This article uses the French Rassemblement National (RN) as a case study to examine how the populist radical right (PRR) prepares for a world after COVID-19 dominated by climate change concerns. Research suggests that certain measures introduced to contain the virus – such as the establishment of strict border and travel restrictions – may legitimize the PRR’s protectionist and anti-immigration agendas, yet few have examined whether or how PRR parties have used COVID-19 to promote their environmental agenda. If anything, the expectation has been that the pandemic would hurt the PRR precisely because its effects, unlike climate change, cannot be dismissed as a “hoax.” This view overlooks not only the “environmental turn” recently taken by several PRR parties but also the possibility that public awareness of the causal link between climate change and COVID-19 may work to their advantage. The analysis presented in this article highlights this possibility, showing that the RN used COVID-19 not only to capitalize on anti-immigrant sentiment but also to bolster its self-image as a champion of environmental protection.

This article revisits the debate on the modernity of nations considering recent critical approaches to national phenomena. It proposes an alternative model that addresses the existence of empirical evidence about nations before the 19th century without erasing key changes in the history of nationhood, such as the rise of the principle of national sovereignty. The model draws on existing literature and a corpus of British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese ego-documents from the Age of Revolutions. The study of patterns of usage of national languages in these life narratives supports the abandonment of the premodern/modern antinomy and the implementation of a more complex account. The proposal distinguishes republican, genetic, nonpoliticized ethnotypical, politicized ethnotypical, liberal, romantic, biological, cultural, and democratic forms of nationhood. It then develops the genetic and the ethnotypical forms using source materials and readdresses the issue of “modernity” in the light of this evidence.

The 1925 Estonian cultural autonomy law is a rare example of the idea of nonterritorial national minority rights officially adopted in the interwar period. Scholarly interest in this legislation, however, has so far overwhelmingly concentrated on the case of the Baltic Germans. This article is intended to make a contribution toward a broader understanding of the 1925 law and the “cultural autonomy” discourse in Estonia altogether by examining the Estonian Swedish minority’s political leadership’s understanding of cultural autonomy: how it changed and developed up to 1925, and what the subsequent Swedish attitudes toward the 1925 Estonian cultural autonomy law were. I demonstrate that although the Swedish leaders had been closely involved in the long process leading up to the law’s passing in 1925, it ended up seen as being of little substantive relevance from the Swedish perspective. Furthermore, by being strongly associated with the term “cultural autonomy,” the law also deprived the Estonian Swedish national movement of an important slogan that had long functioned as the overarching goal of Estonian Swedish nationalism.

Alexander Dugin is considered a fringe figure in contemporary Russia. Yet, his writings exert considerable influence and develop a virulent nationalism that exploits the vocabulary of post-colonial resistance in an unaccustomed way. Dugin should not be ignored, and this article gives a brief account of Dugin's peculiar brand of post-colonial thinking by reference to its central source: Martin Heidegger. Specifically, the article examines how Dugin adapts the anti-metaphysical thinking of Heidegger's most radical work of the 1930s – a thinking that seeks to renew Western thought in an other beginning – to the context of modern Russia as it tries to free itself from Western (American) domination. Dugin aims at nothing less than the creation of a new Russian identity and destiny that will not only save Russia but also, in a nod to Heidegger, renew the Western tradition itself from the “outside.” If Dugin's political project is ambitious, so is his interpretation of Heidegger which attempts to bring out the full radicality of Heidegger's thinking, both as philosophy and as politics.

The aim of this article is to inquire how recent and more consolidated historiographical trends consider the impact of nationalism in the late Ottoman Balkans. I focus on historical accounts of Albanian–Slav interaction in the late Ottoman Macedonian context, although the inquiry also includes texts that do not only engage with this epistemological field. I confront research efforts that have been published from the early 1960s to the present in order to understand the continuities and the discontinuities that characterize the work of historians. A preliminary investigation has allowed me to outline two main historiographical approaches: the national historiographies and the postnationalist approach. Such a distinction has become tangible especially after the end of the Cold War when a new generation of historians started to question the validity of the studies conducted by their colleagues in the past decades by pointing at the methodological and ideological issues that limited their work. In this article I evaluate to what extent the work of postnationalist historians is different from that of traditional historiographies and finally reflect on the possibility and benefits that might come from a dialogue between the two approaches.

How does a newly formed state and its newly created nation present itself at world’s fairs? This article focuses on the interwar period and the impact of the political restructuring of Central Europe in order to examine the strategies and motivations of Czechoslovakia for participation in exhibitions around the globe. It takes Czechoslovakia as an example of a country, created in 1918, that constructed and displayed its image in a comprehensible and uncomplicated way to international audiences. World’s fairs that were primarily organized to promote trade relationships thus gave the opportunity to countries like Czechoslovakia to validate its existence, internal composition, and domestic politics through carefully crafted narratives that were showcased. The article primarily addresses the question of who creates these narratives and why, while scrutinizing the transfer of domestic politics into international displays.

Why do Igbo nationalists subscribe to the view that Igbos are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel and thus descend from Jewish people despite evidence against such genealogical and cultural ties? This problematic is largely underexplored in the copious literature on ethnonationalist agitations in Nigeria. Drawing on ontological security theory, I contend that Igbo nationalists employ the analogy of Jewishness to posit the Igbo as a unique ethnoreligious and ethnoracial group whose identity is under existential threat in postcolonial Nigeria and to draw global attention to their separatist cause. Further, I argue that although belief in the similarities between Jews and Igbos predates postcolonial Igbo nationalism – there are scores of racialist writings advanced by European colonizers in precolonial times to undermine African cultures (the so-called Hamitic hypothesis) – it was particularly invoked by Igbo nationalists during the gory Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), a defining moment in the social construction of Igbo identity. Igbo nationalists appropriated the Jewish experience of persecution in Central and Eastern Europe to make their case for the ontological security of Igbos. Whilst this political strategy was partially successful, it did not halt the Nigerian state from extirpating Biafra. Despite the reincorporation of Biafran territory into Nigeria, Igbo nationalists still see themselves as Jews and Jewishness has mutated into something of a pristine Igbo identity in postcolonial Nigeria.