On 27 August 1991 the European Community (EC) resolved to establish a peace conference on Yugoslavia (the Brussels Declaration). Within the framework of the peace conference an Arbitration Commission was established for the purpose of resolving differences between “the relevant authorities” (not specifically identified). The Arbitration Commission consisted of five members, all being presidents of constitutional courts of EC members states and was headed by the French lawyer, Robert Badinter. The Arbitration Commission was subsequently endorsed by the United States (U.S.) and the then Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

All the changes of statehood, political and administrative interventions in the last century have influenced … the national, demographic, cultural, economic and social composition of Istrian villages as well as the coastal towns they surround. Thus it is not strange that today when Istrians discuss borders what they are really discussing is themselves and their identity, strategies for everyday life and the practices with which they have symbolically and physically interpreted the existence of borders on the multicultural and multiethnic territory of Istria.

Major events concerning national minorities continue to occur on a daily basis. Long lingering issues surface throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, often after decades of official denial and repression.

In 1929 a young Communist activist named A. Nurkhat traversed Central Asia gathering information about grassroots-level party social work and propaganda among indigenous women. An Uzbek woman who converted to Bolshevism, Nurkhat accepted the social and political reasons for the regime's push to win the support of local women in its struggle against traditional ways of life. Seeking to document these efforts, she traveled to nomadic regions and followed a “red yurt” expedition. Over one hundred red yurts operated across Kazakstan, providing literacy programs, medical treatment, and legal counseling to remote nomadic areas. When Nurkhat visited one red yurt, a Kazak man from a nearby village rushed in seeking help for his wife, who had endured more than a day in labor. The local baqsy (shaman) had been unable to induce birth and the family desperately sought help from the red yurt's nurse, an ethnic Russian, who was able successfully to deliver a healthy baby. Afterward, Nurkhat asked the red yurt's nurse, “What is the Kazak women's attitude to [Western] medical treatment?” The nurse responded,

Konrad Henlein founded the Sudeten German Heimatfront (SHF) in October 1933 and in less than a year and a half it would become the largest party in the First Czechoslovak Republic. This achievement is all the more remarkable in light of the initiative undertaken by the Czech and German Social Democrats, as well as the Communists to have the SHF banned in the year before the elections. This initiative would most likely have succeeded had the matter not been referred to Czechoslovakia's ailing President, Tomáš Masaryk. After the state had banned both the Sudeten German Nazi and Nationalist parties on account of their alleged ties to Hitler, Masaryk concluded one month before the 19 May 1935 general elections that the SHF should be allowed to campaign.1 Masaryk, however, mandated that the Heimatfront must change its name to the more democratic “Sudeten German Party” (SdP). Despite the specter of a ban that still haunted the party in the month before the election, the SdP succeeded in transforming itself from a political pariah into a majority German party by using the legal protections and security forces of Czech democracy to wage a legalistic campaign against the state. In light of this stunning success, how then did the party leadership perform this act of political alchemy and what strategies did it deploy in campaigning against the state?

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.