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This article investigates how some prominent and less known Albanian activists perceived their Southern Slav neighbors at the turn of the twentieth century. The research explores the way in which the spread of nationalism conditioned the positioning of Albanians and Slavs in the process of identity construction and how such identities mirrored their reciprocal political claims. Recent scholarship has often emphasized that the affirmation of national ideas led to the fragmentation of Balkan communities by turning Albanian-speaking populations and their Slavic-speaking neighbors into “others.” My analysis expands this assertion by elaborating a theoretical approach that allows us to explore the impact of nationalism on the post-1878 Balkan context from a more dynamic point of view. National discourses did not only lay the foundation for a differentiation between the Balkan communities, but were also tools for promoting joint political activism. National activists often felt it necessary to cooperate in order to deal with the challenges posed by the surrounding environment, which was common to both Albanians and Slavs. Various contingent circumstances led Albanian activists to project long-term forms of coexistence with their neighbors, and to imagine forms of political, cultural, and social synthesis with the Slavs.
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This article examines how the Maidan protests of 2013–2014 were a space for the collision of conflicting narratives on what Ukraine is and what it should be, and how past, present, and future were used to imagine contemporary Ukraine. Making use of speech acts by local and international actors and politicians on the Ukraine crisis, historical narratives on Ukraine, Maidan protest slogans, and field work data gathered throughout 2013–2016 in Ukraine, we identify four meta-narratives that enable us to unravel such an imagining: (1) Ukraine as a liminal category between East and West; (2) Ukraine as Russia, Ukraine as non-Russia; (3) Ukraine as Europe, Ukraine as non-Europe; and (4) Ukraine as Ukraine. We trace and contextualize these narratives in four separate sections. Positing all narratives in a discursive battleground and problematizing them as a struggle between stories, the article demonstrates that the imagining of contemporary Ukraine is deeply conditioned by the conflict between all four narratives. Ukraine is simultaneously all and none of them.
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The enlargement of 2004 and 2007 significantly transformed the European Union in political, economic, and social terms. It also challenged the collective identities of Western Europeans as well as each of the newcomers. However, for new members, the prospect of joining a supranational political entity posed a threat to their newly established or regained sovereignty and nationhood. The integration triggered a process of redefinition of both their self-perception and the perception of Europe as a common project. The article offers a case study of how the Polish Members of the European Parliament discursively (re)construct national and European identities and how these constructions relate to each other. The analysis reveals three main visions of the European identity that are voiced by the Polish representation and corresponding visions of national identity. By focusing on the supranational level of the European Parliament and contextualising the analysed constructions with references to national debates, the study is able to nuance the existing theoretical accounts of European and national identities.
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Partly as a result of compartmentalized academic specializations and history teaching, in accounts of the global upheavals of 1968, Native Americans are either not mentioned, or at best are tagged on as an afterthought. “Was there a Native American 1968?” is the central question this article aims to answer. Native American activism in the 1960s was no less flashy, dramatic or confrontational than the protests by the era’s other struggles—it is simply overshadowed by later actions of the movement. Using approaches from Transnational American Studies and the history of social movements, this article argues that American Indians had a “long 1968” that originated in Native America’s responses to the US government’s Termination policy in the 1950s, and stretched from their ‘training’ period in the 1960s, through their dramatic protests from the late 1960s through the 1970s, all the way to their participation at the United Nations from 1977 through the rest of the Cold War. While their radicalism and protest strategies made Native American activism a part of the US domestic social movements of the long 1960s, the nature of American Indian sovereignty rights and transnationalism place the Native American long 1968 on the rights spectrum further away from civil rights, and closer to a national liberation struggle—which links American Indian activism to the decolonization movements of the Cold War.
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This article focuses on one of the factors that is conducive to the rise of the far right in current European societies: the articulation of phobic discourses. Far-right leadership has engaged in a systematic manipulation of phobias that lie in fears, anxieties, and discomfort towards the unknown and unfamiliar, omnipresent in our globalised world. This article investigates a set of phobic discourses articulated by the leader of the farright Bulgarian political party ATAKA, Volen Siderov, but not uncommon in other far-right parties. More specifically, it explores ethnophobia, implying that the nation is withering away and that the country is being transformed into a mere colony, focusing on the topoi of “treachery and disaster” and “threatened identity.” It then examines Islamophobia, encapsulating a fear of Islam and a fear of a threat from within, that is, the Muslim minority. Within this framework, the topoi of “perpetual cultural confrontation with Islam” and “religious terrorism” are analyzed. Last, it analyzes Romaphobia, denoting fear towards the marginalised group of Roma, and within this framework, the topoi of the “demographic explosion of Roma” and the “bad human capital.” Such phobic discourses are emphasised by the far right for electoral benefit.
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The article presents the perceptions of global and internal developmental hierarchies in Romania. According to our empirical results, the Western-centred developmental paradigm has deeply penetrated the worldviews of ordinary people in Romania. As a consequence, national self-perceptions, respectively, constructions of internal regional and ethnic differences in Romania, are powerfully shaped by the idea of East–West developmental hierarchies. Melegh introduced the concept of an “East–West slope” to denote a discursive construction used since the eighteenth century. This construction suggests that there is a gradual decline of development (or “civilization”) as one moves from the West (North West) toward the East (South East). The author argues that this framework not only defines how Romanians position themselves in the global developmental hierarchy but also how they define their internal (regional and ethnic) hierarchies. The article also discusses Todorova’s concept of Balkanism. This interpretive framework not only defines the perceptions of external observers but (following a process of cultural penetration) may also shape the self-perceptions of those involved. This article argues that Romanians have succeeded in avoiding—at least partially—the most severe consequence of the “Balkanizing gaze,” which is a constant sense of inferiority. It is also important, however, that this Balkanizing gaze can be reproduced at a national/local level and (in interrelation with other types of developmental discourses) can organize internal hierarchies.
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Focusing on three contemporary grassroots initiatives of preserving Jewish heritage and commemorating Jews in Belarus, namely, the Jewish Museum in Minsk, Ada Raǐchonak’s private museum of regional heritage in Hermanovichi, and the initiative of erecting the monument of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in Hlybokae, the present article discusses how local efforts to commemorate Jews and preserve Jewish heritage tap into the culture of political dissent, Belarus’s international relations, and the larger project of redefining the Belarusian national identity. Looking at the way these memorial interventions frame Jewish legacy within a Belarusian national narrative, the article concentrates in particular on the institution of the public historian and the small, informal social networks used to operate under a repressive regime. Incorporating the multicultural legacy of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth into the canon of Belarusian national heritage and recognizing the contribution of ethnic minorities to the cultural landscape of Belarus, new memory projects devoted to Jewish history in Belarus mark a caesura in the country’s engagement with its ethnic Others and are also highly political. While the effort of filling in the gaps in national historiography and celebrating the cultural diversity of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania overlaps in significant ways with the agenda of the anti-Lukashenka opposition, Jewish heritage in Belarus also resonates with the state authorities, who seek to instrumentalize it for their own vision of national unity.
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This article argues that positive representations of the German minority in post-1989 Romania, discernible in specific memory and identity discourses, are linked to an internalized self-orientalizing view of Romanianness and to a symbolic wish to “belong to Europe,” present in Romanian society and displayed on the Romanian political scene. In other words, it maintains that a phenomenon describable as “philo-Germanism without Germans” in contemporary Romania is tightly connected with the production and reproduction of symbolic geographies whose aim is to insert Romania into the “civilized” Western/European world.
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The historical process has posed a challenging question about Bosnia's national identity today. It is quite obvious that since the end of the 19th century, the historical course of a nation has been reduced to a "religious group" in which it is possible to recognize regression and unconscious existence. This represents a trace of the Ottoman period of hegemony in Bosnia, when the identity of the people was determined by religious affiliation. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in Bosnia, left Bosniaks solely perceived and defined as Muslims. What looks like naivety and powerlessness during the 20th century, should in fact be seen as ignorance of, and non-reflexivity on, one's own existence. In the Yugoslav system, they were designated as Muslims - with the capital letter M. At the time, it was announced as the solution to the national question! The clash of unfinished ethnic-religious constructions of Bosniak identity and the process of globalization in the first decades of the 21st century, led to paradoxical and somewhat tragic self-experiences and attempts to develop national consciousness, based on a religious matrix that is the foundation of conservative consciousness. This moves the whole of human destinies in the wrong direction once again, and the importance of the national or civic identity and political philosophy of statism are undermined and blurred by non-reflexive voluntarism. It seems that citizens’ naivety and their lack of knowledge about themselves and their own state framework, have led to a disastrous anti-Bosnian mentality and the extinguishing of the Bosnian national civic identity.
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This article argues that bottom–up, people-centered research which uses ethnographic and everyday approaches is crucial but underutilized in research on identity politics in Eastern Europe. In order to understand what concepts such as ethnicity and citizenship mean in the context of people’s everyday lives, it is vital to understand whether taken for-granted political concepts are appropriate and the make-up of data such as census data. The article first introduces the methods of political ethnography and bottom–up interviews by discussing how they can be applied and their value within political science. The paper uses data gathered from interviews in Moldova and Crimea (when it was still a de jure and de facto part of Ukraine) to demonstrate the value of this approach. It shows how interview data can add significantly to the understanding of kin-state relations within political science by adding a richness of context and a bottom–up perspective that quantitative and elite-level interviews fail to provide. Lastly, the paper draws on experiences gained from research design to discuss how bottom–up research in political science can be conducted rigorously. The article argues that this approach can deepen the understanding of identity politics and kin-state relations or, more broadly, important post-communist questions such as democratization and Europeanization.
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In the first federal and national elections after the collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia, supporters for Moravian autonomy achieved significant levels of representation and obtained nearly a quarter of the vote in Moravia itself. This movement was short-lived. The Czech Republic would not become a federal state and the Moravian movement disintegrated. Scholars have suggested that the Moravian movement was a temporary phenomenon linked to the collapse of communism. It is argued in this article that the economic, historical and cultural bases for a Moravian movement pre-date the post-communist euphoria. Instead, the decline of the movement can be attributed in part to governmental decisions motivated by a fear of further state disintegration after the creation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Institutional changes with the creation of the Senate and the Kraj have been explained by party politics and by Czech–EU relations. In this article, it is argued that these reforms were also motivated by a desire to weaken Moravian identity. The Moravian autonomy movement has collapsed but economic, historical, and cultural distinctions remain. Furthermore, despite these reforms, there are differences in the electoral behavior of Moravians and Bohemian that could serve as the potential base for future regional mobilization.
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The politicized polarization of Montenegrin society around the question of Montenegrin statehood in the context of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, finally leading to Montenegrin independence in 2006, is accompanied by a remarkable identity change toward a clear division between Serbian and Montenegrin nationhood. I situate this development within the long-term interference between Montenegrin and Serbian categories of identification in elite articulations of national identity in Montenegro during the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, the Montenegrin and Serbian categories were concurrently available for national identification in the context of political modernization in the country. Reflecting the lasting political and broader societal relevance of nationhood during the Yugoslav twentieth century, diverging interpretations of the relation between both categories of nationhood have continuously substantiated political divides in Montenegro. One part of the political spectrum subordinated Montenegrin regional identity to Serbian nationhood, the other part attached increasingly far-reaching political demands to Montenegrin national identity while maintaining a sense of Serbian national identity in the domain of culture and ethnicity. In the course of the Yugoslav twentieth century, the complementary relation between both categories of nationhood was challenged by exclusive definitions of Serbian and Montenegrin nationhood, a development which has to be related to the continuous questioning of relations between various concurring categories of national identity available in Yugoslavia. The current institutionalization of Montenegrin nationhood in independent Montenegro and the development toward clear-cut Serbian and Montenegrin mono-national identities is leading to the regression of multiple nationhood among the broader population.
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In today’s world, issues of cultural pluralism form an essential part of political discussion. Directions are set for the implementation of individual activities, aimed at correcting and coordinating activities in the field of multiculturalism. There is no doubt today that the United States of America has faced a migration challenge that they had to implement in the conditions of American reality. Therefore, this article addresses the issue of cultural pluralism, taking into account every aspect of this complex concept. The author considers this issue from the perspective of historical, sociological, and cultural studies. The interdisciplinary approach is necessary because of the multi-faceted nature of the issue. This case could be heuristic for Ukrainian researchers because the Ukrainian state, aspiring to the integration with Western democratic structures, the question of cultural pluralism is crucial.
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To legitimize separation from Moldova, Transnistrian elites have been constructing a civic Transnistrian nation, subsuming local ethnic Russian, Ukrainian, and Moldovan identities. This article first identifies changes to the Transnistrian nation-building strategy: from an emphasis on Moldovan nationhood in the early 1990s to oppose “Romanianization” in Chisinau, to Transnistrian nationhood mainly after Moldovanism was adopted in Chisinau in 2001. It then shows how this multiethnic nation is being constructed, with a particular emphasis on the place of Transnistrian Moldovans. While the Moldovan identity category is being institutionalized as a part of the Transnistrian civic nation, its ecological niches are being emptied of Romanian/Bessarabian attributes and invested with Russianness. As a result, “Moldovan” now seems an empty identity category in Transnistria.
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Throughout the Second World War and the post-war period, the city of Chernivtsi was transformed from a multiethnic and borderland urban microcosm into a culturally uniform Soviet socialist city. As the Soviets finally took power in this onetime capital of a Hapsburg province in 1944, they not only sponsored further large-scale population transfers but also “repopulated” its history, creating a new urban myth of cultural uniformity. This article examines the connection between war commemoration in Chernivtsi in the era of post-war, state-sponsored anti-Semitism and the formation of collective memory and identities of the city’s post-war population. The images of homogeneously Ukrainian Chernivtsi and Bukovina were created through the art of monumental propaganda, promoting public remembrance of certain events and personalities while making sure that others were doomed to oblivion. Selective commemoration of the wartime events was an important tool of drawing the borders of Ukrainian national identity, making it exclusivist and ethnic-based. Through an investigation of the origins of the post-war collective memory in the region, this article addresses the problem of perceived discontinuity between all things Soviet and post-Soviet in Ukraine. It demonstrates that it is, on the contrary, the continuity between Soviet and post-Soviet eras that defines today’s dominant culture and state ideology in Ukraine and particularly in its borderlands.
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In considering the concept of “Pole-Catholic,” it might well be asked not if it had real grounds but in what circumstances it was constructed. Although the Polish national identity in its current shape was “Catholicized” mostly in the twentieth century, the previous age—the nineteenth century—as a time of constant struggle for political independence has been regarded as having the most formative effect on Polish national imagination. This article discusses an important moment in the construction of the concept “Pole-Catholic.” It shows that far before the idea of Roman Dmowski (from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), who claimed that only a Catholic was a good Pole, the strong identification of Polish nationalism with Catholicism had been insistently articulated by Polish conservative groups. The discourse of the Catholic Polish nation appeared in (and even dominated) the debate on the Italian Risorgimento. Between 1848 and 1871, discussing the Italian–papal conflict, the conservatives created their religious programme for Poland and took advantage of the popularity of the Italian national movement among Poles to promote it in their writings. Their equation of Polishness with Catholicism appeared to leave a strong trace in the formation of the Polish identity and continues to inform the way in which Poles are perceived nowadays.
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The memory of WWII always played an important role in Belarus, which was characterized as a “Partisan Republic” during the Soviet time. Soviet historiography and memorial narrative emphasized the heroics of the resistance to fascism and allowed only a description of the crimes of the Nazis. New ways of looking at war events appeared during the perestroika and after the independence of the country. But after Alexander Lukashenko came to power as president in 1994, a neo-Soviet version of the past was adopted and spread. The Great Patriotic War (GPW) has become an increasingly publicized event in the official memorial narrative as the culminating moment in Belarusian history. Since the mid-2000s, this narrative tends to be nationalized in order to testify that the Belarusian people’s suffering and resistance behavior were among the highest ones during WWII. Political and academic dissenting voices to the Belarusian authoritarian regime try to downplay this official narrative by pointing out that the Belarusians were also victims of the Stalinist repression, and their attitude towards the Nazi occupation was more than ambivalent. Behind the memorial discourses, two competitive versions of Belarusian national identity can be distinguished. According to the official version, Belarusian identity is based on the East-Slavic identity that incorporates the Soviet history in its contemporary development. According to the opposition, it is based on a national memory that discards the Soviet past as a positive one.
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Review of: Katharina Blumberg-Stankiewicz - Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck: Pendelmigration aus Oberschlesien. Lebensgeschichten in einer transnationalen Region Europas. transcript. Bielefeld 2014. 402 S. ISBN 978-3-8376-2133-4. (€ 32,99.) Katharina Blumberg-Stankiewicz - Ute Frings-Merck: Zwischen Białystok und Berlin-Westend. Eine ethnografische Studie zu den Begegnungen von Polinnen und Deutschen in informellen Hausarbeitsverhältnissen. transcript. Bielefeld 2018. 271 S. ISBN 978-3-8376-4521-7. (€ 34,95.)
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Most scholars of the recent history of Yugoslavia and its successor states tend to focus on nationalism and its hegemonic role in the region. However, it is prudent to examine the role of subnational regionalism on the politics of the region as well. This article analyzes Istrian regionalism in Croatian politics during the 1990s. It investigates the struggle between the Croatian ruling nationalist party, the Croatian Democratic Alliance (HDZ), and its primary regionalist opponent, the Istrian Democratic Assembly (IDS). While the HDZ generally maintained a hegemonic position in much of Croatia, the IDS resisted with a hegemonic hold on the region of Istria. Ultimately, both parties’ popularity fell in the late 1990s with the upswing in the Croatian economy. The article concludes that in specific regions and under particular circumstances, regionalism can be as hegemonic as nationalism and should be taken into consideration when studying modern politics and the politicization of identities.
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