One of the greatest challenges currently facing the new states in Central and Eastern Europe is educational reform. After obtaining independence in the early 1990s, these states were confronted with the immense task of transforming an outdated centralized education system, which was aimed at delivering a loyal communist workforce, into a modern system that would be much more responsive to consumer demands and would recognize and further individual talent. The immensity of the undertaking lies in the fact that three discourses make simultaneous demands on the education system: nation building, democratization and globalization.

“Belgrade ‘Targets’ Find Unity ‘From Heaven,’” read the front-page headline of a somewhat staggered New York Times, only five days after NATO bombs began falling on Serbia. Instead of hiding in bomb shelters or, as US officials had hoped, rebelling against their government, Serbs were busy singing patriotic songs at public squares, throwing rocks at the Goethe Institute, wearing medieval Serbian military uniforms and carrying signs equating Bill Clinton to Ottoman emperors, Croatian fascists and Napoleon. Thus a population which had for years expressed nothing but discontent with its government suddenly became “unified from heaven—but by the bombs, not by God.” Uniting them “behind their soldiers, their Kosovo and even President Slobodan Milošević” was, Belgrade's then-Mayor explained, a seemingly incomprehensible mélange of “myth and superstition.”

Every nation has its own ways of telling its national story. Such narratives attempt to incorporate and explain the terms of a nation's history, culture, language, territory, economic welfare, and its citizens' sense of belonging. Some national stories are more complicated than others and require specific terminology to describe their nation and its “other.” Belarus is one of these complicated cases. Belarusian national character is often defined by the concept of tuteishaść, or “localness,” by which the people of Belarus identify themselves in relation to other nations and countries.

This paper is devoted to the Russian minorities living in Central Asia (nearly 10 million people in 1989, about 5.5 million today), and more specifically to the Russians living in Kazakhstan, who constitute the main Russian minority in the near abroad, apart from Ukraine. Unlike the Russians living in the other Central Asian republics, Russians in Kazakhstan created political parties. Kazakhstan even experienced some significant secessionist trends in the mid-1990s. Today, the political, social and economic situation of the Russian minority is rather different. Since about 2 million Russians have left the country, those who remain have tried to find their niche within the economic growth that Kazakhstan has experienced since the 2000s. The political parties and associations that represented the interests of the Russian minority have largely disappeared from the political scene. The “Russian question” no longer threatens to destabilize the territorial integrity of the country.

The usually cheerful Insight Travel Guide to the Baltic States offers this synopsis of the Baltic situation: