The politics of language identity have figured heavily in the history of the people of the Republic of Moldova. Indeed the region's status as a province of Russia, Romania, and then the Soviet Union over the past 200 years has consistently been justified and, at least partially, manipulated on the basis of language issues. At the center of these struggles over language and power has been the linguistic and cultural identity of the region's autochthonous ethnicity and current demographic majority, the Moldovans. In dispute is the degree to which these Moldovans are culturally, historically, and linguistically related to the other Moldovans and Romanians across the Prut River in Romania. Under imperial Russia from 1812 to 1918 and Soviet Russia from 1944 to 1991, a proto-Moldovan identity that eschewed connections to Romania and emphasized contact with Slavic peoples was promoted in the region. Meanwhile, experts from Romania and the West have regularly argued that the eastern Moldovans are indistinguishable, historically, culturally, and linguistically, from their Romanian cousins.

Among the most pressing tasks confronting leaders of the Central Asian states is the reconciliation of their desire to expedite legitimation of rule by reifying titular cultural paradigms with the need to construct inclusive civic modes of national self-conception. Kazakhstan is perhaps the best example from the region wherein the construction of a multicultural, inclusive homeland concept is essential to the future of the state. The poignancy of Kazakhstan's situation relates to the fact that its population consists of nearly equal numbers of titular and non-titular peoples, often living compactly in different regions of the state. Large-scale migration of predominately European ethnic minorities from Kazakhstan's territory since the late Soviet period has coupled with high birth rates among ethnic Kazakhs and the “return migration” of diasporic Kazakhs to elevate the titular community to a 53.4% majority (from 40.1 in 1989).

A series of time-honoured regular folk fairs take place in the Carpathian Mountains that are mainly economic but also socio-cultural events. The participants come from all the three Romanian principalities—Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania, that is, from all the historical provinces of the Romanian state as constituted after the First World War. These folk fairs are “two-land fairs” in the Eastern and Southern Carpathians and “three-land fairs” where all three provinces converge, as in the district of Vrancea. Over the centuries, such fairs advanced the perception that participants spoke the same language, shared the same religious belief, and belonged to the same neam, that is, implicitly to the same territory (the word neam being a vernacular term for “kin group,” but extensible to the notion of “people” and “nation”). In short, the folk fairs contributed to awakening Romanian national consciousness. Such evidence challenges modernist theory, according to which national consciousness should have arisen with the bourgeoise elite, who should have inculcated it into the public mind.

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.

Since the 5 October revolution that formally ushered Serbia into a democratic era, political commentators, scholars, civic activists and others have watched the country for signs of resurgent nationalism. Many perceived the primary threat to the new democratic order as the persistence of nationalism, particularly in the years after the 2003 assassination of Zoran Djindjić. Such nationalism, forged in the 1980s and 1990s, was subject to eruptions among unsavory politicians, pensioners, Mafiosi and denizens of Belgrade's suburbs and Serbia's “backward” countryside. The problem underlying this model of resurgent nationalism is that it assumes, and simultaneously constructs, nationalism as a static and unchanging arrangement of ideological and social factors that flare up and die down in response to political stimuli—the arrest of indicted war criminals, the outrageous rhetoric of populist politicians, negotiations over the status of Kosovo, or high-stakes sporting events. While there is no question that such events create discursive space for nationalist, sexist and racist agendas, the flare-up model presents a dangerous simplification of how nationalisms work.

In any contemporary conflict, the war of ideas may be just as important as the war on the battlefield. Throughout history, propaganda has been used as a tool of psychological warfare. The prevalence of technology makes the mass media an ever more vital tool in spreading one's message, both to combatants and throughout the world. The case of the Chechen wars demonstrates the importance both sides placed on publicity in the course of fighting. In addition to the use of print journalism, the Chechen wars witnessed the employment of television news broadcasts, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Internet as a means to spread messages. Given the importance of the media, the public and private discourse by the combatants has been seen as crucial to their cause. The language of Islam carries a set of widely shared symbols, many related to war, that can be used to manipulate public opinion. This article will analyze how Islamic language was used in the two Russian invasions of Chechnya in the 1990s (1994–1996, 1999–2002). It analyzes three pairs of variables: Russian and Chechen public discourse, especially regarding the language of Islam; Chechen public and Chechen private discourse; and the discourse of both sides in the first war compared to the second war.

This article is the third in this Nationalities Papers series, following “Part 1: The Legacy of Early Institutionalism: From Gypsy Fiefs to Gypsy Kings,” which covered the period from the arrival of Gypsies to Europe until the mid-nineteenth century (Vol. 32, No. 3), and “Part 2: Beginnings of Modern Institutionalization,” describing the birth of the first modern forms of ethnically-based political and social organizations established by Romani elites from the nineteenth century up until the Second World War (WWII) (Vol. 33, No. 2). The article concentrates on developments between two significant landmarks in the history of Romani mobilization—the end of WWII in 1945 and the institutionalization of a permanent international Romani body in the form of a World Romani Congress, held for the first time in 1971. The time period covered in this article is distinguished from the previously covered periods by the emergence of the following phenomena: (1) modern Romani political organizations at the national level, (2) their unification through international Romani umbrella organizations, (3) some limited Romani participation in non-Romani mainstream political or administrative structures, (4) an international Romani evangelical movement, (5) reconciliation between Romani political representation and the Catholic Church, (6) national institutions created by various governments to aid the administration of policies on Roma, (7) rapid growth of non-governmental organizations addressing Romani issues, and (8) some limited cooperation between Romani organizations and intergovernmental organizations.

Many Bosnians I talked to were skeptical about my plan to do research among local police in the central Bosnian town of Zenica. They told me that no one would talk to me there. “They're too scared of foreigners,” they said, meaning especially Westerners who might be connected to the powerful international institutions that have acted as de facto protectorate to the fragmented and unstable state after the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia and the devastating 1992–1995 war. In their efforts to neutralize the police as enforcer of ethnonational separatism and to promote the new democratic values of rule of law, respect for human rights, and ethnic and gender equality, the “international community” had sacked hundreds of officers, restricted police powers, and introduced quotas for ethnic minorities and women. There was thus a sense that “foreigners” posed a threat to the masculinized coercive power of the state as embodied in the police. As it happened, the police did talk to me, though always in reference to this context of shifting relations of state and state-like power, as well as the economic and social instability that characterizes postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia).

Romanian war-time policy towards Jews presents a paradox. In the summer and fall of 1941 Romanian military and police were killing the Jews of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina indiscriminately. In late fall of the same year, those Jews who survived the first wave of killings were forcibly deported further to the east—this time not only from Bessarabia and the northern part of Bukovina but from the whole of the latter's province. In the late fall of 1941, Jews from Odessa were once again murdered en masse and any survivors deported from the city. At this time, i.e. in the summer and fall of 1941, Romanian policy was at least as radical and brutal as the Germans', perhaps surpassing it in its brutality, a fact that elicited Hitler's delight and commendation. But then Romanian policy underwent a gradual but more and more pronounced change. Though Romanian authorities took part in the preparations for the deportation of Romanian Jews to the Nazi concentration camps in the summer and early fall 1942, in October of that year the Romanians abruptly terminated their participation in all preparations. In 1943 and 1944 the Romanian government even took measures to protect Romanian Jewish citizens residing in the German-ruled territories by demanding that those Jews were exempt from deportation to concentration camps and facilitated Jewish emigration to Palestine from Romania. Inside Romania, Jews were still heavily discriminated against, exposed to various vexations and harsh confiscatory taxation, but the majority of them survived the war.

Katherine Verdery writes that “[i]n the modern period, nation has become a potent symbol and basis of classification within an international system of nation states”; in turn, nationalism “is a political utilization of the symbol nation through discourse and political activity, as well as the sentiment that draws people into responding to this symbol's use.” However, the idea of “nation state” and its functioning can be seen as a part of the larger hegemonic constructions that operate on the level of “common” beliefs that legitimize existing social hierarchies and divisions of economic resources, and on the level of relationships between states and nations.