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While ‘tragic’ protest and protest songs are normally conceived of as originating on the political left of American culture, in recent years protest from the political right, specifically the racist right has flown under the cultural radar of most researchers of American studies. This article strives to explore the ways in which the neo-Confederate movement is currently protesting the state of cultural, political, and social affairs in the contemporary American South. The neo-Confederate movement is one of the oldest forms of ‘conservative’ protest present in the United States, originating out of the defeat of the Confederacy and the civic religion of the ‘Lost Cause’ of the last decades of the 1800s into the first three decades of the 1900s. Since the neo-Confederate movement is both revolutionary and conservative, it is possible to derive some valuable insights into the contemporary reactionary politics of the right by examining a brief sampling of the protest songs, novels, and essays of this particular subculture.
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How can we explain variation in the organization of LGBT activism in postcommunist Europe, both across countries and over time? Much of the extant scholarship has analyzed the comparative politics of homosexuality in the region in terms of transnational norm diffusion occurring within the context of EU accession and integration. Thus, it emphasizes the empowerment of domestic gay rights groups either through maximizing the leverage of their external allies or through increasing their linkage with transnational advocacy networks. This paper argues that the effectiveness of these diffusion mechanisms is strongly constrained by the collective action problems faced by gay rights activists in societies with a legacy of civil society underdevelopment, such as in postcommunist Europe. We argue that hard-right backlash is a critical domestic factor that can help overcome these collective action problems, enabling gay rights activists to find resonant frames, build internal solidarity, and win allies—even when social movement resources are minimal. The research focuses on a close comparison of Poland and the Czech Republic since 1989 and draws on field interviews and original sources to process-trace the resonance of LGBT rights frames and how activism is organized. By building organizationally robust activism, postcommunist gay rights movements lay claim to full membership in the political community, exercise civil rights as LGBT citizens (not merely as private ones), and expand the sphere of “sexual citizenship.”
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This article focuses on the changes of the citizenship status of Jews in Romania between 1879 and 1938. It presents the Romanian citizenship law beginning with the constitutional amendment of 25 October 1879 and concluding with the citizenship review under the Goga ministry. It rediscusses the citizenship review using previously unexploited archival material. It argues that the Romanian State performed an almost complete rotation in the above-mentioned period: the State gradually granted most of the Jews in Romania citizenship, then challenged its acts beginning with 1936. The citizenship review deprived 30% of the Jewish population in Romania of its citizenship shortly later, in 1938-1939.
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Two and a half decades have passed since the formidable tumult called by many the upheaval in the East —the chain of dramatic events that led to the accomplishment of what most among us thought to be unthinkable: the collapse of communist regimes, the end of a system that seemed destined to last forever. The revolutions of 1989 resulted in the rehabilitation of individual dignity after decades of dictatorial domination. The post-1989 East-Central Europe has been a battlefield between proponents of civicliberal values and supporters of populist, ethnocentric, illiberal movements. Precommunist and Communist legacies continue to influence the democratic transitions.
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Regional headlines: Hooligans march in Prague and Bratislava; another ceasefire fails in Karabakh; a rare moment of concord on Serbia-Kosovo border; Belarusians rally for 10th straight week; and a new home for an Uzbek journalist.
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Regional headlines: Estonia faces fallout over homophobic remarks; Belgrade to welcome Russian military; EU vs. Poland, TBD; Holocaust play opens in Bucharest; and Chernobyl goes virtual reality.
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The political integration of ethnic minorities is one of the most challenging tasks facing the countries of post-communist Europe. The roads to their political representation in the mainstream political process are numerous and diverse. The EU accession of the Central and East European countries has expanded the scope of the political participation of minorities by adding an electoral process at the regional level: the elections for members of the European Parliament. This article presents a comparative study of the ways in which EU-level electoral processes affect the scope and quality of minority representation on the example of the participation of ethnic political parties in Bulgaria and Romania in the 2007 and 2009 electoral cycles of the European Parliament.
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Regional headlines: Czech PM again mired in conflict-of-interest charges; Catholic Church under fire in Poland; Russia and chemical weapons.
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Regional headlines: Controversial Ukrainian court ruling; Russian soldiers on the Karabakh border; Georgian election preview; ransomware attack blamed on Eastern Europe; and wartime treasures found in Poland.
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The Great Famine of 1932–33, known in Ukraine as the Holodomor and silenced for decades by the Soviet regime, holds a special place in national memory. It was after the Orange Revolution that the Holodomor became the core of a new identity politics, which conceptualized the Ukrainian nation as a “postgenocide” community, a collective victim of the Communist regime. But the official interpretation of the Famine as a genocide met ambivalent responses in the regions. While formally complying with the official political line, the regional political elites in Eastern and Southern Ukraine often refused to accept the official interpretation of history and sabotaged orders coming from Kyiv. The present article focuses on the official commemoration of the seventyfifth anniversary of the Holodomor in Kharkiv, the former capital of Soviet Ukraine and epicenter of the famine. The “memory wars” in Kharkiv during 2006 to 2009 have revealed more than just tensions between the center promoting a new national identity and a reluctant “Sovietized” region adhering to its political mentality and commemorative culture. In fact, the official narrative of the Holodomor as a genocide and the corresponding memory regime have been contested, renegotiated, and modified on the regional level, through the conflicts and the bargaining of the local political actors. The borderland identity of Kharkiv, its geographic proximity to Russia, added an international dimension to the local memory wars as the Holodomor issue became a stumbling block in Ukrainian-Russian relations.
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This article analyzes how the ideological discourse of the Croatian fascist movement (the Ustaša) evolved in the course of World War II under pressures of the increasingly popular and powerful communist armed resistance. It explores and interprets the way the regime formulated its ideological responses to the political/ideological challenge of the leftist guerrilla and its propaganda in the period after the proclamation of the Ustaša Independent State of Croatia in 1941 until the end of the war. The author demonstrates that the regime, faced with its own political weakness and inability to maintain authority, shaped its rhetoric and ideological self-definition in a direct dialogue with the Marxist discourse of the communist propaganda, incorporating important Marxist concepts in its theory of state and society and redefining its concepts of national boundaries and racial identity to match the communists’ propaganda of inclusive, civic national Yugoslavism. This massive ideological renegotiation of the movement’s basic tenets and its consequent leftward shift reflected a change in an opposite direction from the one commonly encountered in narratives of other fascisms’ ideological evolution paths (most notably in Italy and Germany): as the movement became a regime, the Ustaša transformed from its initial conservatism, traditionalism (in both sociopolitical and cultural matters), pseudofeudal worldview of peasant worship and antiurbanism, anti-Semitism, and rigid racialism in relation to nation and state into an ideology of increasingly inclusive, culture-based, and nonethnic nationalism and with an exceptionally strong leftist rhetoric of social welfare, class struggle, and the rights of the working class.
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In the 1990s, a number of post-Communist states adopted diaspora laws that defined the target group ethno-culturally, thus seemingly confirming the continued relevance of Hans Kohn’s distinction between ethnic Eastern and civic Western nationalism. This article, however, posits that while Kohn’s dichotomy may be valid, its related implications are often not. The ethnic content of the diaspora laws, and the content of ethnic nationalism behind them, is much more nuanced, and not all ethnically tinted diaspora polices are discriminatory or otherwise contrary to international standards. Using the case of the 2001 Hungarian Status Law and the European organizations’ reaction to it, the first part of the article draws attention to the often neglected fact that international standards do not ban ethnically based policies altogether but allow for some distinctions in treatment based on ethno-cultural criteria. The second part of the article focuses on the case of Ukraine and further challenges the accuracy of the civic-ethnic dichotomy by showing how the politics of the Ukrainian diaspora law was driven not by a clash between civic and ethnic nationalism but by a more complex tension between different variants of ethnic nationalism, a neo-Soviet imperial vision, strategic bargaining, and changes in electoral fortunes for unrelated reasons. The Ukrainian case also shows how, in addition to international norm diffusion, another—and rather counterintuitive—path towards internationally compliant diaspora legislation may be the presence of substantial domestic divisions on the national issue, which forces the elites to compromise on a less ethnic law.
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This article presents a summary of analyses addressing the changing patterns of voting behavior in post-communist Poland as a context for examination of the issue of the relationship between regions defined by history (eighteenth-century partitions, border shifts after WWII) and contemporary forms of voting behavior. In the 1990s, the dominant cleavage in Polish politics was the one between the post-Solidarity and postcommunist camps, and the best predictor of voting behavior was one’s religiosity. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this cleavage has been replaced by another, between the liberal, pro-European orientation and the more Euro-skeptic, populist attitudes. The empirical evidence seems to suggest that one end of the populist–liberal continuum is relatively well defined and represents the traditional system of values, which defines Polish national identity in terms of ethnic nationalism, strong attachment to Catholic dogmas, and denunciation of communism as a virtual negation of those values. The other end of this continuum is defined more by rejection of this nationalistic-Catholic “imagined community” than by any positive features. This article examines the relative role of identity-related factors (e.g., religiosity or region) and determinants based on one’s socioeconomic (class) position in shaping voting patterns in the 2007 elections to the Polish Sejm and Senate. The empirical data come from a postelection survey, the Polish General Election Study 2007.
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This article explores the history of HIV activism in Poland from the socialist period through the early 1990s transformation as a means of examining the reconfiguration of rights, obligations, and responsibility as Poland redefined itself as a market democracy. Drawing on archival materials, in-depth qualitative interviews with current and former HIV activists, and participant observation at HIV prevention organizations in Warsaw, Poland, I sketch the ways in which the socialist system’s failures to protect the health of its subjects led to the terms through which state-citizen engagement was defined in the postsocialist period. Uncertainties and anxieties surrounding who was responsible for protecting the health and well-being of citizens in the newly democratic Poland gave rise to a series of violent protests centered on HIV prevention and care for people living with HIV/AIDS. Resolution of these political and social crises involved defining democracy in postsocialist Poland through claims to moral authority, in alliance with the Catholic Church, and an obligation by multiple stakeholders to disseminate technical/scientific knowledge. By comparing the responses to the epidemic by diverse institutions, including the government, the Catholic Church, and the fledgling gay rights movement, this analysis reveals the ways in which democracy in postsocialist Poland tightly links science, democratic reform, and moral/religious authority while at the same time excluding sexual minorities from engaging in political activism centered on rights to health and inclusion in the new democracy.
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The review of: 1) Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1950, by Melissa Feinberg. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. 2) Living Gender after Communism, by Janet Elise Johnson and Jean C. Robinson. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2007. 3) Gender and War in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe, edited by Nancy Wingfield and Maria Bucur. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. $24.95 (paperback).
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The review of: 1) Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany: The Crisis of Leninism and the Revolution of 1989 by Steven Pfaff. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. pp. 333. 2) Textbook Reds: Schoolbooks, Ideology, and East German Identity by John Rodden. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. pp. 443.
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The conceptual genealogy of the Albanian so-called Renaissance is often linked to the influence of Western Romantic ideas on the nationalist movements of the Balkans. This paper analyzes the specificities of the Albanian cultural and political context and suggests, by contrast, that Enlightenment categories provide a better means of comprehension of this stage in Albanian intellectual history. It focuses on the ideological function played by the critique of religion as well as by a cultural project addressed to political struggle and emphasizes its roots in the Enlightenment tradition. It finally argues that Enlightenment concepts such as self-criticism and rational teleology might help to grasp some unique features of the Renaissance movement and to construct a more sophisticated account of the emergence of the Albanian modern state.
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This article looks at influences on the social quality of the lives of the citizens of Belarus and Moldova in the context of the traumatic shock—economic, political, and social—experienced after 1991. It argues that lived experience—how people evaluate their condition—is as significant an influence on their welfare as the actual circumstances in which they live. The majority of respondents perceive the post-1991 economic and political changes negatively, and levels of general satisfaction and happiness are comparatively low. The findings suggest that objective economic factors, health status, and social context influence well-being, but also personal control and satisfaction with material circumstances, with health having a greater influence on happiness, while material circumstances and the evaluation of them have a greater influence on general satisfaction.
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This article examines the domestic politics behind Hungary’s controversial 2001 “Status Law,” which granted special cultural and economic benefits to ethnic Hungarians who are citizens of other states. It argues that Hungary’s increasingly interventionist policy toward ethnic Hungarians beyond its borders in the late 1990s was driven not by a growing sense of ethnic nationalism in society or as a reaction to the plight of ethnic kin but by the party-building strategy of right-wing elites. These elites utilized and coopted transnational ties with the diaspora to further their own political goals. Specifically, engagement with the diaspora issue provided the thengoverning Federation of Young Democrats (FIDESZ) government with symbolically charged ideological content, important organizational resources, and the basis of a longer-term strategy for governance and institutional embeddedness.
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