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.

Given equal income incentives, why does migration from poor countries to rich countries vary ? I apply Boudon's logic of relative frustration and Elster's model of interactions among desire, opportunity and action to interpret sociological findings on the self-sustaining nature of the migration process. I conclude that migration does not occur in the absence of initial opportunity, but that once begun tbe migration process itself increases, both the opportunity and the desire to migrate.

Focusing upon donations to monasteries in the medieval Western world, this paper expands upon extant discussions of religious gift-giving in the ‘great traditions’ , and of its relation to more archaic forms of gift-exchange, hitherto largely based on non-Western and mostly Asian anthropological material. While displaying many of the social functions familiarly associated with the gift in archaic or primitive societies, donations to monasteries are shown to have also entailed a process of immobilisation of wealth not extant in the gift circuit of ‘simpler’ societies. While donations to monasteries clearly attested to the impact of otber-wordly religious orientations, they also entailed a range of symbolic dynamics very different from, and even incompatible with, those analysed by Jonathan Parry with regard to the other-wordly ‘pure’ gift. The paper then brings into relief the precise constellation of ideological ‘gift-theory’, socio-economic ‘gift-circuit’, and macrosocietal context, which enabled this specific variant of the gift-mechanism to operate as a ‘total’ social phenomenon in the two senses of that term suggested, though not clearly distinguished and equally not developed, in Mauss’ pathbreaking essay on the gift.

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.

In 1992–1994 the Russian people met with a drop in their standard of living and suffered from a rapid deterioration of public services. Yet their dissatisfaction did not manifest itself in collective protest actions. Their patience can be explained as a consequence of their desire for order, their pessimism, their capacity to adapt to difficult situations and, above all, by their evaluation of virtual outcomes. Convinced that protests would not lead to any positive results, the Russian people preferred to rely on patience rather than action. A rejoinder, by Marie Mendras, traces this discussion back to its Western antecedents.

Data from 1991 surveys, from elections, and from elite discourse in Estonia and Bashkortostan are presented. Despite significant historical and demographic differences in these two post-Soviet republics, the Russian population in both places had similar reactions in regard to the collapse of the Union. In both republics, Russians were wary of assimilation, yet they neither planned to exit in large numbers nor to organise politically as Russians. Furthermore, in both republics, elite discourse was framing a new identity, which can be called the ‘Russian-speaking nationality’. This nationality is likely to be secular, Soviet, and includes all non-titulars whose primary language is Russian. While it is unlikely that this emergent nationality will be the same in all post-Soviet republics, in large part because incentives from the titulars will be markedly different, the data show in the early period after the Soviet collapse, in two ‘most different cases’, the dynamics of Russian identity re-formation have been quite similar.

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.

State socialism is often analysed as if all institutions functioned in directions diametrically opposed to those in liberal Western states. A frequent assumption in both the East and the West, therefore, is that marketization and democratization require the dismantling of powerful, centralized states. This paper explores changes in the distribution of income in Poland between 1982 and 1991. As market reforms are introduced, power shifts from centralized to decentralized authorities, and from the state to the private sector. Market coordination produces new opportunities and sources of income for rentiers and entrepreneurs, but it also substantially reduces the income share going to direct producers. These data suggest that both economic equality and income determination depend on changes in state policy more than on fledgling markets. Dismantling the centralized state organisation is proved to be much less favorable for economic growth and a better income distribution than usual liberalism would claim.

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.

In Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, Alvin W. Gouldner has developed a conception of rational domination which is different from that developed by Max Weber. Gouldner argues that a democratic variation of rational domination (representative bureaucracy) can be more efficient tban the authoritarian variation, and that, accordingly, the ‘iron cage of rationalisation’ is not inevitable. I will show that Gouldner—who is sociologically driven—contradicts Weber on the basis of an erroneous translation and a poor understanding of the concept of bureaucracy. Thus his critique in no way undermines the Weberian typology of domination.