This article discusses how the legendary general Yue Fei (1103–1142) and his legacy have been perceived and appropriated in Chinese history. Twentieth-century historians approached Yue's career by highlighting the tension between his dedication to the nation (baoguo) and his personal loyalty (jinzhong) to Emperor Gaozong (1107–1187) of the Song. I argue that for Yue Fei himself and those who wrote about him in late imperial China, Yue's guo, from which he derived his political identity and toward which he devoted his service, meant first and foremost the Song dynastic state. The pushing and pulling of multivalent themes of loyalty and state service in the “historic assessment” of Yue Fei since the turn of the twentieth century speak to the complexities embedded in different Chinese governments’ navigation of ethnic and class politics in their pursuit of a new national identity for China.

How do citizens interpret contentious symbols that pervade their community? And what downstream effects does state protection of these symbols have on how citizens of different backgrounds feel they belong in their community? We approach these questions through the lens of race and Confederate monuments in the American South. We rely on two original surveys to illustrate 1) the symbolic meanings Americans attach to these monuments and 2) how state protection of them impacts residents’ feelings of belonging. We find that perceptions of Confederate monuments vary by race: White U.S. residents are drastically less likely to perceive them as symbolic of racial injustice than are Black U.S. residents. Further, state protection of Confederate monuments leads to a diminished sense of belonging among Blacks, while leaving Whites unaffected. This research moves beyond scholarship examining simple support for or opposition toward contentious symbols, developing a deeper understanding of what meaning those symbols can hold for individuals and what their impacts are on individuals’ feelings of belonging and engagement in their communities.

The article dwells upon the use of the symbol of the “Motherland” in the legitimation and delegitimation of power. The Motherland symbolizes the matters that are essential for legitimacy-seeking: the unity of Russia, its territory and sacredness of its borders, the most important events of its history, the “authentic Russianness,” and multi-ethnic peace in the country. The author argues that the Motherland serves as an important factor of the legitimation of power in contemporary Russia, which allows the authorities to have high popularity both in domestic and foreign policies. This symbol is also actively exploited by the opposition; one mode of the delegitimation of power through using the symbol of Motherland (the “populist” mode) implies the symbolic struggle for possessing this symbol, or for the right to speak on behalf of the Motherland, while another one (the “liberal” mode) implies the desacralization of the “Motherland” and deconstruction of the practices of employing the symbol by the authorities.

We present the results of a 2014 survey of Canadian parliamentarians, journalists and bloggers in which respondents were asked to rank competing definitions of open government. Overall, respondents preferred to define open government in terms of access to information and sources. However, controlling for age, ideology and language, we also found that respondents in the different positions ranked definitions of open government differently. Journalists are more likely than any other group to define open government in terms of access to information and sources. In contrast, parliamentarians who were members of a governing party were as likely to choose definitions of open government that emphasized public participation as they were to choose definitions that emphasized access to information. Opposition parliamentarians share more similarities with government parliamentarians than with journalists. These results suggest that key actors in the Canadian policy landscape define open government in ways that are consistent with their institutional interests. We suggest that these results reflect ways in which open government operates more like a buzzword, which helps explain the common pattern whereby opposition parties make promises to be more open and, after taking power, operate in less open ways. Moreover, these results raise questions about the extent to which open government can actually operate as an organizing principle.

This article examines how rebel Serbs in Croatia reinterpreted narratives of World War Two to justify their uprising against the democratically elected Croatian government in 1990 and gain domestic and international legitimacy for the Republika Srpska Krajina (RSK) parastate. While scholars have written about the strategies nationalist elites used regarding controversial symbols and the rehabilitation of World War Two collaborators in Croatia and other Yugoslav successor states, the RSK's “culture of memory” has received little attention. Based on documents captured after the RSK's defeat in 1995, this article shows that it was not only the government of Franjo Tudjman that rejected the Partisan narratives of “Brotherhood and Unity,” but a parallel process took place among the leadership in the Krajina. Ultimately the decision to base the historical foundations of the Croatian Serbs’ political goals on a chauvinist and extremist interpretation of the past resulted in a criminalized entity that ended tragically for both Serbs and Croats living on the territory of the RSK.

Politics in Hungary since 1989 has been focusing on nation-building. Each government has had a license to articulate what it is to be Hungarian, in the public realm with public funds. While current political debates are heated and focus yet again on defining Hungarian national identity, this article takes a distance from contemporary politics. It studies a situation ten years earlier, when the current government party Fidesz -which took a landslide victory in the 2010 general elections after eight years of socialist-liberal government - was in office for the first time from 1998 to 2002. Exploring the debate from the perspective of architecture, it reveals how Fidesz sought to mark their space and express their sense of nationhood in Budapest around the millennium. Beside publicly sponsored institutions and commemoration, architectural forms became contested as they were used to express nationality. The National Theatre, Millennium Park and House of Terror Museum, each broke with the urban flow in the left-leaning metropolis while representing the Fidesz discourse on Hungary. The article, besides analyzing postcommunist nation-building, reflects on the interconnection between architecture, politics and memory in an urban symbolic landscape. It discusses how myths of nationhood can be represented in the cityscape.