On 22 December 1918 Tomáš G. Masaryk delivered his first political message as president of the fledgling Czechoslovakia. Addressing the Constituent Assembly at Hradčany in Prague, he vowed that the frontier districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, which contained a predominantly German-speaking population (and which German nationalists eventually designated collectively as the Sudetenland) would remain in the new Republic. Inimical toward and unwilling to live in a state dedicated to the sovereignty of Czechs and Slovaks, virtually all German leaders at the time of Masaryk's address were working to separate German districts from Czechoslovakia and link them with Austria.

When we talk about Slovenia in Europe, we are talking about a two-way relationship: what does Slovenia mean for Europe? and, what is Slovenia's place in Europe? The first question requires an answer to an additional question: what is Europe, and where is its development leading? As part of Europe, and as a part of its system, Slovenia must also be in harmony with it or, rather, Slovenia's attributes must not be in conflict with those of Europe, otherwise Slovenia would not integrate properly. Europe could not then accept it as a composite part, for Slovenia's development would not align with the direction in which Europe is moving.

In the eyes of the European public, Slovenia is still considered a Catholic country. Since before the last World War, this has had a double meaning. First of all, the Roman Catholic Church has been the leading ecclesiastical institution since the Christianization of the territory settled by Slovenes, decisively influencing the constitution of the cultural and political life of the Slovene nation, as well as its character. In spite of changed social conditions and its fate in the period of “real-socialist” rule from 1945 to 1990, the Church has preserved this role to the present time, although in different forms.

Shortly before the Christmas of 1860, the major bookstores in Prague put on display a German-language booklet entitled Bohemian Sketches: By a Native Writer. Although the book was published anonymously, its author soon became well known: he was Jan Palacký, the son of the prominent historian and leading Czech politician Frantis̆ek Palacký. But even his famous name did not spare the young man from stormy, harsh criticism that followed after the publication of the book. For weeks the newspapers both in Prague and in Vienna scrutinized the rhetorical nuances of the book, pointing out the author's national and political biases. Surprisingly, neither of the Czech-language newspapers, Národní listy nor C̆as, that had recently entered into the public arena, stepped forward in defense of the author. The critical response in the press raises one's curiosity: what was wrong with Jan Palacký's arguments? How could someone so closely connected with Czech national leaders write such a controversial account? Moreover, considering the censorship practices and vigilant police supervision of the time, it is also worth asking how the publication could have escaped the attention of governmental surveillance.

My argument is that one can determine the kinds of conflicts that are likely to occur by looking at the way in which ethnic groups are placed within the work force. There is a large literature on ethnic competition that suggests that conflict is probable when groups come to compete in the same labor, housing, marriage, or other kinds of markets. This literature indicates that four conditions facilitate ethnic conflict.

Marin Pundeff, National Consciousness in Medieval Bulgaria, Reprint from Sudost-Forschungen. Vol. 27 (1968).

A dramatic population increase coupled with a reduction in per capita investment is producing a “demographic cauldron” in Soviet Central Asia. This was the focus of Professor Lewis's December 7 lecture. In his presentation, Professor Lewis outlined the political, economic and social conditions that frame a grim picture for Central Asia. The region is plagued by an unfavorable convergence of factors: a rapidly growing rural population, especially the indigenous population which is concentrated in rural areas, labor surpluses, relatively little rural or northward out-migration, deteriorating economic conditions especially in rural areas and environmental degradation, along with significant social development and, thus, rising expectations and national awareness. At current growth rates, the indigenous, the rural, the total, and the rural working-age populations will double about every generation or less. Besides, there has been little effort on the part of the central government to shift investment and resource allocation priorities to accommodate the demographic changes.

In the spring of 1990, Lithuanians surprised the world by first declaring their independence and then, after Moscow had declared the act illegal, refusing to retract their declaration even in the face of military occupation and economic blockade. Many foreign observers despaired of their “stubbornness,” but the Lithuanians' determination was based on their newly regained national pride as expressed in their concept of statehood (valstybingumas in Lithuanian and gosudarstvennost' in Russian). Lithania, they insisted, had a right and a historical destiny to be an independent state.

The Soviet regime's contention that the nationalities problem has been solved can no longer be taken seriously. At his speech honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the Soviet Union on December 21, 1972, party chief Leonid Brezhnev claimed:

By now … solving the nationalities problem, overcoming the backwardness of previously oppressed nations, is … habitual for the Soviet people. We must remember the scope and complexity of the accomplishments, in order to appreciate the wisdom … of the party, which took upon itself such a task — and accomplished it.

While some groups are discovering new opportunities in the shifting political and economic structures of the former Soviet Union, others are finding that their paths towards upward social mobility have become less clear or blocked. There are also growing regional differences in benefits and losses. Although privileges in the old system often translate into advantages in the new, a contracting economy and the redrawing of political boundaries are altering the social order.

Between 1981 and 1991, Serbian intellectual and political life were energized by a movement to overcome the legacies of the Tito regime. Tito himself had died in 1980, but his political heirs, insecure and unimaginative, had proclaimed that even though Tito was gone, his image would continue to guide and bind the peoples of Yugoslavia: “After Tito—Tito!” In Belgrade, the anti-Titoist movement began as a struggle for free expression. As Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz, one of the leaders of the Committee for the Protection of Artistic Freedom (founded in 1982), said later, all political freedom flows from the right to free speech. Mihiz's commitment to the defense and nurturing of this right was consistent with values he had expressed throughout his career as a literary critic, playwright, and theater director. Yet the movement that he helped found in 1982 would be transformed after 1986 into something less obviously principled and much more visceral, as the issue of Kosovo's fate came to consume Serbia's intellectual elite. The movement for free speech segued into a movement to reclaim Kosovo for Serbia without missing a beat, thanks to the ability of Serbian intellectuals to frame the Kosovo problem as a product of the suppression of open dialogue in Yugoslavia. Kosovo replaced Gojko Djogo, Jovan Radulović, Dušan Jovanović, and other censored Serbian writers as the emotive fulcrum of the anti-Titoist movement in Serbia. The free speech movement was transformed into a movement of rage at the Tito regime's allegedly systematic injustices towards Serbs. Since the wars of Yugoslav succession began in 1991, commentators have conveniently forgotten that what ended up a violent and irrational movement in the late 1980s began in such a reasonable fashion. Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz was the face of the early free speech movement.

On the eve of the October revolution most of Central Asia was a tsarist colony with the exception of the Amaret of Bukhara. Islam as a religion and a way of life had become more and more ibadah (religious ritual) and less and less as a program of action for the ummah. The tsarist functionaries deprived its religious and educational institutions from their major sources of income (the auqāf) and encouraged instead a program of russification through the schools, specially the Russian-Native schools (russkotuzamnaya shkola) and active conversion of the Muslims of Turkestan to Orthodox Christianity through organizations such as the Anti-Muslim Missionary Division (protivo-musul'manskoe missionerskoe otdelenie), of the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy. Aside from these and settlements of the Slav immigrants on the Turkestanis lands by force and without compensation the Tsarist government interfered very little in the Central Asian way of life. Almost all of the religious laws (Shariah) dealing with the domestic matters, and the customary laws of the land (adāt) were kept intact.

Despite the euphoria surrounding the 1989 revolutions, over the past 15 years voices have warned that resurgent nationalism may bring “democracy in dark times” (Isaacs, 1998; Tismaneanu, 1998; Ramet, 1997). Reflecting this fear, a stream of articles has asserted that nationalism in the East is different from the more civic nationalism of the West (Vujacic, 1996; Bunce, 2001; Schöpflin, 2003). If true, these sentiments should be reflected in the constitutions, documents that define the polity and the foundational values of the state in addition to creating the basic institutional order. Debates over religious references in the European Union constitution and the focus on constitutional change by Albanian forces in Macedonia in 2000 serve as reminders of the centrality of constitutions in contention over identity. However, as all constitutions in East Central Europe and the Balkans set out a democratic structure informed by a tangle of national and liberal ideas, they cannot be neatly divided between those which are nationalist and those which are civic, between those which respect minority rights and those which do not. In fact, what is striking about the constitutions is how they combine ideas of liberal individualism, strong democracy, and pluralism.

Many scholars have written on Soviet nationality policies, including language policies. This article does not aspire to add to the general literature of the subject. Rather, it is concerned with one particular decision of the Soviet leadership regarding the periodical press. All information presented here is derived from Soviet sources. Those sources include, first of all, a periodical that is not generally known in the West, which may explain why the decision in question was not noted by foreign observers when it was announced in that particular periodical.

In late February 1947, Stalin's trusted troubleshooter Lazar' Kaganovich arrived in Kiev as the Ukrainian Communist Party's new first secretary. Having served consecutively as the Soviet People's Commissar of Railroad Transport, Heavy Industry, and Construction Materials, the notoriously heavy-handed Kaganovich had earned the epithet of zheleznyi narkom (“iron minister”). His tenure at the head of the Ukrainian party organization in March–December 1947 was marked by intensified coercive intervention in the economy and ideological purges in culture and scholarship. In Ukraine, Kaganovich's brief rule is remembered primarily for his relentless attacks on the alleged remnants of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.” In the works of post-Soviet Ukrainian historians, the 1947 crusade against “nationalism” appears as a comprehensive campaign masterminded by Stalin, planned by his envoy Kaganovich, faithfully implemented by the servile republican functionaries, and submissively endured by the terrorized Ukrainian intellectuals. Clearly, modern Ukrainian historians have adopted the traditional Western concept of Stalinism as a successful totalitarian dictatorship, in which society was no more than a passive object of an all-powerful state.

Youth and their experiences, opinions and attitudes in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter BiH) have typically been left unexamined by both academics and policy makers. Nor is there much attention paid to historical analysis of youth who lived in the socialist period, which could shed some light on the mentality of young generations in present-day BiH. This article provides a historical view of socialist youth in Tito's era, with a special focus on BiH in the late 1980s. The second section provides a survey of how young people live in one of the Yugoslav successor states, BiH, examining the continuity and discontinuity of socio-political and ideological conditions in which youth lived in socialist Yugoslavia. The third section looks at the relationship between youth and the international community, the dynamics of which shed light on common features of both pre- and post-war BiH. Specifically, it will examine the internationally funded and organized “Successor Generation Initiative” (SGI) youth program, which aimed to educate youth in democratic values and develop their leadership skills.

In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson stressed the role that literature, and particularly the development of the novel, actually played in building a nation as an “imagined community.” Others have emphasized how building a national literature has often gone hand in hand with the creation of a national identity (e.g. Thiesse; Jusdanis). All have underlined the strong relationship between nationalism and literature: literature is a concrete tool that builds the nation as a community; literature also serves to build and spread a national identity.