The principle of national self-determination has been haunting the world since the French Revolution. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union alone 20 new “nation-states” were created in the 1990s—200 years after the French Revolution. They were all established on the basis of the principle of national self-determination. There may be no other term in modern political discourse which is used with more emotion and passion. Recent history has known many wars fueled by conflicting interpretations of self-determination. Woodrow Wilson thought that implementation of the principle of self-determination would lead to a better world, a world without wars and “safe for democracy.” His secretary of state, Robert Lansing, had doubts. He suspected the concept of self-determination to be “loaded with dynamite” and capable of causing even more bloodshed because it “will raise hopes which can never be realized.”

On 2 August 1919 in the Upper Adriatic port city of Trieste (as it was called in Italian) or Trst (as it was referred to in Slavic languages), nationalist youths harassed socialist children returning from a group outing. The incident escalated into a riot. Police opened fire, and one nationalist was killed. On 12 July 1920, a nationalist mob incited by Fascists looted and burned Narodni Dom, the Slovene cultural center. The carabinieri, Italy's state police, collaborated in the attack, or at the very least stood by and watched as the building was torched using gasoline obtained from the nearby barracks. The next day, Italian nationalist demonstrators torched the Croatian-managed Adriatic Bank. Police at the scene stood on the sidelines and watched the bank burn. In the autumn of 1920, Fascist squads attacked a funeral procession mourning a socialist worker killed in a general strike. The socialists erected barricades in the streets of the San Giacomo quarter, a working class neighborhood. Police leveled the undefended barricades and intimidated the quarter's residents during a house-to-house search. In 1921, a firebomb exploded in the offices of Il Lavoratore, the local socialist newspaper. Police watched the premises burn. In all five instances, the forces of public security in Trieste stood by, unable or unwilling to stem violence and restore order in the city newly annexed to Italy from the Habsburg empire. The Italian liberal authorities officially disavowed mistreatment of ethnic minorities and members of the political opposition, but they found themselves unable to deal effectively with the clash among ethnic groups and political parties precipitated by the transfer of the territory to Italian sovereignty. They sympathized with those adopting extra-legal and violent strategies that they perceived as useful to further state political agendas and promote assimilation, or at least quiescence, of the border population.

Ethnic conflict is not—because there are no ethnic groups in conflict. This is the main conclusion of a comparison of so-called “ethnic conflicts” in the Balkans and in colonial India. A comparison of Muslim nation building in these two regions provides several valuable insights that go far beyond the specific cases. Thus far, there have been many hints in the literature on similarities between Bosnia and Pakistan or the Balkans and the Indian subcontinent as a whole. But there have been no systematic comparisons, though many parallels emerge when we look more closely.

In 1990 a Mordvin scholar released an alarming forecast about the fate awaiting his people: provided that those adverse demographic trends that had established themselves over the course of the twentieth century continued, the last member of his million-strong nation would disappear by the year 2135. This statement was not the only one of its kind. During the final years of Soviet rule, the recently realized opportunity to speak out about the concerns of the non-Russian groups was being utilized speedily. Journalistic and scholarly reports on the various problems of Russia's minority groups, often painted in highly dramatic language, became common in both regional and central publications.

With these words, the Romanian–Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian expresses within his private diary some of the darkest moments of a World War II “transfigured” Romania, populated as they are by the gothic characters of legionaries, Nazis, and antisemitism. His death soon followed in 1945, when Romania was at the threshold of fascism and communism. However, with the discovery and the subsequent publishing of Sebastian's diary in 1996, and following 50 years of communist mystification of the Jewish Holocaust, the entire chaotic war atmosphere with the fascist affections of the Romanian intellectual elite was once again brought to light with all the flavor and scent of the dark past. In this entry from Sebastian's diary he speaks of his friend, Eugen Ionescu who, born of a French-related mother and a Romanian father, was living in Bucharest at that time. He would later become known to the world as Eugène Ionesco, the famous French playwright and author of the well-known plays The Bald Soprano and The Rhinoceros. The above quote from Sebastian's journal, predating the international fame of Ionesco, but already marking the end of Sebastian's career under fascism, remains a traumatizing testimony of the Jewish Kafkian torment as “guilt,” a deeply claustrophobic identity that many Eastern European Jewish intellectuals have learned to internalize. Beyond this symbolism, the publishing of Sebastian's diary in Romania unintentionally challenged an existent post-communist tendency of legitimizing inter-war fascist personalities within the framework of a general lack of knowledge about the Jewish Holocaust in both the communist and post-communist periods.

Three costly revolutions began in Poland between spring 1944 and summer 1946. The first two were primarily state-sponsored political and socioeconomic revolutions initiated by a minority comprising the Moscow-appointed and -controlled Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, P.P.R.) and their allies. Although they dominated the commanding heights of regional and national politics and administration, the P.P.R. and its supporters faced fierce opposition and waged these revolutions with only partial success, relying heavily on fraud and force. These ongoing state-sponsored transformations established an uneven hold on Polish society and depended upon the police power of the new Polish state and, ultimately, the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union was no longer willing to support its satellites in Eastern Europe by force of arms and the Polish people dismantled their regime's coercive power, much of the laboriously developed political and socioeconomic superstructure of the People's Republic of Poland collapsed.

In “Our Guests and Ourselves,” an article written in 1924 for the Prague daily newspaper Lidové noviny, Czech playwright and novelist Karel clarified for his readers the failings in Czech habits of sociability, and the unfortunate consequences of those habits for the new Czechoslovak nation. Each nationality in Prague, and each political grouping within the nationalities, tended to socialize in different clubs and cafes. The Czechs preferred to socialize only with each other, complained , and foreigners visiting Prague tended to socialize with Germans. When Czechs set themselves the task of entertaining visiting foreigners, they did so in a manner overly officious and overtly “national”: that is, Czechs dragged foreigners around from function to banquet, forcing them to listen endlessly to official pronouncements of the glories of the long-overlooked Czech nation. As yet, wrote, Prague lacked a single genuinely neutral club or grouping open to all, and comfortable for all, particularly foreigners, whom the Czechs needed badly to impress. In contrast, told his readers, he himself had just visited the kind of club the Czechs should create: the “Penklub”, in London. In the International Pen Club's London chapter, writers of different nationalities were able to enjoy one another's company, and perhaps develop a greater understanding for other countries' perspectives. The club's existence demonstrated that even England, one of the historical great powers of Europe, put great weight on creating international ties. reminded his readers that “we here have more, and more urgent, reasons for needing such [clubs].” Those “more urgent” reasons for changing Czech habits were first and foremost political reasons, in an age when sociability was politicized—and, as 's comments make clear, nationalized.

Scholars had already suggested the relationship of some Finno-Ugrian languages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the linguistic affinity of the Finno-Ugrian languages was proven only at the end of the eighteenth century by two Hungarian pioneers of comparative linguistics, János Sajnovics and Sámuel Gyarmathi. Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739-1804), professor of rhetoric and a great humanist, brought their ideas to Finland. He was strongly influenced by August Ludwig Schlözer, author of a comprehensive and critical survey of the history of the Finno-Ugrian peoples. Having studied Sajnovics' work in Göttingen, Porthan published an extensive account of it in a Finnish newspaper in 1779, demolishing previous ideas about the kinship between Finnish and Hebrew. Porthan urged Finnish scholars to investigate the Finno-Ugrian languages of Russia, of which very little was then known (some lists of words and short grammars were all that was available).

This article analyzes the ideas of Adolf Fischhof (1816–93) on the nationalities question in the Habsburg Monarchy. Throughout his career Fischhof argued that the survival of the multiethnic Habsburg polity required the strengthening of each nationality's separate consciousness as an ethno-cultural unit. In terms of the reform plan he espoused, he was perhaps more supportive of the rights of the non-German peoples of Austria than any other German liberal politician of the post-1848 era. Nevertheless, Fischhof's rationale for proposing such reforms, namely that they would lead the Monarchy's Slavs to reject the notion of ethnic kinship with Russia and instead join the civilized, European (read: German) side in its inevitable clash with barbarous Muscovite tyranny, revealed a clear belief in the supremacy of German Kultur and in a German-centered mission for the Austrian state.

The Archive of the Town Curator of Monuments in the Polish city Poznań contains material about streets, monuments, Old Town Square, the cathedral, and other valuable constructions there. A folder labeled Nowy Ratusz (New Town Hall) attracted my attention, because I knew nothing about such a building. The folder contained photographs of a large neo-Gothic building. It looked like a typical Prussian public building, similar to hundreds of other postal, school, and government offices throughout the Prussian/German state. But what of this building? Had it been another casualty of the Second World War? The postwar images showed, that although seriously damaged, the building still stood in the ruins of the Old Town Square.

Both Yugoslav wars and Yugoslav basketball were conspicuous in Western media in the 1990s. While CNN transmitted scenes of horror from battlefields of Bosnia and Kosovo, several dozen professional athletes of Yugoslav background could be seen in action on U. S. sport channels. Yugoslavs, by far the most numerous among foreign players in the strongest basketball league in the world—the American professional basketball league (NBA)—sparked the audience's curiosity about their background and the peculiar Yugoslav style of basketball. The literature concerning the Yugoslav crisis and Balkan wars noted sporadic outbursts of ethnic hatred in sport arenas, but did not provide any detailed information on the otherwise important role of sport in Yugoslav history and society. Not even highly competent volumes such as Beyond Yugoslavia, which highlighted the country's culture, arts, religion, economy, and military, paid attention to what Yugoslavs called “the most important secondary issue in the world”—sport. Yet sport reveals not merely the pastimes of the Yugoslav peoples, but also the varieties of nationalism in the former Yugoslavia, including probably the most neglected of all local nationalisms: the official communist-era patriotic ideology of interethnic “brotherhood and unity.” The goal of this article is to highlight this type of nationalism manifested via state-directed sport using as a case study the most successful basketball program outside the United States.

National identity is everywhere constructed through a process of negotiation with other categories of identity—local, regional, class, confessional, and gender. In borderlands, however, there is another element in this negotiation process—the sharing of public space with another national group, an element that further complicates identity formation. Here categories can change and/or function differently than in the interior of a country. In many respects, the construction of Germanness in the province of Poznania [German: Posen; Polish: Poznań] proceeded along similar lines as in the rest of the German Empire. German nationalists, both in the eastern provinces and in the rest of the Reich, produced publications and organized lectures about and celebrations of German history and German culture in an effort to mobilize national loyalties in support of policies that would consolidate Germandom both within and without. However, the presence of a Polish challenge in Poznania—the defining problem of the province—complicated constructions of German national identity.

The collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed a number of violent, usually secessionist ethnic conflicts. These conflicts were typically intensified (or “escalated”) by foreign intervention. Although there is a great deal of consensus about the fundamental forces driving these conflicts and their escalation, there remain considerable theoretical differences about how to understand these factors and assess their relative importance. These differences mirror debates in the broader literature on national identity and its consequences. This article seeks to clarify these debates by elucidating some theoretical distinctions among the factors taken to contribute to the outbreak and escalation of violent ethnic conflicts. These distinctions are then applied to post-Soviet conflicts in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan. The case studies bear out the relevance of the theoretical distinctions, but also reveal the difficulty of applying them unambiguously in any given case. These examples form the basis for some concluding suggestions. These suggestions aim to maximize the clarity with which theoretically distinct causal factors are empirically distinguished for purposes of testing hypotheses.

During the first years of the Bulgarian transition to democracy, all indicators seemed to point towards an impending explosion of interethnic hatred. Located at the crossroads of Islam and Christianity, this predominantly Orthodox country harbors a 13.1% strong Muslim minority, which was subjected to forcible assimilation under communist rule. The assimilation policy reached a climax in 1984–1985, when around 800,000 Bulgarian Turks were forced to renounce their Turkish-Arabic names in favor of Slavic patronyms within the framework of the so-called “Revival Process,” a campaign that aimed at precipitating the unification of the Bulgarian nation. Far from achieving the intended result, the authorities' move not only fostered a reassertion of distinct ethnic and religious identification among the Turks, but also succeeded in durably upsetting intercommunitarian relationships. Significantly, the Communist Party's announcement on 29 December 1989 that it would restore Muslim rights met with sharp resistance in mixed areas, where large-scale Bulgarian protests rapidly gathered momentum. Against this background, in 1990–1991, few analysts would have predicted that Bulgaria could avoid religious conflict, especially as the country was faced with growing regional instability and a belated shift to a market economy—two conditions often said to be conducive to the exacerbation of ethnic tensions.

The northwestern flank of the Slavic expanse of settlement, the territory of today's Russian Karelia, constitutes an age-old site of Slavic-Baltic-Finnic contact. The Karelians and Vepsians, two Finno-Ugrian groups, are a part of the indigenous population of Karelia. The settlements of the former are found mainly in the western half of the present-day Karelian Republic. The Vepsians live on the southwestern coastal strip of Lake Onega, south of the capital of the republic, Petrozavodsk. Vepsian settlements are also found outside Karelia, in Vologda and Leningrad provinces. For several centuries, the Russians have formed a majority of the inhabitants both near Lake Onega and on the west coast of the White Sea. In contrast to the Karelians, Vepsians and Russians, Finns can be considered newcomers to Karelia.

After the collapse of communism in Russia, which is the home of more than 14 million Muslims, there has been an Islamic revival that has been part of the process of political and intellectual liberalization of society. The major Islamic enclaves of the Russian Federation are located in the Volga-Urals, the North Caucasus, and central Russia. Russian Muslims are concentrated in the eight autonomous republics of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Adyghea, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Chechnya. Most Muslims belong to the Hanafi madhhab (the juridical school) of Sunni Islam, although Dagestani and Chechen Muslims adhere to the Shafii madhhab of Sunni Islam. There is also a small Shia community in southern Dagestan. A large number of Dagestanis, as well as Chechens and Ingushes, profess Sufism—a mystical form of Islam, which is also known as parallel Islam.

The administrative division of late imperial Russia made few concessions to minority populations, who often found themselves divided among several provinces. The Bolshevik ascendancy to power changed the situation; Vladimir Lenin's “federal compromise” marked a breakthrough from the tsarist unitary practice to a system of governance which, at least on paper, made allowance for the ethnocultural diversity of the population. The chief designers of the Bolshevik nationality policy believed that a federal arrangement would offer a framework for controlling undesirable national sentiments during the transitional stage when class identities would gradually replace ethnic attachments. However, it turned out that for non-Russian groups the national-territorial autonomous units were not simply empty containers, free of cultural and emotional meaning, in which their political socialization would occur. These units became an integral part of their national identity; ethnicity obtained “legal” territorial roots and the various territorial units began to function as vessels of ethnic consciousness.

In the first days of August 1914, as enthusiastic crowds hailing the German declaration of war on Russia and France swarmed in front of the imperial residence in Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II famously declared that he no longer knew political parties, only Germans. The remark was intended to be rhetorically inclusive, of course, to signal the surmounting not only of party-political divisions but also of the empire's chronic class, confessional, and regional tensions. But for one of the empire's most marginalized groups of subjects—those millions who did not consider themselves of German descent and who spoke Polish rather than German as a native language—the Kaiser's invocation of a common German identity was more effective in underlining the limits rather than the promise of civic solidarity. Unlike the Habsburg Monarchy or (to a lesser extent) the Czarist Empire, where Polish nationalists could hope to reconcile commitment to their national cause with faithfulness to an imperial dynasty or even a diffuse sense of patriotism to a multinational state, the Hohenzollern monarchy had, over the previous half-century, become virtually synonymous with hostility to all things Polish. Upholding the Prussian monarchy, it seemed, was functionally inseparable from promoting a culturally homogenized German nation-state.

As Ukraine approaches its tenth year of independence, it seems an appropriate moment to ask what type of nation it has become. The process by which Ukrainians determine the boundaries and characteristics of their national identity is dynamic, and has been the source of debate at many levels of Ukrainian society. The education system can illustrate several aspects of this process of identity formation: what the dominant elite choose to teach to the next generation about nation and citizenship, whether that material is accepted or transformed in its presentation to pupils, and to what extent the pupils internalize what they have been taught. This article begins to analyze the historical narrative and underlying values that together help to define a collective understanding of “nation” through a discussion of the education system in Ukraine. In particular, it focuses on the textbook used for the introductory Ukrainian history course as an example of the values and narrative fostered by the Ministry of Education. Although the analysis focuses on a single textbook, the article also attempts to place the arguments in a broader perspective by paying attention to the context within which the textbook curriculum is created and implemented and by discussing several factors that may affect its presentation to and reception by pupils.