In the fall of 1918, after over four years of war, the cohesion of Austria-Hungary collapsed. In the aftermath of the Great War, Burgenland (Western Hungary) was part of a pattern of complex territorial issues, though it was actually the smallest disputed territory between Hungary and her successor states. The region became a disputed land after the Allied Supreme Council recommended the transfer of most of it to Austria. The internal crisis in Budapest, the Habsburg restoration attempts and the activities of many militia on the ground led to an extremely dangerous situation. Diplomatic and direct military involvement of the Powers eventually resolved the issue with an agreement providing for a plebiscite on the fate of Sopron and the other smaller towns of the region. At least until 1921 Western Hungary represented an element of destabilization in Europe, while its partition was a significant event in the evolution of relations between the two new states of Hungary and Austria, and a testing ground for European diplomacy. The purpose of this article is to highlight the role of Italy in these complex events and to elucidate the contribution of its military in the formulation of clearer political strategy.

This article synthesizes Wimmer's and Brubaker's processual approach to analyzing ethnic groups with Jenkins and Bentley's practice-based theories of ethnicity to explain the role played by socio-emotional experiences and practical concerns in Carpatho-Rusyns, both mobilizing as an ethnic group as well as resisting such mobilization. Data were gathered from interviews and participant observation during the eight months of fieldwork in 10 different villages, towns, and cities in the Prešov region of Slovakia and the Zakarpattia oblast of Ukraine. Carpatho-Rusyns live in an area where borders have changed frequently and where religions, states, and political movements have encouraged the inhabitants' assimilation to a new or larger group. Rusyns tend to describe ethnicity as instrumentalist theorists do, that is, something largely produced as a result of struggles over territory, resources, and political power. Nevertheless, they evince a profound emotional connection to their language, land, and spirituality. This emotional connection manifests itself among “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs” as well as among the general population, but only motivates explicit political organization among the former.

This article analyzes how the Poles and Jews who disappeared from the western Ukrainian city of L'viv as a result of the Second World War are remembered in the city today. It examines a range of commemorative practices, from monuments and museums to themed cafes and literature, and analyzes how these practices interact to produce competing mnemonic narratives. In this respect, the article argues for an understanding of the city as a complex text consisting of a diverse range of mutually interdependent mnemonic media produced by a range of actors. The article focuses in particular on the ways in which Ukrainian nationalist narratives interact with the memory of the city's “lost others.” The article also seeks to understand L'viv‘s memory culture through comparison with a range of Polish cities that have faced similar problems with commemorating vanished communities, but have witnessed a deeper recognition of these communities than has been the case in L'viv. The article proposes reasons for the divergences between the memory cultures of L'viv and that found in Polish cities, and attempts to outline the gradual processes by which L'viv‘s Polish and Jewish pasts might become more widely integrated into the city's memory culture.

Much has been made over the past few years of China'vs ambitions of regaining control of its irredentist claims in the East and South China Seas. While some of this speculation focuses on the massive amounts of money the People's Republic of China (PRC) has funneled into its naval modernization program, other analysts are more interested in the drivers behind the increasingly popular sentiment that the country must “reclaim” its lost territories. The Chinese Communist Party can ill afford to ignore the voice of an already disenchanted population if it hopes to stay in power, particularly in regard to matters of national pride. As a result, in dealing with China's irredentist claims, nationalism in particular can be a powerful ideological factor in shaping the nation's foreign policies. This is especially apparent in the case of irredentism, where nationalism can often override diplomatic and strategic imperatives. This paper addresses the question of how does the nationalist discourse vary between two territorial disputes, the East and South China Seas. It uses discourse analysis to examine developing trends among online social media and news sites. This in turn allows for the construction of a framework of how nationalism develops among both elite and grassroots audiences.

The article analyzes the material or objectified reproduction of the Basque demos since democracy was established in Spain in 1980. Spain holds within its territory diverse regions and political communities and the Basque case is a highly illustrative example of how the development of regional state institutions is fundamental for the reproduction of distinct democratic demoi not merely in their political but also socio-economic dimension. This paper argues that, in our current European context, political distinctions cannot become effectively objectified and instituted power structures without state institutions being able to uphold a differentiated system of stratification.

The situation of Hindus and Sikhs as a persecuted minority is a little-studied topic in literature dealing with ethno-sectarian conflict in Afghanistan. Hindu and Sikh communities’ history and role in Afghanistan's development are examined through a structural, political, socioeconomic, and perceptual analysis of the minority populations since the country gained its independence in 1919. It traces a timeline of their evolving status after the breakdown of state structure and the ensuing civil conflicts and targeted persecution in the 1990s that led to their mass exodus out of the country. A combination of structural failure and rising Islamic fundamentalist ideology in the post-Soviet era led to a war of ethnic cleansing as fundamentalists suffered a crisis of legitimation and resorted to violence as a means to establish their authority. Hindus and Sikhs found themselves in an uphill battle to preserve their culture and religious traditions in a hostile political environment in the post-Taliban period. The international community and Kabul failed in their moral obligation to protect and defend the rights of minorities and oppressed communities.

This paper argues that current Western-backed approaches to conflict resolution in Kosovo have failed to alter Serbia's policy toward the region and have contributed to the exacerbation of political tensions between Belgrade and Brussels, while deepening ethnic cleavages between Serb and Albanian communities. While there is no possibility of Kosovo returning to Serbia's control, there is an equal unlikelihood that Serbian-populated regions of Kosovo, especially the north, will submit to Pristina's authority. Most importantly, there is little hope that Kosovo can gain full international recognition and membership in international organizations without a compromise settlement with Serbia. While territorial partition has long been a suggested option, I conclude that the best possible solution for Kosovo, given the positions of all parties involved, is a process of significant decentralization beyond the internationally supported measures in the Ahtisaari Plan. A model of consociational power sharing is one in which Serbian and Albanian municipalities are granted high levels of autonomy similar to arrangements made for Bosnia. While this solution may not be ideal and further weakens central authority, I argue that consociationalism reduces the problems of ethnic conflict, encourages local self-government, and preserves the overall territorial integrity of Kosovo.

The establishment of the Nemzeti Casino (National Casino) in Pest helped establish civil society in nineteenth-century Hungary. Count István Széchenyi, hoping to modernize Hungary on the English model, established the casino in 1827 as a public forum for the Hungarian nobility. By transcending caste divisions between nobles and bourgeois elites, Széchenyi's casino served as an unofficial parliament and stock exchange, and generally helped cultivate Hungarian patriotism. The Pest Casino inspired a nation-wide trend for casinos, which in turn formed a civil society in opposition to Habsburg absolutism. Yet when the casino movement spread to Hungary's minority nationalities, Jews, Slovaks, Romanians, and particularly Croats, the casino also contributed to national divisions in Hungary's ethnically diverse population that affected the course of the 1848 Revolution.

Until 1999, Kosovo was a little-known province of Serbia. NATO's intervention, however, changed this. Suddenly, everyone was talking about Kosovo and the plight of the Kosovo Albanians. Today, Kosovo is no longer a major talking point; few authors are now writing about post-independence Kosovo and the many challenges that confront the young state. Particularly striking is the relative absence of scholarly writings that discuss the Gordian knot of northern Kosovo. Seeking to rectify this neglect, this article has three core aims: to provide new empirical insights into the situation on the ground in northern Kosovo, to explore Serb and Albanian viewpoints regarding the status of the north (and in particular to examine Serb fears and concerns) and to discuss possible solutions. It argues that granting the north a special, autonomous status within Kosovo is the ultimate way to resolve the “northern problem,” and indeed this now seems the most likely solution following the recent conclusion of the First Agreement on Principles Governing the Normalization of Relations. This research is based on five weeks of fieldwork in Kosovo in July and August 2012. During this time, the author conducted 56 semi-structured interviews, 29 of which took place in northern Kosovo.

In this article I present a decade-long affair over the erection of the Monument in Belgrade to those killed in the wars of the 1990s where the official Serbian policy was to manage its contested past through cover ups and cultural reframing rather than public acknowledgement. I demonstrate here that, though the open competitions to erect a monument dedicated to the fallen of the wars of the 1990s were an opportunity to negotiate different mnemonic agendas, the ruling political elite, as the dominant actor, promoted Serbian victimhood as it meant to bridge gaps in the opposing domestic and international demands. I suggest here that the mnemonic battle in present-day Serbia proves to be an exemplary case of how a post-conflict nation state mediates its contested past when caught in the gap between the domestic demands and those of international relations.

This article is a review of the development of the Bukharan Jewish community organization. It describes the transformations it has undergone in the twentieth century and examines the changes that Bukharan Jews underwent from demographic, social, and organizational perspectives, and the far-reaching processes that have occurred later in community organizations, particularly in light of the establishment of the World Congress of Bukharan Jewry in 2000. Traditionally, when dealing with Jewish communities the term “diaspora” refers to different Jewish communities scattered away from the “promised land” (Diatlov 1999). Thus, the terminology of: “Jewish immigration” traditionally is considered as their return. In this article, which focuses on Bukharan Jews, I use “diaspora” to describe different Bukharan communities created due to immigration to the land of Israel and to other destinations from the cradle of Central Asia.

Using results from a 2010 survey conducted in the Republic of Buryatia, this paper compares the responses of Russians and Buryats on questions of religious practice and belief, as well as the role of religion and religious organizations in the political sphere of contemporary Russia. Buryats more commonly identify with a religion and more frequently attend religious services in comparison to Russians living in the republic. There is greater consonance between the two groups on the public role of religion, with both Russians and Buryats generally supportive of the recent extension of religious education into schools and the creation of national holidays for all traditional religions, among other issues.

Each of the post-Soviet Central Asian states inherited both inefficient collectivized agricultural systems and an understanding of the nation rooted in categories defined by Soviet nationality policy. Despite the importance placed on territorial homelands in many contemporary understandings of nationalism, the divergent formal responses to these dual Soviet legacies have generally been studied in isolation from one another. However, there are conceptual reasons to expect more overlap in these responses than generally assumed; in this paper, we engage in a focused comparison of three post-Soviet Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) in order to investigate how nationalizing policies and discourse, land distribution, and ethnic tensions interact with each other over time. We reveal that the nationalizing discourses of the three states – despite promoting the titular groups vis-à-vis other groups – have had limited influence on the actual processes of land distribution. Furthermore, the Kyrgyzstani case challenges the assumption that the effect flows unidirectionally from nationalizing policies and discourse to land reform implementation; in this case, there is evidence that the disruption caused by farm reorganization generated grievances which were then articulated by some nationalistic political elites.

The article examines the development of the Yugoslav state's policy of transnational political engagement of Yugoslav citizens on temporary work in the FR Germany during the late 1960s and 1970s. This politicization of labor migrations was shaped by the interplay of the internal turmoil in the Yugoslav federation and the conditions peculiar to West Germany of the time. The change of the state's perception of external migrations is being examined through the extension of the agitation apparatus of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia onto the territory of the FR Germany and the mobilization of economic emigrants against the “hostile” political emigrants residing in that country. The main goal of these measures was to maintain the emigrants' transnational links to their homeland and ensure that their political standing was kept in line with the official Yugoslav ideological tenets until the time of the prospective return migration cycle. The extraterritorial character of these measures, coupled with the specific position of Yugoslavia within the Cold War diplomacy, led to a peculiar ideological interplay and shifting web of cooperation and confrontation between various actors.