Since 1918, much historical debate on Austria–Hungary has revolved around the supposed inevitability of its demise. Most historians of recent decades have rejected this inevitability. Nevertheless, one can argue that although Austria–Hungary could have survived well into the twentieth century, there were certainly key factors and decisions that made its dissolution much more likely.

Every newly emerged and nationalizing state has to confirm its legitimacy and, more often than not, employs a cultural-historical approach for that. It is even more so, if, under an authoritarian regime, the given society presents itself as a cultural-historical entity rather than a civic one based on political cohesion. The less democratic a society the more it is eager to depict itself as an organic community based on a well-bound culture and deeply rooted in the given soil. In this case the idea of an ancestral heritage is used as a substitute for political legitimacy.

War crimes and genocide are as old as history itself. So are regulations and laws that protect individuals during time of war, whether they be combatants or civilians. The Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu wrote in the fifth century BCE that it was important to treat “captured soldiers well in order to nurture them [for our use]. This is referred to as ‘conquering the enemy and growing stronger.'” Yet several centuries later, Qin Shi Huangdi, China's first emperor, committed horrible atrocities during his military campaigns to unite China. Eric Yong-Joon Lee adds that it should be remembered that the Qin emperor also created that country's “first managed international legal order.” But, according to Robert Cryer, it was the West, not Asia, that created the world's first “international criminal law regime.” This “regime,” R. P. Anand argues, was, in many ways, a form of “Victor's Justice“ or “ruler's law,” since it was forced on Asia and Africa by the West in the nineteenth century.

There are two popular myths concerning the relationship between communism and nationalism. The first is that nationalism and communism are wholly antagonistic and mutually exclusive. The second is the assertion that in communist Eastern Europe nationalism was oppressed before 1989, to emerge triumphant after the Berlin Wall came down. Reality was different. Certainly from 1945 onwards, communist parties presented themselves as heirs to national traditions and guardians of national interests. The communist states of Central and Eastern Europe constructed “socialist patriotism,” a form of loyalty to their own state of workers and peasants. Up to 1989, communists in Eastern Europe sang the national anthem, and waved the national flag next to the red banner. The use of national images was not the exception, but the rule. From Cuba to Korea, all communist parties attempted to gain national legitimacy. This was not incidental or a deviation from Marxist orthodoxy, but ingrained in the theory and practice of the communist movement since its inception.

In the 1920s, the Ukrainian Commissariat of Education and a circle of progressive educators aimed to radically transform the educational system in Ukraine, and, as a consequence, the skills and mentality of its graduates. To do this, they would have to teach students in a language they understood. For nearly three-quarters of the juvenile population of Ukraine, this meant instruction in Ukrainian. Although this may have sounded like a simple proposition, it was not. Throughout the pre-revolutionary period, schools had educated Ukrainian children in Russian, and teachers, regardless of their ethnicity, were trained and accustomed to teaching in it. Pre-revolutionary publications, still widely used in Soviet schools, and even the early Soviet primers were overwhelmingly written in Russian. Ukrainian national leaders had made an attempt to set up a network of Ukrainian-language schools during the country's short-lived period of independence, but their attempts were disrupted by the chaos of civil war and the fall of successive governments. It was under Soviet patronage that the “Ukrainization” of the schools reached its greatest extent; however, it was an achievement that required effort, and real qualitative change in the language of instruction was gradual.

Why would elites or masses in an ethnically distinct region ever opt for “alien rule” over national independence? While separatist movements tend to create the most drama and make the most headlines, mass media and most scholarly accounts pay far less attention to ethnic groups opting to stay in a union state dominated by other groups. Yet such unionist groups are surely more numerous than the separatist ones. Indeed, in the neighborhood of almost every separatist region in a given multi-ethnic state, one can find one or more unionist groups, such as the Yoruba during Nigeria's Biafran Civil War, the Ingush as Chechnya battled the Russian Federation, and the Kannadigas at the peak of Kashmir's struggle for independence from India. Sometimes, unionist groups advocate political integration despite seeming to have every reason to seek secession. Such groups are neglected by analysts only at great cost, because it is precisely these groups that are likely to hold the key to understanding how distinct groups can come to live together in peace.

In September 1989, speaking to the Republican Strike Committee of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR), Erkin Nurzhanovich Auel'bekov, assistant chairman of the All-Union Soviet of Nationalities, asked a question of great importance to Soviet citizens in the increasingly fragile union: “Is there such a thing as a Soviet narod (people), or is this just an empty fiction?” For Auel'bekov and the assembled strike committee, the answer was not in doubt. “Certainly for all of us here,” he continued, “there is such a narod. There is a passport, there are Soviet people (sovetskie liudi) and, moreover, there is justification for thinking that this is the most important achievement of the past seventy years of Soviet power.” Soviet patriots, they agreed, needed to protect this narod from the process of “nationalization” that threatened the Soviet Union and its constituent people both locally in Moldova and more broadly in the union in general. The protection of this achievement in Soviet nation building became the mission of an “internationalist' ” movement as it moved from a strike campaign to stop language laws in 1989 to an election campaign in 1990. The political strike of 1989 had achieved none of its immediate goals and as internationalist activists moved into the second phase of the conflict over the future of Moldova they invoked imperiled Soviet achievements as they first attempted to take the Moldovan government through the ballot box, and failing at that, to take the eastern region of Transnistria out of Moldova.

In the course of trying to establish functional and harmonious relations among Yugoslav nations, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (hereafter the Communist Party) asked two key questions: (1) did the common interests that united Yugoslav nations and nationalities after the Second World War change over time? And (2) was nationalism a manifestation of the failure to resolve the national question? The Communist Party answered “no” to both questions. We may deepen our understanding of why multinational socialist Yugoslavia resisted disintegration for almost 50 years, if we get a better grasp of the Communist Party's responses and arguments to these questions. Equally important, since the Kosovo question is, so to speak, an unresolved legacy of the socialist (communist) system, reviewing the arguments that dominated the political life of socialist Yugoslavia may also give us some insights into future developments in Kosovo. By putting the above-mentioned questions into the Kosovo context, the article does not, however, attempt to offer the “right” answer to them. Rather, the purpose of this article is to provide some important background considerations about challenges, such as decentralization, that multinational Yugoslavia faced and to explore lessons learned from the past.

While participating in Hitler's Holocaust against Jews and Roma, wartime Croatia's collaborationist government, the Ustaša (Insurgent), conducted its own genocide against the Serbs within its territories. As the title of Marco Rivelli's 1978 text, Le Génocide occulté, makes clear, this phenomenon remained largely unknown in the West until the 1990s. Of the principal external actors, post-war German attention focused on the Holocaust. Italy still resists fully confronting its less than pristine role in the Balkans, so that Rivelli's work, completed in 1978, was not published in Italy until 1999. The Vatican, meanwhile, has yet to release its documents on the subject.

A small advertisement in the first issue of España Popular, a weekly journal begun in February 1940 and edited by Spanish communists in exile, announced that it would be publishing chapters of The Terror of 1824. This 1877 novel by Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) was part of the second series of his National Episodes and served as a literary standard for reinforcing the master narrative of Spanish liberal nationalism at the turn of the century. Spanish communists considered The Terror of 1824 a representative work of common patriotic heritage that should be preserved and publicized among their followers. Built around the absolutist repression of liberals after the anti-Napoleonic War in Spain, the novel was given an updated political meaning. An implicit parallel was traced between the fate of nineteenth-century liberals and the recent exile of Spanish communists, with the former cast as the progressive forerunners of the twentieth-century freedom fighters in Spain. This was coherent with the Republican and socialist interpretation of the Spanish history of that period.

The significance of language and literature as formative to national identity is a major trope within studies of nationalism. The act of imagining and realizing a nation and a nation-state along these lines has been tackled from multiple angles including folklore, linguistics, historical studies of educational institutions and their curricula, with a prominent place reserved for textbook analysis. Even though historical studies for the most part have underscored the rapidity and novelty of these processes, a temporal claim that is part and parcel of the larger and fundamental assertion that nationalism is a modern phenomenon, these processes are negotiated over a period of decades. In Braudelian terms, the standardization of a national language would fall somewhere between conjoncture and événement.

In 1762 and 1763, manifestos were issued by Catherine II, and later were extended further by her son Paul I, inviting foreign artisans and others to settle in far-flung rural areas of the Russian Empire in order to help strengthen the economy. Under a policy somewhat similar to the later US Homestead Act, under the manifestos German and other foreign-national settlers and their descendants were offered Russian citizenship, land ownership after three years, religious tolerance (including, in the case of Germans, German clergy and German-language churches), and exemption from the military draft—although by the end of the nineteenth century the last of these had been rescinded. The call was not restricted to Germans, but Germans comprised the largest group to take advantage of it, settling for the most part in Ukraine, Bessarabia, and the mid-Volga region. Those who participated in the migration, known as the Auswanderung, and their descendants are often referred to in English as “Russian Germans” or “Germans from Russia” (rossiiskie nemtsy). A second wave of German immigration occurred in 1894, when some Germans who had settled in Prussia moved across the border into Russia. By 1897, there were over 2 million German immigrants and descendants in the Russian Empire.

Serbia's ethnic Hungarian minority, concentrated in the northern province of Vojvodina, is little known compared to other ethnic minorities in the Balkans. Unlike Kosovo Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs, and Croatian Serbs, the Vojvodina Hungarians were not involved in violent conflict during Yugoslavia's disintegration of the 1990s. The Hungarian minority is not without its grievances or its political demands, however. Over the past two decades, Vojvodina Hungarians have organized a campaign for greater cultural accommodation and political autonomy for their community. They argue that the province as a whole has lost most of its meaningful autonomous powers, that the Hungarian minority does not have adequate political representation and cultural institutions, and that the state does not fully protect the minority from growing threats of ethnic violence and discrimination. The minority's campaign directs most of its appeals to the Belgrade authorities, but increasingly it looks beyond Serbia's borders for support as well. Especially when the Serbian government appears hostile or indifferent to their appeals, the Vojvodina Hungarians look to make alliances with foreign actors, including the Hungarian government, the US government, EU institutions, and assorted other media outlets and NGOs. The minority leaders expect that by sending these foreign actors accounts of the human rights abuses that Vojvodina Hungarians suffer, they will ally themselves with the campaign and pressure the Serbian authorities to compromise with its demands.

Uncovering the importance of Islam in Chechen national identity is not necessarily difficult. Alexei Malashenko has noted that Chechen identity today cannot be considered outside the context of Islamic tradition. Chechnya today is not an independent Muslim state. Its embracing of Islam came about during a time of colonization, when Chechens were struggling to halt Russian encroachment on their lands. Many works pertaining to Islam in Chechnya suggest that, at the time of Russian advancement in the eighteenth century, most Chechens were “nominally” Muslim. This has been attributed to the geographic isolation of the Caucasus. While the rugged mountainous landscape and thick forests which cover the region provided protection from invaders, it also hindered interaction among the various mountain peoples as well as the strength of outside religious influence. Soon after their defeat to the tsarist Russians, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred and Chechens spent the following 80 years under Soviet rule. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Chechnya declared independence alongside the full-fledged Soviet Socialist Republics, though their independence was not recognized by the UN. The Chechen victory over the Russian Federation in the first war in 1994–1996 has been considered a remarkable military defeat. However, a weak economy, high unemployment, and criminality caused the young nation to fall into a state of lawlessness and radicalism, eventually causing it to suffer a defeat to the Russians in the second war, which began in 1999. The present day is characterized by exhaustion and a desire for peace, a desire that ultimately has meant deference to Russian rule.

What was Soviet patriotism? A definition of the term offered by the Soviet ideological apparatus in 1953—a “social, historically conditioned feeling of love for one's motherland“—raises more questions than it answers. Patriotism was a concept foreign to classical Marxism; indeed, the concept, along with the corresponding term “the Soviet people,” entered mass usage only in the mid-1930s, when the Soviet government moved away from class as the dominant paradigm for interacting with its society. The relationship of Soviet patriotism to nationalism, the predominant political identity in twentieth-century Europe, was also ideologically fraught. Patriotism was sharply distinguished from nationalism (natsionalizm) in the Soviet lexicon. The first referred to a healthy allegiance to a community that was consistent with universal values of enlightenment, justice and democracy; the second was a jingoistic and reactionary ideology utilized by the bourgeoisie to mislead the working class. Despite this distinction, Soviet patriotism was supra-national, not anti-national, as it “harmoniously combined” the national traditions of the different Soviet nations with “the common, fundamental interests of all working people in the USSR.”

The sheer enormity of Soviet losses at the hands of German forces during the Second World War staggers the mind. During the immediate post-war period, Stalin did not want the West to know just how badly the Soviet Union had been mauled or the fact that far more Soviet soldiers had died than German ones (up to three times as many); consequently, the Soviets clamed that the total number of dead was 7 million, while Western estimates were between 10 and 15 million Soviet dead. It was only during the Khrushchev era that the true scale of the disaster was revealed and the more accurate figure of 20 million dead was generally accepted. Of these, only half were soldiers. The rest were at least 10 million civilians, including 2 million who died as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. The death toll has more recently been put at 25, 27 and even 30 million, though I suspect the latter figures also take into consideration the decline in birth rates. In April 2009 Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev appointed yet another commission to give a final accounting of Soviet losses.

It is estimated that, in 1913, less than 500,000 Muslims lived in the regions ruled by Greece and around 800,000 Muslims in those areas which were under the authority of the Bulgarian state. In the aftermath of the 1923 obligatory Greco-Turkish population exchange the number of Muslims in Greece reduced to approximately 200,000, of which around 180,000 lived in the region of Western Thrace and 20–25,000 Albanian-speaking Muslims, known as Çams, in Epirus and Greek South-West Macedonia. In the same period, the number of Muslims in Bulgaria was between 800,000 and one million people. Meanwhile, during the two Balkan and the First World Wars a hardly definable number of Muslims lost their lives due to starvation, disease, massacres and physical destruction caused by the military and paramilitary troops of the two Balkan states, as well as due to voluntary and forced migration to areas controlled by the Ottoman Empire.

During the early post-war years (1944–1948), the newly established communist regimes in Eastern Europe followed the Soviet example. They honoured figures and events from their respective national pasts, and celebrated holidays dedicated to anti-fascist resistance and popular uprisings, which they presented as forerunners of the new, bright and prosperous “democratic” era. Hungarian communists celebrated 15 March and commemorated 6 October, both recalling the national struggle for independence in 1848; they celebrated a martyr cult of fallen communists presented as national heroes, and “nationalized” socialist holidays, such as May Day. In the centenary of 1848 they linked national with social demands. In the “struggle for the soul of the nation,” Czech communists also extensively celebrated anniversaries and centenaries, especially in 1948, which saw the 600th anniversary of the founding of Prague's Charles University, the 100th anniversaries of the first All-Slav Congress (held in Prague) and the revolution of 1848, the 30th anniversary of the founding of an independent Czechoslovakia, and the 10th anniversary of the Munich Accords. National holidays related to anti-fascist resistance movements were celebrated in Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia; dates related to the overthrow of fascism, implying the transition to the new era, were celebrated in Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria.

In 1944 Poland was re-established for the second time in the twentieth century. Between the Lublin manifesto of 22 July 1944 and the Potsdam conference of summer 1945 a communist-dominated regime had formed, which was had little in common with the Second Republic that had been founded between the declaration of independence on 9 November 1918 and the peace of Riga with Bolshevik Russia signed in March 1921. Post-war Poland was significantly smaller, geographically further to the west, and ethnically more homogeneous. The Holocaust had destroyed Europe's most sizeable Jewish population, the loss of the kresy (eastern borderlands) to the USSR had reduced the size of eastern-Slavic minorities and the expulsion of the Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia further helped to create an ethnically homogeneous country. For the first time in her history, Poland had the structure of a nation-state. Through the destruction and catastrophe of Nazi occupation and genocide the goal of firebrand Polish nationalists such as Roman Dmowski had been achieved: a Poland inhabited by ethnic Poles. Still, the new Poland was less independent than its predecessor; from 1944 onwards it was part of the emerging post-war Soviet Empire. Polish sovereignty had fallen victim to Stalin's “revolutionary-imperial paradigm.” Expansion of Moscow's power was as much a priority of the Soviet leadership as the export of Bolshevik revolution.

Relating nationalism to other ideologies or cultural value systems is an enigmatic scholarly activity. The enigma lies in the kaleidoscopic nature of nationalism and the ease with which it adapts to philosophically opposed ideologies. Nationalism, for instance, often assumes ties to liberalism, even though it presupposes a strong commitment to a national community that transcends individualism. It accommodates conservatism fairly well despite nationalism's modernizing mission, and it has often been paired with communism, regardless of the latter's internationalist rhetoric. Finally, nationalism and religion often go hand in hand, despite their deep philosophical incompatibilities and asymmetries. For example, nationalist ideologies often encourage violence against outgroup members even where religious doctrines strictly prohibit physical force. Inherently local, philosophically poor, and limited in scope or outreach, nationalism lacks a belief in afterlife salvation or in creative intelligence as source of meaning behind the universe. Yet it frequently dominates identity construction, overshadowing the primacy of Christianity or Islam which are universal in their message of salvation.