Micro factors that induce violent confrontations amidst national revival movements are identified. These factors include the nature of local social structures, tipping phenomena, and fortuitous events that set off action/reaction cycles. They are shown to he better explanations than reigning macro theories to account for the peaceful nationalist revival in Catalonia in contrast to the violent one in the Basque Country. A robustness test for the micro factors succeeds in differentiating levels of violence in the politics of separation from the Soviet Union in the Ukraine and Georgia.

This article investigates the relationship of ordinary Neapolitans' morals of legitimacy to legality, semi-legality and crime. It argues that addressing this relationship empirically serves much more than the purpose of making suggestions to be translated into law or policy. Raising key questions about control, value and representation, the analysis brings to light the significance of individual morality and action to the complex relation of domination to authority in civil society.

A general typological model for the analysis of collective identify is outlined and applied to the case of German and Japanese national identity. Primordial, civic and cultural codes of boundary construction are described with respect to their logic of exclusion, corresponding rituals etc. German national identity is presented as a cultural project carried by the ‘Bildungsbürgertum’, whereas the Japanese identity is presented as a combination of primordial and civic elements.

This article discusses political developments in Czechoslovakia and the two successor states from November 1989 to the end of 1992. Three main topics are explored: the failure to write a new constitution for Czechoslovakia, the breakup of the country, and the making of new constitutions in the Czech and Slovak Republics. The author argues against the view that the breakup of the Czechoslovak federation was analogous to the breakup of the Yugoslav or Soviet federations. Instead he suggests the inherent instability of any two-member federation as the structural cause, and economic conflicts as the triggering cause, of the breakup.

This article present a gametheoretic model of the transition to democracy in Poland. The events in Poland are conceptualized as a strategic game between a government and an opposition. The transition is modeled as a sequence of intentional decisions about political arrangements. During the 1980s Poland went through three such arrangements: dictatorship, broadened dictatorship, and democracy. Each one is understood as a game-theoretic equilibrium. The transition between two political arrangements is explained as a shift from one equilibrium to another. These shifts occurred because the probability of Soviet intervention diminished over time, changing incentives for the government and the opposition.

Is there a notion of economics in Greek philosophy? How can we interpret it without making anachronistic assumptions? What relationship exists between management of the material world and the ‘good life’? These questions at the centre of W. Booth's paper, examined here, are the subject of a study which tries to point out the present interest of analyses of the Ancient Greeks.

This article discusses Roger Brubaker's contribution to a new sociology of the state, which considers the state not as a strategic actor or a territorial organization but as a culturally bounded membership association. After pointing out the novelty of Brubaker's approach in light of previous theories of the state, I address some of its shortcomings—a formalistic concept of citizenship, an exclusive focus on elites, a mechanistic fashioning of the relationship between ideas and interests, and no mention of the pending Europeanization of citizenship.