The Czech philosopher Tomáš G. Masaryk was a scholar and nation-builder; the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga was a scholar and nation-builder; the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi was a scholar and nation-builder; Paul Robert Magocsi is a scholar but not a nation-builder. Unlike the first three distinguished figures, the North American Magocsi never lived in any country among any people that was in need of being “built.” At best he may be considered an advocate or a promoter of a nationality; that is, a people in search of a distinct identity recognizable to themselves and to others.

Of all the post-Soviet states, the challenge of managing ethnic diversity has perhaps been the most problematic in Georgia. Following the secessions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the early 1990s, Georgia has recent experience not only of the radicalization of ethnic relations but also of defeat in violent ethnic conflict. Current debates surrounding the conceptualization and management of ethnic diversity are thus inseparable from urgent questions concerning the future of the Georgian state, and explanations of the conflicts and questions of power and domination. Perceptions of the issue are further overshadowed by memories of the chauvinist rhetoric and illiberal policies of the early phase of sovereignty under President Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Abroad, perceptions of Georgia as a “micro-empire” continue to be fuelled by references to the Gamsakhurdia era, above all in the Russian press, and short-sighted recourse in Western sources to theories of “ancient hatreds.” Defeat also means that contrary to demographic evidence of a proportional expansion of the ethnic Georgian population, independence has not imparted to the Georgian majority a sense of security associated with majority status. As a result of Georgia's apparent inability to influence outcomes in either the peace processes or internal developments in the seceded territories, and the decline in the Georgian population in real terms, the attainment of sovereignty has not allayed Georgian fears of either permanent territorial fragmentation or ethnic “degradation.” Georgians consequently approach issues of majority-minority relations from a position of perceived weakness, coupled with as yet unfulfilled “post-colonial” desires for Georgianization.

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.

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.

The wave of Colour Revolutions, which started in Serbia in the year 2000, and spread to Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, has changed the existing concepts on how transformation would take form in countries exiting from “really existing socialism.” In the early years following the collapse of the Soviet state, the dominant concepts were that of “transition” or slow, top-down reforms that would transform the existing political systems from ruling-party dictatorships to parliamentary democracies, and planned economies to market-based ones. Yet in the late 1990s there was a growing fatigue and pessimism towards the basic thesis of transition: the transition paradigm was formulated as a reaction to the perceived causes of the Soviet failure: a totalitarian state which monopolized the political space proved itself unable to provide either economic well-being or political legitimacy. The task in the early 1990s was to shrink the state apparatus, to make space for a multi-party political pluralism. Even though some argued that the main objective of transition was to achieve democracy,1 for transition theories and even more so for its translation into actual political choices the economic aspect of transition was perceived to be more immediate than the political one. Democracy needed a certain material context, and here too decreasing the role of the state was thought to liberate the market and provide material stability to the new democracies. It was necessary to create a new middle class by way of mass privatization of the former state properties to create a social demand for democracy. Those ideas reflected not only an ideological victory of the one side of the Cold War over the Eastern camp, but also very practical needs: the huge Soviet state sector was neither sustainable nor necessary after the fall of one-party rule, and it had to be radically transformed. At the time, this transition was thought to be an easy task: to take off the oppressing lid of the party-state and let democracy and market economies emerge naturally. Yet in the conception of transition there was a certain tension between the economic and political sides of the imagined reforms, between mass privatization with its dire social consequences of unemployment and fall in the standard of living, and the political goals of democratization where people who were being “restructured” were simultaneously promised to receive the right to change their rulers by casting their ballots. Would people who are threatened with job loss and lower living standards vote for the reformers? And in the event of a negative answer, how would the reforms proceed? Should economic reforms come before political ones; that is, first privatization and in a second stage freedom of political choice through parliamentary elections? These are some of the dilemma that the new republics of the Soviet Union and the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe were facing in the early 1990s. At the time, the answer was clear: the economy came first; it was more important to reform the economic sector, to privatize massively, and stabilize the economy as soon as possible. The economy came before politics, in the sense that restructuring of the property structure through mass privatization was supposed to create the material means for the creation of democracy. It was believed that once the middle class was created as a result of mass privatization, the democratic institutions, such as free elections, multi-party system, independent media, an active civil society, in a word, all the attributes of democracy, would evolve naturally.

Since independence, Central Asian republics have been facing the paradox of developing nation-state ideologies on the basis of a multinational population, inherited from their colonial and Soviet past. This ideology claims historical ownership over the territory, the so-called homeland (rodina in Russian or vatan in local languages). Central Asian governments do perceive the need to assert their sovereign rights on the land. In political terms, it becomes a quest to ensure that the territories claimed contain a majority of titular members of the nation and a minority of other ethnic groups. The census appears here to be the key instrument to measure people and legitimate the power of the titular nation.

The question of ethnic and national identity has dominated post-Soviet life in Abkhazia, which is situated on the Black Sea coast, in the north-west corner of the South Caucasus. Formerly an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, its status is now contested. Following violent armed conflict with Georgia over a period of 13 months in 1992/1993, Abkhazia became de facto independent. However, while not now under Georgian control, Abkhazia remains de jure part of the Republic of Georgia, which considers Abkhazia an integral component of its state. Abkhazia declared independence in 1999, a status that remains unrecognized by the international community.

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

The downfall of communist Yugoslavia and the democratization process that followed at the end of the 1980s have led to the fragmentation of the country, which was accompanied by several wars of different intensity and duration (1991–1999). From the ashes of what once was the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia raised six independent states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia. The situation relating to the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, after its unilateral declaration of independence at the beginning of 2008, and subsequent recognition by parts of the international community, remains unclear. Slovenia is already in the EU, while the rest of the former Yugoslav republics, within the framework of the Stabilization and Association Process of the European Union, have the status of EU Candidate or Potential Candidate countries and are slowly moving towards EU membership.

The collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe promised bold opportunities for the various ethnic groups populating that vast, diverse region. Yet if history had any lessons to teach these groups it was that democracy, or at least the political systems that emerged in the midst of the rubble of the Berlin Wall between 1989 and 1991, was no guarantor of whatever idealized rights the region's ethnic groups hoped would come in the wake of the collapse of the communist dictatorships that had dominated these parts of Europe for decades. Communism, had, in many instances, done nothing more than stifle the festering ethnic tensions that had exploded in the nineteenth century and short-circuited the complex, lengthy process of resolving these conflicts. Consequently, for those knowledgeable about the essence of these conflicts, it should have come as no surprise that Yugoslavia, for example, was torn asunder by ethnic violence so terrifying that it took the intervention of the Western world's great powers to end the most violent aspects of these wars of ethnicity.

In 2006 the Croatian singer Severina Vučković attempted to represent Croatia at the Eurovision Song Contest with a song arranged by Goran Bregović, the ex-Yugoslav musician from Sarajevo. Before the song “Moja štikla” [My Stiletto] had even been released, the Croatian (and Serbian) mass media had questioned its “Croatianness” in an escalating sequence of claims and counter-claims to authenticity. Its use of musical elements based on folk song and dance left it open to allegations that it had compromised folk music's authenticity; those elements’ regional associations (especially ganga and rera singing from Lika and Herzegovina) connoted spaces which had been marginalized as “eastern” or “Balkan” in comparison to privileged inland and coastal traditions; the involvement of Bregović (represented as Serbian throughout the Croatian mass media) enabled suggestions that the song presented “Serbian folklore” or belonged to the Serbian genre of “turbofolk”—and all this in the particularly sensitive context of a competition which was supposed to symbolize Croatia's full European membership.

This article examines the application of the concepts of minority rights, racism and multiculturalism to the case of Bulgaria. It explores how—if at all—these concepts have been accommodated within the domestic discourse on ethnic relations. Overall, it will be seen that Bulgaria has been slow to face up to its multi-ethnic reality: apart from the cessation of communist assimilation campaigns, hardly any positive minority rights were adopted after 1989. There were, however, clear changes in the discourse on ethnic relations, in particular regarding the notion of the “Bulgarian ethnic model,” which now figures prominently in the discourse of most political parties.

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.