There was a fateful inevitability to the military actions in Dagestan that began on 2 August 1999 and concluded on 16 September. During the 2 years preceding, tensions within Dagestan's Islamic community had been building between fundamentalist Wahhabis and traditionalists. These tensions were exacerbated by Dagestan's sharp economic decline. Unemployment, which was running at 80% by August, contributed to growing dissatisfaction, especially in Dagestan's rural regions. These tensions reached critical proportions in the Botliksky rayon, particularly among young men belonging to the Andi ethno-linguistic sub-group of the Avars. Many of the latter were attracted to military training camps operated in Chechnya by Emir al Khattab, leader of the Wahhabite Islamic djamaat (village or connected group of villages) at Karamakhi, Chabanmakhi and Kadar, and by Shamyl Basayev, leader of the Islamic Congress of the Peoples of Ichkeria and Dagestan. In these camps rural Dagestani alienation met Chechen militancy and international Islamic fundamentalist support. Meanwhile Wahhabism grew increasingly influential in Chechnya as rival political leaders appealed to puritanical Islam in order to bolster their claims to authority and legitimize their political agendas.

The Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) is a highly visible institution in Russia, and arguably the most prominent and influential religious or cultural body. The Orthodox Church figures prominently in various discussions as the driving force behind Russia's post-Soviet renewal and recovery. Surveys show that Russians trust the Orthodox Church more than any other public institution, including law courts, trade unions, mass media, the military, the police and the government. Estimates of the number of self-identified Orthodox adherents range from 50 million, which amounts to slightly more than one-third of Russia's population, to 70 million, or roughly one half of the population. A leading newspaper consistently ranks Patriarch Aleksii II, head of the Moscow Patriarchate, the governing body of the Orthodox Church, in the top 15 of the country's most influential political figures. These indicators confirm that the Orthodox Church has a significant role in Russia's post-Soviet development. This is widely accepted by commentators both within and without the Orthodox Church, and within and without Russia.

This article uses Central Asian examples to challenge theories of ethnic nationalism that locate its origins in intellectual activism (Hroch), state modernization processes (Gellner), or the rise of mass media (Anderson). Modern Uyghur cultural politics and traditional Central Asian dynastic genealogies reveal related processes used in constructing modern nationalist symbols and pre-modern ideologies of descent. Modern territorial states with ideals of social unification and bureaucratic organization rely upon nationalist discourses to elaborate and rework cultural forms into evidence for the ethnic nation. The state links citizens to institutions through nationalist content used in political discourse, schooling, and public performances. Because such content is presented as authentic but used instrumentally, its contingency and fabrication have to be concealed from view: the culturally intimate spaces of bureaucratic production of culture and narratives are separated from public performances. The creation of genealogies used to legitimate pre-modern states are similar: compositional processes and goals are kept offstage, and little is disclosed in the public historical narratives and performances.

While participating in Hitler's Holocaust against Jews and Roma, wartime Croatia's collaborationist government, the Ustaša (Insurgent), conducted its own genocide against the Serbs within its territories. As the title of Marco Rivelli's 1978 text, Le Génocide occulté, makes clear, this phenomenon remained largely unknown in the West until the 1990s. Of the principal external actors, post-war German attention focused on the Holocaust. Italy still resists fully confronting its less than pristine role in the Balkans, so that Rivelli's work, completed in 1978, was not published in Italy until 1999. The Vatican, meanwhile, has yet to release its documents on the subject.

The relationship between Marxism and nationalism has been tumultuous. While theoretically attempting to reject nationalism as a transient product of capitalism, Marxism has in practice oftentimes exploited its appeal and utilized its extensive institutional repertoire. To a large extent, the difficult dialogue between the two ideological constellations can be traced back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who neglected to leave a definitive statement on the nationality question. The article traces the evolution of Marxism's conceptualization of the nationality question – a slow shift from an outright rejection of nationalism to an acceptance of its progressive features, complexity, varieties and influences. It re-evaluates Marx and Engels’ views on the nationality question, from its outright denial to limited acceptance and application. After identifying factors that shaped their perception of the nationality question, the study offers an analysis of the evolution of these attitudes from the 1840s to the 1860s. The objective is to show how Marx and Engels’ theoretical dogmatism was tainted by their desire for activism. Their views were not inflexible but rather evolved in response to changing circumstances in the mid 19th century.

This paper shows how contemporary believers are negotiating a new identity of Islamic piety in Bulgarian Muslim communities. Driven by communal memory of repression and contemporary Islamophobia, Bulgarian Muslims have created communities of practice (Wenger 1998), participatory groups that share a common interest in learning more about their faith. Communities function on multiple levels: there are small pockets of Islamic activity at the local level, and at a broader level, an imagined community of Bulgarian-speaking Muslims connected to an imagined global Islamic community, the ummah. The practices examined here include face-to-face activities, such as learning to read the Qur'an and prayers in Arabic, learning Islamic principles and practice, and talking about faith in mosques and homes in Bulgaria. This paper also examines virtual practices, such as discussing faith on social media. The article focuses on women's and girls’ Qur'an reading groups and discussions about wearing hijab, and it examines an online mixed-gender discussion of daily prayers. Such grassroots practice of Islam fosters a newly articulate and participatory version of religion, embracing and encouraging believers’ literacy and knowledge, activism, and agency. The mutual goals, repertoires, and activities of this community of practice create a sense of commonality and cohesiveness, while leaving room for some diversity of focus.

Attitude towards one's past, the farewell to the communist past, has become a vital matter on the territory of the former Soviet Union. The failure of the “building of communism” project has, besides a devastated environment, left behind it a spiritual “homelessness.” For Russians, for whom communism was the path to global power, the collapse of the Soviet Union also meant a collapse of their national identity. “Look back in anger” might be the most concise way of characterizing their attitude to their history of the past seventy years. The same might be said of the other peoples of the former USSR. Sovietologists who treated the Soviet Union as one entity and placed the Baltic nations into the same category as the other “fraternal” people created insurmountable problems for an understanding of Baltic developments, and Estonian, in particular.

Croatia and Serbia are two countries that started their paths toward the EU with similar conditions. Nevertheless, in 2018, the end of this study’s period, the two countries are characterized by different outcomes regarding European integration. This paper puts forward one key determinant for the more successful Europeanization process of Croatia—resolved statehood problem—and claims that the unresolved statehood problem in Serbia led to higher adoption costs of EU rules. Therefore, this article seeks to improve the theorization of the relationship between Europeanization and the statehood problem.

Azerbaijan's complex history has weaved a tapestry of linguistic, cultural, and national identities among Azerbaijanis through centuries of political, social, and linguistic integration. In the current post-Soviet era, this identity is undergoing another period of change, with influences from intra-state ethnic, religious, and sociopolitical institutions as well as from regional and international powers. This article centers on linguistic identity among Azerbaijani youth at three types of schools: Azerbaijani-medium, Russian-medium, and English-medium. The authors seek to discover whether and to what extent the language of instruction in each type of school affects linguistic identity, which in turn has implications for national identity. The article first discusses the existing literature on language and identity in second language acquisition and socio-educational linguistics. It then examines Azerbaijan's linguistic and political history through the lens of the latter framework, as a context for an analysis of the data from surveys and focus groups. The article analyzes the relationship between medium of instruction in school and students' perceptions of language and identification with various language groups, and discusses the findings of a significant correlation between language of instruction and linguistic identity, with its implications for national identity.

The article examines a key attribute of Russian national identity—national pride—as it is reflected in mass consciousness. To trace the dynamics of multiple facets of national pride and related phenomena from 1996 to 2015, we use data from five surveys. The results demonstrate a substantial growth in Russian national pride in specific country achievements and general pride in Russian citizenship over the last 20 years. This change is the result of the population’s and state’s need for positive social identity as well as from both real and imagined progress in the Russian economy and political influence, and it started long before the Crimea mobilization and Olympics of 2014. The structural difference in pride in various achievements persisted for the 20 years examined here, but became less distinct. Across the years examined here, Russian national pride has become more strongly related to belief in the superiority of the country and is therefore increasingly competitive.

This article uses ideological criticism to examine how and why victimage, identity and nationalism are produced through everyday discursive practices of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. Wander contends that the ideological turn in criticism confronts and studies what is professed and obscure, and Greene argues that part of this criticism involves unmasking forms of domination. Examining cultural or rhetorical narratives is part of ideological criticism. The narratives in this study can be regarded as competing vernacular memories representative of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. The participants invoke personal and collective memories with official national histories to explain contemporary victimization as a continuance of historical victimage. This use of the past can serve to legitimize their national and political claims, as well as to justify violence against the other group, since historical victimage provides a rationale for hating the other group and perpetuating a vicious cycle of violence.

In late 2010, Azerbaijan tried to introduce a ban on hijab in all secondary schools, referring to an article of the new Law of Education that mandated school uniforms. The supporters of the ban argued that the hijab was inimical to Azerbaijani culture and law because it violated the separation of religion and state, was a propaganda tool of Islamist fundamentalists funded from abroad, and was a foreign form of clothing that did not exist in Azerbaijani culture. This article examines why hijab is the focus of controversy in Azerbaijan. The supporters of the ban offered simple oppositions, such as secularism versus theocracy, modernity versus backwardness, and national versus foreign, to explain and justify the ban. However, these dichotomies do not capture the complexities of Islam in Azerbaijan. Rather, they are polemics that blur more than they reveal. In this article, I argue that the debates around the hijab controversy in Azerbaijan are a political discourse aimed at building a nation. The key contribution of this article is to examine the wider historical trajectory of the political discourse that constructed hijab as fundamentalist, backward, threatening, and alien, through discussing the topics of secularism, Islamist politics, modernity, and nationalism.

In October 1989, Uzbekistan's Supreme Soviet adopted the law “On the State Language of the Uzbek SSR.” At that time, Uzbekistan was still one of the 15 constituent republics of the USSR. The law was an important symbol of Uzbekistan's changing relation to Russia and the assertion of the preeminence of Uzbek culture in Uzbekistan.

Given its economic success and the political transformations of the last decade, it is not surprising that Turkey is now charting an ambitious course in foreign policy. This article provides a sober assessment of some of the shortcomings becoming evident in Turkish foreign policy, and argues that if these problems are not addressed, Turkey is due to fall short of its regional leadership ambitions.

This article compares the nation-building processes in four well-established Eurasian de facto states. Although all four pursue a set of identity politics that would legitimize the separatist cause, comparing them reveals important differences in boundary-making strategies. While maintaining the image of the enemy parent-state and of an imminent external threat is a common endeavor, they face different challenges and thus have pursued different strategies of identity-building. Transnistria and Abkhazia are two ethnically heterogeneous entities while Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia are more homogeneous since (forced) displacements, mostly of non-titular ethnicities, took place. The Abkhazs, Ossetians, and Armenians claim titular status in their respective regions, but only the latter two have kin in neighboring countries with whom they want to unify. Meanwhile, the “Transnistrian people” is a newly invented construct. Despite their lack of international recognition, the article demonstrates that – apart from a special emphasis on cultivating the image of the “enemy parent-state” – the nation-building mechanisms in the de facto states do not substantially differ from the processes at work in other post-Soviet states presented in this Special Issue.

History is one of the many instruments available for the persuasive construction of a nation. In Moldova, the Party of the Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM), in office from 2001 to 2009, advocated for a Soviet-based version of the Moldovan nation. This “Moldovanism” boasted of the existence of a “Moldovan People” and was relied upon to justify the independence of the former Romanian province. Vladimir Voronin, the party's leader and president of the Republic during this period, promoted this “civic” Moldovan nation and created what seemed to be a coherent and ad hoc construction of an independent Moldovan nation.

This paper focuses on communist political discourse during this eight year period. Through the use of Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper focuses on the discursive construction of the Moldovan nation. It is based on Voronin's official speeches and messages from key occasions such as Independence Day and Victory Day.

This paper demonstrates the varied use of history in these speeches which improves understanding of the process of the construction of a nation. Moreover, it demonstrates that this construction, far from being coherent, was also sometimes contradictory. Indeed, discourse was adapted to the immediate context and audience. Finally, the paper explains how an explicitly “civic” discourse can be implicitly and, sometimes even explicitly, “ethnic” and “exclusive”.

During the first years of the Bulgarian transition to democracy, all indicators seemed to point towards an impending explosion of interethnic hatred. Located at the crossroads of Islam and Christianity, this predominantly Orthodox country harbors a 13.1% strong Muslim minority, which was subjected to forcible assimilation under communist rule. The assimilation policy reached a climax in 1984–1985, when around 800,000 Bulgarian Turks were forced to renounce their Turkish-Arabic names in favor of Slavic patronyms within the framework of the so-called “Revival Process,” a campaign that aimed at precipitating the unification of the Bulgarian nation. Far from achieving the intended result, the authorities' move not only fostered a reassertion of distinct ethnic and religious identification among the Turks, but also succeeded in durably upsetting intercommunitarian relationships. Significantly, the Communist Party's announcement on 29 December 1989 that it would restore Muslim rights met with sharp resistance in mixed areas, where large-scale Bulgarian protests rapidly gathered momentum. Against this background, in 1990–1991, few analysts would have predicted that Bulgaria could avoid religious conflict, especially as the country was faced with growing regional instability and a belated shift to a market economy—two conditions often said to be conducive to the exacerbation of ethnic tensions.

In our research, we examined the discursive framing of Trianon and the Holocaust in today’s Hungarian online media. Our corpus contained 26,519 articles connected to these two historical events published between September 2017 and September 2020. We used a mixed-method approach by combining computational text analysis, namely, LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic models and qualitative methods. Our aim was not only to map the latent thematic structure and the discourses about Trianon and the Holocaust but also to identify the main differences in the rhetoric of the different sides of the political spectrum. Using Bull and Hansen’s categories, we found that the far-right and government media use the antagonistic, while the left-liberal media use the cosmopolitan mode of remembering. We identified many discursive differences between the rhetoric of the different political sides. Yet, the different relationship to emotions has the most far-reaching consequences. On the one hand, in antagonistic remembering, thus in the far-right and progovernment media, emotions play an essential role. On the other hand, cosmopolitan remembering, thus the rhetoric featured in the nongovernment media, detaches itself from emotions. This difference contributes significantly to the success of antagonistic remembering in Hungary. At the same time, the left-liberal side loses the opportunity to shape memory and identity politics.

This paper argues that current Western-backed approaches to conflict resolution in Kosovo have failed to alter Serbia's policy toward the region and have contributed to the exacerbation of political tensions between Belgrade and Brussels, while deepening ethnic cleavages between Serb and Albanian communities. While there is no possibility of Kosovo returning to Serbia's control, there is an equal unlikelihood that Serbian-populated regions of Kosovo, especially the north, will submit to Pristina's authority. Most importantly, there is little hope that Kosovo can gain full international recognition and membership in international organizations without a compromise settlement with Serbia. While territorial partition has long been a suggested option, I conclude that the best possible solution for Kosovo, given the positions of all parties involved, is a process of significant decentralization beyond the internationally supported measures in the Ahtisaari Plan. A model of consociational power sharing is one in which Serbian and Albanian municipalities are granted high levels of autonomy similar to arrangements made for Bosnia. While this solution may not be ideal and further weakens central authority, I argue that consociationalism reduces the problems of ethnic conflict, encourages local self-government, and preserves the overall territorial integrity of Kosovo.

This article presents the history of Belarusian national development in the light of Miroslav Hroch's theory and demonstrates how the initial process of national awakening typical for small nations in eastern and central Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century described by M. Hroch continued under Soviet rule after the Bolshevik revolution. Changes which were brought to Belarusian society together with socialist modernization in the Soviet state constituted “Phase D” (a term coined by Terry Martin) in Belarusian nation-building. As the history of Belarusian nation-formation illustrates, Hroch's scheme of three phases of national movements within small nations ignored a specific mode of small nations’ development in a multiethnic state and within the socialist formation. At the same time, the question about the status of the Soviet era's achievements in Belarusian national development appears to be an important issue for understanding the current political development in the country.