Elections are one of the major ways in which democratic governments maintain legitimacy. Do elections serve the same functions in transitioning, non-democratic, or semi-democratic systems? Perhaps the relationship between elections and legitimacy is different in systems that are not fully democratic? And what of the media? Is their role the same or is the role they play dependent upon the type of system in which they exist? The Republic of Georgia offers an interesting case in which to look at these relationships. I would posit that in transitioning, non-democratic, and semi-democratic systems, elections serve a different function than in a fully democratic society and the media are one tool that leaders in such systems can use to enhance their legitimacy. When non-democratic leaders enjoy popularity, there is no need to finesse the media since positive coverage is easy to come by when you are popular. But if your popularity is waning and democratic habits are not well ingrained, the temptation to overtly or covertly subvert the media can be quite intense. So instead of maintaining legitimacy, elections may serve to create legitimacy or at least the appearance of legitimacy when legitimacy is lacking. To that end, regimes and leaders cannot afford to lose, and moreover need to win, elections by large margins if their legitimacy is questionable. Therefore, control over the media is more important when this is the case. In fact, there may be an inverse relationship between media freedom and regime insecurity, as the insecurity of the regime goes up, the freedom of the media goes down. Couple this tendency with the fact that the media in these transitioning systems have not fully become a “fourth estate” that is strong, independent, and can hold the government and political leaders accountable and you have a climate in which the media are harassed, biased, and often co-opted. Georgia, through the 2000 presidential election, is such a political system.

Problems of building a new democratic Russia based on federative principles and the region's long-refractory “national question,” forming a knotty tangle of complicated issues, have steadily remained in the political limelight. In a number of regions worldwide dramatic changes have occurred, related in one way or the other to the processes of national-territorial self-determination. As a result of this, the Eurasian political landscape has been marked by the emergence of some twenty newly independent states. Suffice it to say that the Soviet Union, a preponderant superpower feared by all, collapsed; and in Europe the Federative Republic of Yugoslavia ceased to exist, bringing on a long-term national conflict threatening not only regional but even global security. In East Central Europe binational Czechoslovakia split up into two independent nation states. Elsewhere, even in the absence of militarized national conflict, political processes have dramatically intensified. In Asia, for example, the multinational Chinese Republic with its Tibetan and Uighur problems, and ethnically heterogeneous India with its population speaking more than 400 languages and dialects have long attracted public attention as sources of potential instability in the region. The “Sikh issue” alone, for instance, continues to pose a threat to India. Even the North American continent, a peaceful region in terms of its political and ethnic stability, is confronted with similar problems. The integrity of Canada is still in question with the franco-lingual province of Quebec striving for independence.

In 1994, after the enactment of Hungary's Minority Rights legislation (herein the Act), representatives from India rather than Roma themselves were invited to represent the Roma at the signing ceremony, against the request of Roma leaders. During an interview in August 2000, former member of Parliament and Roma leader Aladar Horvath describes the events this way:

A world in which every nation has become a state, that is, a world in which cultural and political units coincide, would be a very different world from the one we know. There are now close to 200 political units recognized as states in the international system. Nations, understood as cultural units, are not as easily identified. Taking only language as a defining criterion, one could count some 6,000 linguistically defined groups. Many of these groups number so few speakers and are so close to extinction that their future can be discounted. If one turns to other cultural markers, however, from religion (or church) and ethnicity, in the sense of common origins, to “a shared style of expression,” the number of cultural groups may well be almost unlimited. Many such groups would call themselves “nations” as a dignified form of self-designation.

The conventional distinction between Soviet and Western uses of the term democracy juxtaposes socioeconomic against political considerations— that is, for the former the stress is upon social equality and economic security, whereas for the latter it is upon civil liberty and political freedom. The tone and character of the Bolshevik approach to institutions which in the West are associated with liberal, parliamentary democracy can best be captured in the words of Lenin himself:

This article examines the role of ethnicity and ethnic parties as stabilizing factors in Southeast European party systems. It compares two ethnically divided countries in Southeast Europe: Bosnia and Herzegovina, where ethnic identities that form the political cleavage are firm, and Montenegro, where they are malleable. Theoretically, it addresses the debate between scholars who either find stability or instability in East European post-communist party systems. The article traces the role of ethnicity in the formation and development of electoral contests and compares the two cases by utilizing measures of block volatility, based on analysis of official electoral data. We argue that party systems in ethnically diverse countries are stable at the subsystems level, but unstable within them. In BiH, firm ethnic identity stabilizes the party system by limiting competition between blocks, leading to closure. Malleable ethnic identity in Montenegro opens competition to non-ethnic parties seeking to bridge ethnic divisions, leading to more instability. We find that party system dynamics in ethnically divided new democracies depend on identity rigidity and cleavage salience, in addition to levels of heterogeneity.

This article analyzes discursive representations of Lithuania and of Belarus as Lithuania's “Other” in the context of the recent political crisis in Ukraine. Focusing on the media discourse of Lithuanian intellectuals regarding the historical Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) and its legacy, it examines how Belarus and its role vis-à-vis Lithuania have been depicted. The analysis is informed by the discourse-historical approach within critical discourse analysis, using thematic content and argumentation schemes for studying the images ascribed to the GDL, Belarus, and Lithuania in the selected texts. Focus in the discourse of intellectuals on the GDL as a historical homeland is found to shift from history as a scholarly endeavor to the politics of history and the uses of the past in today's political projects. Belarus and the GDL emerge as topics not only historically and politically salient but also potentially dangerous for Lithuania within the setting of the events in Ukraine.

The Kosovo Albanian political movement in the 1990s contained three fluctuating factions with distinct strategies: boycotting Serbian institutions, participating in elections, and resorting to an armed insurgency. This article shows how expectations of external assistance, primarily from the Clinton administration, influenced which strategy was to dominate the movement at certain periods. It also shows how the movement successfully conflated the issues of human rights and the ethnonationalist secessionist agenda, even though the secessionist agenda predated the claims of human rights violations following the rise of Slobodan Milošević to power in Serbia. In the end, the article discusses how the Clinton administration’s failure in the Rambouillet peace talks, the diplomatic result of the NATO attack on Serbia, and the fall of Slobodan Milošević set the foundations for freezing the conflict and turning Kosovo into a parastate.

This article focuses on ideological constructions of contemporary nationalism shaped by the influence of Dmitrii Galkovskii. At the dawn of the Russian Internet, Galkovskii’s website, Samizdat, became the birthplace for intellectuals of contemporary Russian nationalism who emerged around Voprosy natsionalizma magazine and the online magazine Sputnik i Pogrom. Enemification strategies described in this article are understood as forms of self-representation of contemporary Russian nationalism. The goal of this article is to characterize one of the ideologies of contemporary Russian nationalism, which serves as a moral justification for some odious manifestations—xenophobia and racism. Three forces are characterized by contemporary Russian nationalists as the most dangerous challenges for the nation: the West, internal enemies, and migrants. Traditional and fundamental anti-Western rhetoric has turned into Anglophobia in the ideology of contemporary Russian nationalism. The most profound evidence might be found in Galkovskii’s conception of the history of international relations. This idea is also used when defining the internal enemy. Caucasians have taken the place of Russian nationalism’s previous main internal enemies, Jews, and are treated as representatives of the British colonial administration. The third enemy of modern Russian nationalism is migrants. They are seen as tools of the degradation policy toward Russians.

The goal of this exploratory article is to examine the specifics and networks within and between conservative organizations at the local, regional, and national levels in Poland. By investigating these connections in 2016 using social network analysis and interviews, we contribute to a better understanding of the growth and structure of these groups, which created the base for right-wing organizations as well as led to the success of right-wing parties in Poland and vice versa. We expect to find that the majority of far-right organization networks is vertically structured, linking those organizations at the local level with national organizations; those at the top sustain them financially and offer popularity, access to politics, and other opportunities. However, although right-wing organizations care more about the linkages with their national counterparts, we expect to find that those few local organizations that form links with like-minded local organizations emphasize grassroots activities unrelated to participation in political party activities and are less radical and more civil in their behavior and attitudes.

The Ottoman-Turkish historiography has been largely concerned with the economic nationalism of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which consisted of four doctrines: elimination of foreign dominance on the Ottoman economy, removal of non-Muslims from the economic sphere, creation of a Turkish/Muslim bourgeoisie, and rapid industrialization. Through its focus on the economic activities of the Society for the Ottoman Navy, a CUP-affiliated charitable organization with enormous economic power, the present study investigates how the economic policies of the period can be regarded as a practice of economic nationalism. Based on archival material and in dialogue with secondary sources, this article argues that although the Unionist leadership and intelligentsia employed the language of economic nationalism, the operation of the economy in practice was considerably different from its rhetoric. War conditions, the lack of indigenous capital accumulation, and relations of the Ottoman Empire with foreign powers heavily shaped the implementation of the economic nationalism of the CUP.

The 1989/1991 demise of European communist regimes created a powerful impulse for the investigation of memory cultures at Cold War borders and, subsequently, for reflections on the creation of new European border regimes. The four studies included in this special section investigate these two processes on a micro level of their dynamics in new and old borderlands from the perspectives of history, anthropology and political science. At the same time, they explore the relations between the everyday life experience of borderland communities and larger historical and political processes, sometimes going back to the re-drawing of European borders in the aftermath of the First World War.

It is the hybrid nature of borders as at the same time separating and connecting (Anzaldúa 1987; Gupta and Fergusson 1997), as the place where “a transition between two worlds is most pronounced” (Van Gennep 1960 paraphrased in Berdahl 1999, 12) that makes them such an attractive and interdisciplinary site of research. It is of interest to geographers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists (e.g. Donnan and Wilson 1994; Anderson 1997; Ganster et al. 1997; Breysach, Paszek, and Tölle 2003; Wastl-Walter 2010). Daphne Berdahl sees boundaries as “symbols through which states, nations, and localities define themselves. They define at once territorial limits and sociocultural space” (Berdahl 1999, 3). Border research distinguishes between “border,” “bordering,” and “borderland” or “frontier” (the term first defined by Turner 1921). While borders connote a dividing line, borderlands connote an area, and bordering refers to the process of border- and borderland-creation. Borders are established through a three-stage process of allocation, delimitation and demarcation: a territory is first placed (allocated) under the jurisdiction of a government, then an imaginary line is drawn (delimited) on a map, and finally the boundary is marked with physical markers (demarcated) in the terrain (Sahlins 1989, 2). Borderlands or frontier zones are “privileged sites for the articulation of national distinctions” (Sahlins 1989, 271), and as such are places where difference is produced and institutionalized through territorial sovereignty, but also constantly renegotiated by multiple actors.

The existing literature explains the war in Donbas and the rationale for why conflict broke out there while failing to do so in other Ukrainian provinces, such as Odesa or Kharkiv. Local pro-Russian organizations could not attract considerable attention and support in the pre-war period in all parts of Ukraine, except for Crimea. The social marginalization and negligible influence of the pro-Russian organizations among the locals presumably stemmed from their weak social ties among the local population. The question is why they had such weak social embeddedness in the local societies despite relatively popular pro-Russian sympathies in these regions? Surprisingly, nobody has sought to explain the social origins of the pro-Russian movements as a source of their weakness and failure to be sparked by the anti-Ukrainian rebellion in 2014.

Just after becoming the first-ever successful, democratically re-elected President of Russia, Boris Yel'tsin ambitiously called for creating, within the next year, a new ideology that would reflect the new state of affairs in Russia—in essence, he was calling for “re-imagining,” or reinventing, the foundations upon which Russian national community is based. With this directive, Yel'tsin was confirming something that had already become clear to many observers of Russian politics: post-Soviet Russian political life not only continued to resist democratization and pluralism, but also appeared to exhibit signs of discomfort without an officially-sanctioned ideological reference point by which the political players could set their compasses. The Kremlin's quest for a restoration of Russia's credibility as a great power included serious consideration of religion, specifically Russian Orthodoxy, playing a leading role in helping to reformulate an ideology acceptable to diverse communities within Russia in order to replace the now-defunct Marxist–Leninist ideology of the Soviet state. The old French adage “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” seems particularly appropriate for the new Russia in its efforts to regain credibility as a great power, along with the prestige and respect to which it had become accustomed. This article examines the dynamics of the Russian search for a new ideology in order to help restore its credibility as a great power, as suggested by Yel'tsin's call for a new “national idea.” But the search for a new ideology began well before Yel'tsin made this statement, and, therefore, the following discussion focuses on the interplay between religion and politics in this quest, covering the first five years of a reconstituted, post-Soviet Russia, that is, the time period roughly from the collapse of the Soviet Union up to the Duma (parliament) elections of December 1995 and the two-stage presidential elections of June-July 1996.

After first outlining the notion of anti-Semitism, the predominant survey method used for researching it, and the history of the presence and the current (near) absence of Jews in Poland, this article gives the results of different surveys of various kinds of anti-Semitism in this country, including the authors’ own, and discusses the findings of their qualitative study – focus group interviews with members of three different Catholic communities from three different cities. The qualitative study confirmed the hypothesis that imagined and stereotypical rather than real Jews are the objects of modern anti-Semitism in Poland, while real historical and stereotypically perceived Jews are the objects of its religious and post-Holocaust variants. The roots of religious anti-Semitism lie in the not entirely absorbed teachings of the Catholic Church on the Jewish deicide charge. Religious anti-Semitism supports modern and post-Holocaust kinds of anti-Semitism. Modern anti-Semitism is rooted in poor education, lack of interest in the Jewish history of Poland, lack of inter-group contact, and persisting stereotypes of Jews. Among the various Catholic communities of Poles, there are considerable differences in attitudes to Jews. The qualitative study also revealed a methodological deficiency in the standard survey questions intended to measure anti-Semitism, which are sometimes understood as questions about facts rather than about opinions.

The establishment of the Nemzeti Casino (National Casino) in Pest helped establish civil society in nineteenth-century Hungary. Count István Széchenyi, hoping to modernize Hungary on the English model, established the casino in 1827 as a public forum for the Hungarian nobility. By transcending caste divisions between nobles and bourgeois elites, Széchenyi's casino served as an unofficial parliament and stock exchange, and generally helped cultivate Hungarian patriotism. The Pest Casino inspired a nation-wide trend for casinos, which in turn formed a civil society in opposition to Habsburg absolutism. Yet when the casino movement spread to Hungary's minority nationalities, Jews, Slovaks, Romanians, and particularly Croats, the casino also contributed to national divisions in Hungary's ethnically diverse population that affected the course of the 1848 Revolution.

The article addresses the representation of gypsies in Russian television news bulletins and popular drama series over a 15-month period. It seeks first to explain the prominence of the media image of the gypsy relative to the size of the Roma population and second to account for the relationship between fictional and non-fictional modes of representation. Situating itself within the broader field of post-Soviet Russian identity studies and applying qualitative tools differentiated according to the arena of analysis, it looks at questions of lexicon, voice and viewpoint in relation to news and issues of characterization, fictional space and plot with respect to drama. The two apparatuses are linked through a shared emphasis on narrative, and in particular on its dual orientation toward the exceptional (what makes a story worth telling and capable of embracing “difference”) and the typical (what enables it to represent and project “identity”). In its central argument it maps this dual “identity/difference” dynamic onto the gypsy's liminal status as both “of the self” and “of the other”, and its mediatory function: the ability to serve as a proxy for ethno-cultural difference more generally, and to negotiate the tensions between the cultural and racial aspects of ethnicity.

This paper examines the history of the restoration, or more accurately, reconstruction of Bagrati Cathedral in western Georgia. Constructed in 1003, Bagrati Cathedral is an important cultural monument in the political and architectural history of Georgia. Destroyed by an explosion in 1691, the cathedral was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1994 in its ruined state. However, the Georgian government under President Mikheil Saakashvili and Georgian Orthodox Church (GOC) officials made the reconstruction and reconsecration of the cathedral a priority. The reconstruction of Bagrati Cathedral, completed in September 2012, brought the differing aims of Georgian politicians, GOC officials, and architectural historians – the major players in the process – into sharp focus. This paper maintains that the rebuilding of Bagrati Cathedral was part of Saakashvili's political agenda, which merged with the interests of the GOC and worked against the objectives of architectural historians and the aims of academic principles of restoration and preservation. The result is that Bagrati has been rebuilt but is under threat of removal from the World Heritage List. The story of Bagrati's reconstruction has implications for the future of monument preservation and restoration in Georgia.

One of the distinct characteristics of the 1932–1933 famine is that between 65 and 80 percent of all famine-related deaths (direct losses) in rural areas of Soviet Ukraine (UkrSSR) and its oblasts and some regions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) occurred during the first six or seven months of 1933, and that in all oblasts of UkrSSR and some regions of RSFSR the number of famine losses increased by a factor of six to 15 between January and June–July of 1933. The historical explanation of this sudden explosion of deaths is critically examined, and a more comprehensive explanation is proposed. We show that the regional variations in these increases in losses are correlated with four factors: extensive household searches for grain with all food taken away in many instances, closing of inter-republic borders and limitation of internal travel by peasants, resistance to collectivization and grain requisitions and repressions, and the “nationality factor.” Analysis of the monthly dynamics of rural losses during the first half of 1933 suggests a possible independent confirmation of the hypothesis that during the searches for “hidden” or “stolen” grain, all food was taken away in many households.

The Program of the CPSU adopted at the 27th Party Congress (1986) included a guarded reference to the nationality question. It observed that the “nationality question, as it has been inheritedfrom the past, has been successfully solved.” This reference to nationality problems as a remnant of the fading capitalist past was not designed to suggest that problems of a national character have ceased to exist in the Soviet Union today. Gorbachev made this point to the Congress delegates noting: “Our achievements should not create the impression that there are no complications in nationality processes. The contradictions characteristic of all development are unavoidable in this sphere as well.” The violent outbursts of a national character in Kazakhstan in December 1986 provide fresh evidence that ethnic tensions lurk just beneath the surface. These tensions have been held in check largely by the threat of reprisals from central authorities who have regarded meaningful expressions of nationalism as treasonous.