Defining the Concepts of “Nation” and “National Minority” – Concurrent Debates and Perceptions
Defining the Concepts of “Nation” and “National Minority” – Concurrent Debates and Perceptions
Keywords: nation; national minority
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More...Keywords: West Balkans; security
More...Keywords: biometrics
More...Keywords: nationalism; Brubaker
Review of Rogers Brubaker, Margit Feischmidt, Jon Fox, Liana Grancea: Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
More...Keywords: Romania; Constitution
Review on Dr. Varga Attila – Dr. Veress Emõd: Román alkotmányjog. Csíkszereda: Státus Kiadó, 2007.
More...Keywords: Bulgaria; visa; EU accession
More...Keywords: migration; Serbia; Hungary
More...Keywords: csángó; Romania; Hungary
More...Keywords: Hungary; lifestyle; communism
More...Keywords: Hungary; ethnic profiling
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Keywords: Roma; Hungary; ethnic minority; security
Numerous questions concerning Roma in Europe have remained unanswered and it is still doubtful whether they will assimilate into majority society or demand special rights as a national or ethnic minority. The answer will vary country-by-country and by the attitudes and interests of different groups of Roma within one country. If a national legal system offers special minority rights and the free choice of identity, theoretically, the Roma will be granted two possibilities: assimilation or special minority rights. A state may provide special minority rights, or it may support various forms of affirmative action promoting the assimilation process. To achieve both forms of social integration, states must guarantee the equal enjoyment of human rights. In an era of universal human rights protection, however, this might seem like a minimalist objective. Documents adopted by international organizations concerning the Roma are frequently incoherent, making it difficult to deduce any common regulatory elements from them. One can claim that in general, these documents are characterized by a security policy approach and regularly recommend the prohibition of discrimination. Furthermore, while perhaps overly committed to the concept of the Roma-nation, they fail to take into consideration the possibility of alternative forms of positive distinction.
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Keywords: citizenship; identity; European Union; Constitutional Treaty
European citizenship has extended the reach of a number of citizenship rights beyond the nation-state, while the concept of a European identity is an effort at supporting the development of a collective identity for an emerging political community. The identity being developed is not the homogenous one of the nation-state, but one that relies on cultural diversity. Still, there seems to have been a recognition that the extension of ever-more rights to an ever-larger group of people is not enough to engender the loyalty hoped for. No political entity can function without legitimacy in the eyes of the individuals that belong to it; so that European citizenship needs to develop in both the area of rights and that of identity. An emerging European identity may help make European citizenship ’matter’, but cannot substitute for missing political allegiance.
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Keywords: area; identity; region; integration; Eastern Europe
The purpose of this article is to create concretely a new methodological terminology to analyze the emerging regions, or meso-areas; changing regions both in regional perceptions and in political and economic institutions. The main object to be interpreted by the new terminology is the post-communist meso-areas emerging in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, or the Slavic Eurasian Mega-area in our geographical definition. The mega-area is a changing unit, whose regions have shared the Soviet type of political and economic institutions, and an identity as well in its active and passive senses. The mega-area is, though the communist regime collapsed, still a unit combining meso-areas on the basis of institutional identity, and it likely remains a unit, though it may be looser and looser in the future.
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Keywords: Central and Southeastern Europe; Romania; Hungary; historiography; history textbooks; conflict; reconciliation
The collapse of the communist system in Central and Southeastern Europe has inaugurated sweeping economic and socio-political changes, marked by the conversion of state-economies into market economies, political liberalization and democratization, and integration into European and Euro-Atlantic security and political organizations. These changes have also affected the pattern of inter-state relations in these regions. Due to the strengthening of their political collaboration, countries in Central and Southeastern Europe are today linked by a dense network of inter-governmental agreements, which have worked for changing the nature of inter-state relations, by fostering co-operation rather than conflict. As a result of this twofold development, one can identify an underlying tension between the “re-nationalization” of history in Central and Southeast Europe and the process of European integration. The article argues for the need to re-conceptualize the history of Central and Southeastern Europe by employing a relational and transnational approach, as part of a more general effort to re-write continental history from an integrated perspective. Central and Southeastern Europe countries share a common historical past that goes far back in time to enduring medieval and early modern imperial legacies, such as the Byzantine, the Hungarian, the Habsburg, and the Ottoman. After 1945, they experienced similar strategies of communist modernization, and a forceful integration into a common military and economic block. Post-communist countries in these regions are now facing similar socio-political challenges. Despite these similarities, historians in the regions seem “absorbed” by their own national histories, and have relatively limited knowledge of — or openness toward — the historical experience of their neighbors. The process of regional integration and the European Union’s Eastern enlargement calls for an incorporation of the Central and Southeast European Studies into the framework of European studies (thus breaking with the tradition of Russian and East European Studies, which is a legacy of the bipolar Cold War division of Europe). Historians in Central and Southeastern Europe are now challenged to place a greater emphasis on the “shared” and “entangled” history of the peoples in these regions, to assess international influences and transfers, and to account for the process of European integration and its impact on the development of their regions.
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Keywords: identity; ethnicity; modernity; ethnic landscape
The concept of identity has cropped up in the past few decades, not only in philosophical, sociological and social psychological texts, strictly understood, but also in the fields of anthropology, history and political science. A number of paths stand open to the social scientist to avoid this disorder. She/he can exchange the expression ’identity’ for representation, life history, etc. or can hang on adjectives such as political, national, ethnic, gender, etc. to the concept, in order to better define the subject of study. The fixation, inference and enumeration of collective identities, or homogenization, is not so much an efficient tool of science (and thereby understanding) as of power (and thereby control). Science can finally return to the quantitative and qualitative analysis of social acts and power relations.
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Keywords: Vojvodina; region; national minority; Yugoslavia
From the time of its constitution as part of Serbia, the political and cultural debate over Vojvodina’s (Serbia and Montenegro) place on the discursive raised new issues. This situation continually generates intense conflicts focusing on questions of regional loyalty and national identity among intellectuals and politicians. Serbia is an unfinished nation-state, and issues related to the territorial frame of a nation-state appear whenever structural transformation becomes evident. It should not be forgotten that re-actualizing Vojvodina as a regional and multiethnic locus where different cultural, social, and political items are exchanged remains a possibility. In order to properly depict the unique character of Vojvodina, wide-ranging, everyday and economic relations between members of different ethnic groups should be mentioned. Comprehensive communication and well-coordinated realization of common interests illustrate habitual behavioral pattern-making it necessary to observe both elements of micro-history and the impact of accumulated social capital that underlay Vojvodina’s political history. The discursive construction of regionalists reifies regional identity and neglects: a) the tensions between the nationalizing and regionalizing processes, b) the claims of national minorities which are described as the continual inscription of equality into structural inequality between majority and minority.
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Keywords: discourse; Hungarians; Romania; parrhesia
Despite the general consensus that transition in Eastern Europe has reached its completion, it seems more difficult to prove on the level of everyday life. In the context of East European transitions, some of the major questions refer to the way this process, the events, and the decisions become interpreted in everyday life; do the values of the new political/economic system become internalized? What is the legitimacy of the political, economic, and social ideals of short-term plans proposed by the elite? Internalization and legitimacy depend only partly on the activity of opinion leaders. Coherent moral rules canonized in different systems became transformed in everyday life into a soft, malleable set of norms, which may be used according to circumstances. The situations, the actions, and the actors may take on different meanings according to the context of the action or of the preceding or ensuing discussion. Ambivalent discourse played, and continues to play an important role in two major spheres of everyday life. On the one hand, it creates and reproduces an acceptable and pragmatic image of oneself and the world. Ambivalent discourse has become constitutive of an acceptable, although “motley” personality, which becomes coherent not through abstract rationalizations, but in practical validity. On the other hand, it can seriously contribute to the management of everyday conflicts (including inter-ethnic conflict), as ambivalent discourse “liberates” us from the exigencies of sincerity, and of plain speech.
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Keywords: Hungary; Hungarian minority; Netherlands; Romania; Slovakia
Confronted with the nation-building program of a majority, minorities react in three different ways: assimilation; challenge; or migration. The Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia react in all three ways. Over the decades their number has decreased due to both assimilation and migration. Still their number is large enough and they live geographically concentrated enough and have a strong sense of solidarity directed towards preserving their culture and language that they challenge the nation-building programs of the Romanians and the Slovakians by their own Romanian-Hungarian and Slovakian-Hungarian nation-building programs. As the experiences of the Central and East European countries teach the Dutchs, oppression of collective identities can lead to assimilation, migration and the challenging of the majority, including the use of violence as well. It is important to understand the mechanism of nation building: the stronger the repression of the minority’s sense of its distinct identity, the more the result is a strengthening rather than a weakening of this awareness. At present, both the Dutch government as well as the kin-state governments are still acting more or less on the assumption that the immigrants will assimilate. It is debatable whether this assumption will prove to be correct for the children of the numerous and rather concentrated immigrant groups of a Turkish and Moroccan origin.
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Keywords: Tranyilvania; nationalism; economy; cooperatives; Austria-Hungary
While state-level economic nationalism is well known in historiography, the economic component of regional national movements received less attention. This paper presents the main features of the economic nationalism promoted by the national entities from Transylvania via their cooperative movements. After a short chronological presentation, the paper focuses on features common or mutually adopted by Saxons, Romanians and Hungarians from Transylvania before World War I. The paper illustrates conscious nation building strategies articulated in political manifestos and realized in entrepreneurial statutes and economic programs. While they reassured the collaboration of institutions inside a national group, they were also serving to prevent the transgression of ethnic borders. The main functions were to be autonomous and national economy was to be coterminous with the boundaries of the national entity. Since national and political conflicts tended to overlap economic concurrence, economy, commodities and finances were voluntarily ethicized. Symbolic economic nationalism became inherent with institutionalized nation building.
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Keywords: Ukraine; nationalism; national movement
The Ukrainian national movement was born from the defeat of the Ukrainian revolution in 1917–1921 and the national-liberation fight following World War I. This movement was born out of the pursuit for new political activity among younger generations The OUN was founded in Vienna, but the organization was really formed in Czechoslovakia among Ukrainian (military student) émigrés. This organization could be rooted and develop wherever Ukrainian indigenous (Romania, Czechoslovakia) lived, or among emigrated populations (USA, Canada, South-America, Germany, France, etc,). It is worth underlining that OUN, in the territory of the Soviet Union did not take shape, due to the totalitarian and repression character of the Soviet state. It is difficult even to estimate the OUN’s number in Poland during the interwar period.
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