Since the end of the Cold War it has become common for Finnish academics and politicians alike to frame debates about Finnish national identity in terms of locating Finland somewhere along a continuum between East and West. Indeed, for politicians, properly locating oneself (and therefore Finland) along this continuum has often been seen as central to the winning and losing of elections. For example, the 1994 referendum on EU membership was largely interpreted precisely as an opportunity to relocate Finland further to the West. Indeed, the tendency to depict Finnish history in terms of a series of “Westernizing” moves has been notable, but has also betrayed some of the politicized elements of this view. However, this framing of Finnish national identity discourse is not only sometimes politicized but arguably is also too simplified and results in blindness towards other identity narratives that have also been important through Finnish history, and that are also evident (but rarely recognized) today as well. In this article we aim to highlight one of these that we argue has played a key role in locating Finland in the world and in formulating notions of what Finland is about, what historical role and mission it has been understood as destined to play, and what futures for the nation have been conceptualized as possible and as providing a source of subjectivity and national dignity.

This paper examines language policy and language use as identity technologies in the Republic of Tatarstan approximately 23 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although Tatarstan is an autonomous republic politically situated within the Russian Federation, it has its own language policy which was implemented in 1992 and which declares Russian and Tatar as the official state languages having equal status in all spheres of language use. Additionally, as a result of an education policy implemented in 1997, Tatar language learning was made a compulsory subject in schools for all nationalities. This research examines how these policies have legitimized the Tatar identity alongside Russian from the top-down perspective, but how these legitimacies are not reflected from the bottom-up perspective [Graney 1999. “Education Reform in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan: Sovereignty Projects in Post-Soviet Russia.” Europe-Asia Studies 51 (4): 611-632; Yemelianova 2000. “Shaimiev's ‘Khanate’ on the Volga and its Russian Subjects.” Asian Ethnicity 1 (1)]. The focus of this research was to find out how effective these language and education policies as top-down identity technologies have been in post-Soviet Tatar society. An empirical research was carried out in Kazan in 2013 and revealed that asymmetrical bilingualism still prevails in contemporary Tatar society: Russian is used for everyday purposes by all nationalities, whereas Tatar is used as an in-group marker among Tatars within informal settings.

In the summer of 1978, a Crimean Tatar man named Musa Mamut walked out of his home in a small village in the Crimea toward a policeman waiting for him at his front gate. He was to be taken to the station for questioning, and quite possibly arrested for “violation of the passport regime.” But Mamut had already drenched himself with gasoline and, lighting a match, was engulfed in flames. He ran toward the policeman, who ran the other way. A deliveryman tripped Musa, and two friends who had been passing by extinguished the flames. His friends took him to the Simferopol city hospital, where he died six days later, never expressing any regret for what he did.

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union has opened up a Pandora's box of communal conflicts. In most Western analyses the majority of these conflicts are subsumed under the heading “ethnic.” This is often the case also with the conflict in Moldova between the national regime in Chišinàu and the insurgent regime in Tiraspol that controls the left bank of the Dnestr river. To be sure, there is an ethnic component to this conflict, but ethnicity clearly is not the main driving force behind it. While ethnic Moldovans make up approximately 70% of the inhabitants on the right bank, there is no ethnic majority on the left bank: 40% of the population are Moldovans, 25% Ukrainians, and 23% Russians. In fact, the Chišinàu leadership downplays the ethnic component in its standoff with Tiraspol. The values at stake, they insist, are basically political in nature.

It has often been declared that the CPSU cannot cope with the problems of its national minorities because it cannot understand, or rather is not willing to understand, the very nature of the beast. There is much to be said for this proposition, mirrored as it is in the agricultural sphere where Professor Peter Wiles has long insisted that to put a Marxist in a field is to pave the way for famine in no time. The Party in power, from Lenin onwards, has constantly sought to analyze the complex ethnic structure of Russia and the USSR with a view to “solving” it as a problem once and for all. Quite apart from the question of whether there is in fact “a” solution (or even solutions) to such a complex melange of problems, much of what has resulted has been more concerned with the idealistic world as it could be, or should be, rather than with an acceptance of the world as it is.

The solutions adopted have variously involved planned economic development and redistribution to achieve a greater measure of equality and levels of development; temporary federation during the process of adjustment; uniform education and socialization programs; population mixing across boundaries; de facto Russification; and a measure of stick to go with the carrots, as and where necessary.

This article examines the origins of the nonviolent resistance movement in Kosovo in the early 1990s, with the purpose of explaining the dynamics that led to the emergence of the so-called “parallel state” of Kosovo Albanians.

Die Geschichte der deutsch-ukrainischen Beziehungen seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg ist nicht unkompliziert. Mit der deutschen Unkenntnis über die Ukraine paarten sich vom Militär und dem Auswärtigen Amt vertretene Ausbeutungsabsichten, die nur wenig verstellt eine Kolonisierung der Ukraine anstrebten. Ihnen standen bei denselben Instanzen Pläne zur Revolutionierung (und Ausschaltung) des Russischen Reiches zur Seite. Politische Kreise hofften auf eine Mithilfe der “Randvölker” dabei und gewannen deren Nationalisten als Verbündete. Aber ebensowenig wie Alfred Rosenberg im Zweiten Weltkrieg von altruistischen Erwägungen geleitet war, wurde hier auch nur für einen Augenblick der Primat des Eigennutzes außer acht gelassen. Mit den Parteigängern der ukrainischen Selbständigkeit kämpfte zudem auch die “russische Schule” des Otto Hoetzsch, die gemeinsame Interessen der starken Großmächte Rußland und Deutschland postulierte.

David Brandenberger argues that contemporary Russian identity was mainly a result of a “historical accident.” He maintains that this national identity was a product of the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, which is more commonly cited, and that in terms of the state formulating a conception of what it meant to be Russian, the first decade of the Soviet period achieved little. However, by the late 1920s Soviet ideologists began to seek something more appealing than the mundane party slogans and eventually added non-proletarian, historical Russian heroes to the Soviet pantheon, particularly after the purges when the latter group was sorely depleted. This campaign was largely successful in inducing an understanding of national identity from a non-proletarian past as is evident today. He perceives this process as the formation of a Soviet populism, designed to mobilize society “on the mass level” and compares Stalin's USSR with Latin American dictatorships in this regard. Stalin, he argues, “was an authoritarian populist rather than a nationalist.” By 1953, Russians had a much better idea about their identity than in the period before 1937.