On the north wall of Cracow's Church of the Annunciation (better known as the Carmelite Church at Piaski) hangs a long-ignored inscription. A simple stone tablet unprotected from the elements, its words have faded over the past century. One must strain to make out its cryptic message: “On September 11, 1883, Polish villagers gathered in Cracow solemnly celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the relief of Vienna by John Sobieski, in remembrance of which this stone has been funded.”

Les événements dramatiques qui ont secoué l'Europe durant dix années à la suite du démembrement de la Yougoslavie, surtout le dernier épisode retentissant qui a affronté les Serbes et les Albanais pour le droit sur le Kosovo, ont impliqué aussi l'ensemble de la communauté internationale pour la défense d'un certain modèle de société et de relations entre groupes ethniques. Les opinions publiques en revanche, abasourdies par les bruits médiatiques et intellectualistes, n'ont toujours pas saisi la signification et les raisons du conflit, que tout le monde espère voir finir une fois pour toutes avec ce dernier et final épisode sanglant. En intégrant l'approche anthropologique aux considérations historiques et géopolitiques sur la région et la culture albanaise, cet article tentera de poser une question qui me paraît essentielle pour la compréhension des phénomènes actuels, à savoir si l'héritage historique et les identités culturelles peuvent raisonnablement, sinon justifier, au moins expliquer les conflits ethniques et le nationalisme, ou si au contraire ils servent tout simplement à déterminer et au mieux à rationaliser les relations interethniques entre groupes sociaux.

Iran is a multi-ethnic society in which approximately 50% of its citizens are of non-Persian origin, yet researchers commonly use the terms Persians and Iranians interchangeably, neglecting the supra-ethnic meaning of the term Iranian for many of the non-Persians in Iran. The largest minority ethnic group in Iran is the Azerbaijanis (comprising approximately a third of the population) and other major groups include the Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis and Turkmen. Iran's ethnic groups are particularly susceptible to external manipulation and considerably subject to influence from events taking place outside its borders, since most of the non-Persians are concentrated in the frontier areas and have ties to co-ethnics in adjoining states, such as Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

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.

In 1903, former mayor Dr Jan Podlipný used these words to petition the Prague City Council to finance a nationalist festival dedicated to the memory of Jan Hus. Arguing for a celebration devoted to the fifteenth-century priest and church reformer who had become a nationalist icon in the nineteenth century, Podlipný emphasized the “memorable” quality of the planned event.2 Indeed, the purpose of the celebration was to create memory on several levels. The festival itself would gather Czechs in great numbers, creating a memory of a shared community, which would bolster the Czech nationalist spirit for future campaigns. The festival's purpose was to lay a cornerstone to a Jan Hus Memorial, a monument that would etch a permanent memory of Jan Hus into Prague's landscape. Last, by publicly and collectively commemorating Hus, Czech nationalists would create a shared memory of the nation's past.

The First World War represents a watershed in European women's history. The process of female integration into the industrial economy was both speeded up and given official endorsement as the massive mobilization of soldiers created great manpower shortages. The war seemed to accelerate and legitimate the process of female political integration as well, as most postwar European governments met the basic aims of the women's suffrage movement. Despite these advances, the First World War and the interwar years comprised an era which was fraught with conflicts over women's roles, rights, and responsibilities.

In Russia, the memory of the Second World War has been at once deeply personal and profoundly political. Largely erased from official memory until Stalin's death, the story of the war became, in the 1960s, a key means of legitimizing the Soviet state. The mythic “20 million”—more recent estimates are closer to 30 million war dead—became the heart of a lasting and state-sanctioned collective memory of shared suffering, patriotism, and redemption. As historian Nina Tumarkin has argued, the official “cult” of the war began to crumble in the mid-1980s, and what she calls “raw human memory,” personal stories untainted by the myth created from above, began to emerge. Tumarkin contends that the “winds of glasnost' and perestroika” effectively “ravaged” both the state-sanctioned “myth” and the “shared memory” of the Great Patriotic War. Personal tragedies began to replace the official tale of national triumph.