolen kannte bis zum Ende der Herrschaft der Parteinomenklatura keine Probleme mit nationalen Minderheiten—so schien es zumindest nach außen. Seit den 1950er Jahren gab es keine Nationalitätenstatistik mehr, und man versuchte den Eindruck zu erwecken, als ob das Zusammenleben im polnischen Staat wenigstens in diesem Bereich völlig problemlos sei. Dies ist zunächst verwunderlich, denn auf der anderen Seite war die polnische Regierung stets bereit zuzugeben, daß der Staat in wirtschaftlicher, aber auch in außenpolitischer Hinsicht in nicht geringen Schwierigkeiten steckte. Nur auf dem Gebiet der nationalen Minderheiten war man zurückhaltend.

On the eve of the October revolution most of Central Asia was a tsarist colony with the exception of the Amaret of Bukhara. Islam as a religion and a way of life had become more and more ibadah (religious ritual) and less and less as a program of action for the ummah. The tsarist functionaries deprived its religious and educational institutions from their major sources of income (the auqāf) and encouraged instead a program of russification through the schools, specially the Russian-Native schools (russkotuzamnaya shkola) and active conversion of the Muslims of Turkestan to Orthodox Christianity through organizations such as the Anti-Muslim Missionary Division (protivo-musul'manskoe missionerskoe otdelenie), of the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy. Aside from these and settlements of the Slav immigrants on the Turkestanis lands by force and without compensation the Tsarist government interfered very little in the Central Asian way of life. Almost all of the religious laws (Shariah) dealing with the domestic matters, and the customary laws of the land (adāt) were kept intact.

Using Hungary as a case study and focusing on legislative policies and the practical application of hate crime legislation, this article shows the various ways legal policy can become misguided in the labyrinth of identity politics, minority protection, and penal populism. The first mistake states can make, the author argues, is not to adopt hate crime legislation. The second error arguably pertains to conceptualizing hate crimes as an identity protection but not a minority-protection mechanism and instrument. The third fallacy the author identifies concerns legislative and practical policies that conceptualize victims based on self-identification and not on the perpetrator’s (or the wider community’s) potential perception and classification. The fourth flaw concerns the abuse of the concept of hate crime when it is applied in interethnic conflicts wherein members of minority communities are perpetrators and the victims are members of the majority communities. The fifth is institutional discrimination through the systematic underpolicing of hate crimes.

This study examines the practice of ethnic communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina flying a state, entity, religious, or foreign flag at wedding ceremonies in public spaces. The wedding custom is analyzed through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the way nationalism in the modern era links family and state. After a tragic war, flag power in this context appears to exacerbate nationalism and ethnic tensions in a polyethnic society trapped in a dysfunctional state structure created by the Dayton Accords. The empirical study finds that flag power does not, in fact, privilege ethnic solidarity over national solidarity to the degree that social and political theory would have us imagine. The national identity of being Bosnian is more likely to be exemplified. A clustered, stratified, random sample of 2,500 subjects over the age of eighteen was drawn from the country’s population, including the two entities, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska and Brčko District. Survey questions involving face-to-face structured questions asked participants whether flags were flown at their weddings, which flags were flown, and attitudes toward the wedding custom. Variations by age, religiosity, education, ethnicity, type of flag flown, and political party affiliation are reported and interpreted.

The existing literature explains the war in Donbas and the rationale for why conflict broke out there while failing to do so in other Ukrainian provinces, such as Odesa or Kharkiv. Local pro-Russian organizations could not attract considerable attention and support in the pre-war period in all parts of Ukraine, except for Crimea. The social marginalization and negligible influence of the pro-Russian organizations among the locals presumably stemmed from their weak social ties among the local population. The question is why they had such weak social embeddedness in the local societies despite relatively popular pro-Russian sympathies in these regions? Surprisingly, nobody has sought to explain the social origins of the pro-Russian movements as a source of their weakness and failure to be sparked by the anti-Ukrainian rebellion in 2014.

Turkish nationalism became an element of the Ottoman political scene in the late nineteenth century. Although its roots can be traced back to the Hamidian period (1876–1909), Turkish nationalism emerged as one of the most important political ideologies during the Constitutional Regime. Wars that the Ottoman State participated in from 1911 to the end of the empire in 1918 resulted in population and land losses. Especially, following the Balkan Wars, most of the lands that were populated by non-Muslim and non-Turkish subjects were lost. Within this context, Turkish nationalism came to be seen as the most dominant ideological tool intended to save the Empire. This article argues that Turkish nationalism emerged as a reactive ideology that addressed Ottomanism and Islamism, which were the two other dominant state ideologies during the late Ottoman State, due to the changing political context. In this article, Türk Yurdu, a well-known and influential periodical, is used as the primary source of reference to demonstrate the basic features of Turkish nationalism in its infancy.

Kazakstan is both part of former Soviet Central Asia and yet stands apart in many respects. Its geographic position, past history and present development are unique for the area. It is significant that Soviet-era writings treated Kazakstan distinctly from the other four Central Asian republics. This essay is devoted to these differences.