This article focuses on Miroslav Hroch's book titled Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe and it tries to build on Hroch's model of small nation-formation mainly on a methodological level. The aim is to incorporate the “subjective” dimension in Hroch's analysis of the “objective” factors that lead to nation-formation, by opening up the discursive level to investigation. I suggest that the comparative study of nation-formation needs to remain connected to the study of nationalism as a phenomenon, including the investigation of the discursive plane, of the political languages, and histories of concepts. In this sense, the article seeks to link Hroch's work to Begriffsgeschichte and to present a range of interpretations on how these two could work together, on a methodological level. The answers come mainly from Reinhart Koselleck's theorizing on the relation between social history and the history of concepts. This article also addresses compatibility problems that aim to encourage a more integrative type of analysis that would entail an in-depth and critical revisiting of Hroch's model. At the same time, Hroch's model proves to be flexible enough to be situated at the intersection of more types of history writing.

This article proposes to look afresh at the legacies of communism in urban spaces in post-1989 Poland. Specifically, it investigates the fate of Red Army monuments and explores how these public spaces have been used in the multifaceted and multileveled process of post-communist identity formation. The article suggests that Red Army monuments constitute sites for the articulation of new narratives about the country's past and future which are no longer grounded in the fundamental division between “us” (the nation) and “them” (the supporters of communism) and which are far from being fixed in the binary opposition of the banished and the embraced past. The reorganization of public memory space does not only involve contesting the Soviet past or affirming independence traditions but is rather the outcome of multilayered processes rooted in particularities of time and space. Moreover, the article argues that the dichotomy “liberator versus occupier,” often employed as a viable analytical tool by scholars investigating the post-communist memorial landscape, impedes our understanding of the role played by Soviet war memorials in the process of re-imagining national and local communities in post-1989 Eastern Europe.

This article explores the implications of monolithic notions of “East” and “West” for security within ethno-religiously diverse nation-states. It builds on literature within critical geopolitics by recognizing not only that homogeneous notions of the “West” and its “Others” were formed for the purpose of legitimizing ideological and physical contestations of geographical space, and that they continue to operate, but also that this has made nation-states substantially less secure at the intra-state level. Travel accounts by Western European and American travellers to Turkey from 1989 onwards are used as data to explore this. The content of these accounts mirrors the wider East–West discourse; considered together with Turkey's popularly described position “at the crossroads” of Europe and Asia, the texts lend themselves to salient discussion of identity, culture, and difference between the hegemonic “West” and its “Others.” The post-1989 decolonized, post-Cold War period enables us to work within a contemporary context in which the opening of geographical space has occurred, and allows us to test whether “Western” identity in its hegemonic form of Western Europe and the US has evolved to accommodate this new context.

This article examines Yugoslav national programs of ruling political elites and its concrete implementation in education policy in interwar Yugoslavia. It is argued that at the beginning of the period Yugoslavism was not inherently incompatible with or subordinate to Serbian, Croatian or to a lesser degree Slovenian national ideas. However, the concrete ways in which Yugoslavism was formulated and adopted by ruling elites discredited the Yugoslav national idea and resulted in increasing delineation and polarization in the continuum of national ideas available in Yugoslavia. Throughout the three consecutive periods of political rule under scrutiny, ruling elites failed to reach a wider consensus regarding the Yugoslav national idea or to create a framework within which a constructive elaboration of Yugoslav national identity could take place. By the end of the interwar period, the Yugoslav national idea had become linked exclusively to conservatism, centralism, authoritarianism and, for non-Serbian elites at least, Serbian hegemony. Other national ideas gained significance as ideas providing viable alternatives for the regime's Yugoslavism.

Although most contemporary theories of nationalism and identity formation rest on some form of social constructivism, few theorists of nationalism and identity formation interrogate social constructivism as a social construction – a social science concept “imposed” on the non-self-consciously constructivist behaviors of people, who generally do not believe they are engaging in construction. Since social constructivism – unless it is a metaphysics about what is real – is really about the concept of social construction, the first task of constructivists is to ask not how various populations have engaged in social construction but how social construction should be defined. As this article shows, constructivism is at best a run-of-the-mill theoretical approach – perfectly respectable, but no different from any other theoretical approach in the social sciences. It is only when social constructivism makes outlandishly radical claims – that all of reality or all of social reality is constructed – that it is unusual, exciting, and wrong.

This paper posits that a great deal of cross-national variation in clientelistic investment strategies can be explained through an examination of the different forms of risk faced by the political elite of different types of regimes. It also maintains that demand from clients/potential clients is, by itself, insufficient to explain the level or scope of clientelistic investments. The argument is advanced through an examination of the linkages (and non-linkages) between patrons/potential patrons and clients/potential clients amongst the ethnic Uzbek populations of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. In Kyrgyzstan, a semi-authoritarian state, electoral risk predominates; however, the character of electoral risk in Kyrgyzstan provides Uzbek members of the political elite with an incentive to diversify their clientelistic investments. Consequently, many engage in direct exchanges with their constituents while simultaneously investing in private, cultural organizations that serve party-like functions. Alternatively, in contemporary Tajikistan, best described as an authoritarian state, electoral risk has been replaced with the risk of expulsion from the presidential clientelistic network. As a result, members of the Tajikistani political elite have a disincentive to publicly invest in constituent clients as this investment may increase the risk of expulsion.

National identity is constructed through successive identifications with significant Others. This article discusses the phenomenon of change and continuity in Czech identity. It is focused here on the identification towards the EU, which has become the most significant Other of today in two ways: (a) (change) contributing to overcoming the identity crisis provoked by the drastic changes that occurred between 1989 and 1993 (change of regime, disappearance of the USSR and the break-up of Czechoslovakia), and therefore the subsequent drastic changes in relations with past significant Others: communism, the USSR, and the Slovaks; and (b) (continuity) reaffirming one of the fundamental elements during the national revival in the nineteenth century, democracy, upon which the various identifications towards the EU have been aligned. According to the differing interpretations of what democracy means, and three other criteria of the “levels of Othering,” the EU has been “imagined,” on the one hand, as an entity where Czechs can flourish in their identity and ensure their freedom and democratic values (positive Other), and, on the other, as an “oppressor” entity which portrays democratic deficit, restricts freedom, and threatens Czech national identity (negative Other).

This article asks why a popular bar named after a criminal Soviet secret police organization has not provoked the outrage of the developed world's intellectual and artistic elites, who would surely condemn an SS Bar. It attributes this moral blindness to the Holocaust's centrality in Israeli, German, and American national discourse and the resultant binary morality that ascribes collective innocence to all Jews at all times and in all places and collective guilt to all Germans – and potentially to all non-Jews – at all times and in all places. The moral logic of the Holocaust thus transforms Jews into victims and non-Jews into victimizers; the moral logic and reality of the Gulag transform everybody into both victim and victimizer. The binary morality of the Holocaust insists that all human beings be heroes; the fuzzy morality of the Gulag recognizes that all humans are just humans constantly confronted by moral ambiguity. But because the Gulag's moral ambiguity concerns non-Jews and Jews, the Gulag undercuts binary morality. The Holocaust and the Gulag are not just incompatible moral tales; they are incompatible and intersecting moral tales. As a result, they cannot co-exist. We therefore fail to respond to the KGB Bar because to recognize the Gulag as a mass murder worthy of categorical moral condemnation would be to challenge the sacred status of the Holocaust. Ironically, the KGB Bar is possible precisely because an SS Bar is impossible.

This article presents the history of Belarusian national development in the light of Miroslav Hroch's theory and demonstrates how the initial process of national awakening typical for small nations in eastern and central Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century described by M. Hroch continued under Soviet rule after the Bolshevik revolution. Changes which were brought to Belarusian society together with socialist modernization in the Soviet state constituted “Phase D” (a term coined by Terry Martin) in Belarusian nation-building. As the history of Belarusian nation-formation illustrates, Hroch's scheme of three phases of national movements within small nations ignored a specific mode of small nations’ development in a multiethnic state and within the socialist formation. At the same time, the question about the status of the Soviet era's achievements in Belarusian national development appears to be an important issue for understanding the current political development in the country.

As “music of commitment,” in the period from the late 1970s to the late 1980s rock music in Yugoslavia had an important purpose of providing a popular-cultural outlet for the unique forms of socio-cultural critique that engaged with the realities and problems of Yugoslav society. The three “music movements” that embodied the new rock'n'roll spirit – New Wave, New Primitives, and New Partisans – used rock music to critique the country's “new socialist culture,” with the purpose of helping to eliminate the disconnect between the ideal and the reality of socialist Yugoslavia. This paper examines the New Partisans as the most radical expression of music of commitment through the works of its most important rock bands: Bijelo dugme, Plavi orkestar, and Merlin. The paper's argument is that the New Partisans’ socio-cultural engagement, animated by advocacy of Yugoslavism, was a counter-logic to the nationalist dissolution of a distinctly Yugoslav fabric of a socialist community in crisis. Thus, the movement's revolutionary “spirit of reconstruction” permeating its “poetics of the patriotic” was a mechanism of socio-cultural resistance to political, cultural and moral-ethical de-Yugoslavization of Yugoslav society. Its ultimate objective was to make the case that the only way into the future – if there was to be any – rested on strategic reanimation of the Partisan revolutionary past as the only viable socio-cultural foundation of the Yugoslav socialist community.

V.P. (Chip) Gagnon, Jr. (2004, 2010) has provided a useful corrective to what he has called the “Myth of Ethnic War,” the notion that what was Yugoslavia was torn apart by primeval communal hatreds. He is not alone in this. Maria Todorova's variation on Edward Said's “Orientalism” take on the same question, and edited volumes put together by Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić and by Raymond Detrez and Pieter Plas have also attacked the problem posed when public intellectuals and politicians paint a crude caricature of Balkan history. The readers of this journal no doubt have their own favorites when it comes to the sport of bashing this particular myth.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a body of scholarship arose which effectively bypassed Miroslav Hroch's work on the emergence of small nations. Rogers Brubaker, Yuri Slezkine and Ronald Suny, among others, persuasively argued that Soviet nationalities policies shaped the ethnogeographic make-up of the post-Soviet space some sixty or seventy years later: it had become literally almost unimaginable to conceive of national affiliation outside of institutionalized forms. This analysis also convincingly accounted for the relative weakness of ethnic Russian identity in contrast to the assertive nationalism of non-Russian nationalities around the time of the USSR's collapse. The Kuban’ Cossacks – an ethnocultural community in the south of Russia – never had official recognition as a Soviet nationality. Hroch's framework can be applied to show their clearly national characteristics and, indeed, their progress towards nationhood around the turn of the twentieth century. By reclaiming Hroch's framework for the post-Soviet context, and combining it with later scholarship, we are able to identify this process for the first time, and thus further refine our understanding of the nation-formation processes within Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The military had been concerned about military patriotic education for a long time when Putin's Patriotic Education Programme was published. As soon as the collapse of the Soviet Union occurred, followed a few years later by the creation of the Russian armed forces, they had already been developing patriotic education programmes aimed primarily at youth, aided by veterans of local wars, both volunteers and recruits. The aim of this article is to show that the military version of patriotic education aims openly to encourage military service, and that the Russian state will try to enlist veterans of the Afghanistan and Chechen wars in activities linked to military patriotic education and its spread in military and civilian spheres. Our hypothesis is that the determination to bring veterans together around a common project has two aims: (1) to federate veterans around the authorities and (2) to channel a population that escapes government control and some of whose excesses on their return to civilian life (violence towards the population in the context of their function, for veterans of the Interior Ministry in particular) have darkened the image of the ministries known as the “power” ministries.

Research on diasporic youth identities in the British and American context has stressed hybridity, heterogeneity and multiplicity. This paper draws upon ethnographic research undertaken with Armenian girls to explore some of the tensions and ambivalences of negotiating diasporic identities in the Russian context. Diasporic identities are constructed through gender, and this paper illustrates how research participants negotiate their identities in relation to both belonging to the Armenian community and wider Russian society. At the same time, this paper examines how research participants draw differently on diasporic identifications in order to overcome tensions and ambivalences in their everyday lives. The paper shows that research participants are not inclined to reject their cultural roots in favor of new hybrid identities, but are able to recognize and appropriate different cultures in their identity negotiations.

David Kanin's comment on my article “Yugoslavia in 1989 and after” indicates some fundamental misunderstandings of my argument in the article as well as in my book The Myth of Ethnic War.

The study of nationalism encompasses so many themes that scholarly communication between different subfields has become difficult. Scholars might facilitate comparison by acknowledging different types of nationalism, but an overview of various taxonomies of nationalism shows that binary taxonomies have a problematic normative subtext, while most non-binary taxonomies have failed to reach a broad audience. Miroslav Hroch, who intended his A-B-C phases to schematize non-state national awakening, also devised a taxonomy of nationalism. Hroch's work has influenced nationalism scholars mostly through its phase theory of how individual national movements develop over time. While other phase theorists have proposed similar schema, Hroch's work has attracted such a wide audience that it provides scholars with a solution to the problem of inter-disciplinary communication: it offers a useful terminology for classifying and describing various sorts of nationalism.