Between March and October of 1942, Slovakia deported the majority of its Jews to extermination camps in German-occupied Poland. Since then, critics and apologists of the nominally independent Nazi satellite state have argued bitterly over who was to blame. Did the Slovaks act voluntarily or under German pressure? If the latter, were they in any position to do otherwise? With equal vigor, the two sides have clashed over whether the Slovaks realized they were participating in genocide, whether they acted to limit or stop the deportations once the truth came out, and whether, compared with other German-occupied or German-allied countries, Slovakia succeeded in saving a relatively high percentage of its Jewry.

This paper examines the interplay between internal and external actors in the process of democratization and state-building in Albania and Kosovo. It does so by using David J. Smith's “quadratic nexus” that links Brubaker's “triadic nexus” – nationalizing states, national minorities and external national homelands – to the institutions of an ascendant and expansive “Euro-Atlantic space”. The main argument of this paper is twofold. First, it argues the nexus remains a useful framework in the study of state-and nation-building provided that it moves beyond the “civic vs. ethnic” dichotomy. Today, many states with a mixture of civic and multi-ethnic elements involve this relational nexus. Second, while comparing Albania and Kosovo, this paper argues that all the four elements of the nexus have a different impact on the process of state- and nation-building and their relationship is more conflictual in Kosovo than in Albania.

Dissent in the USSR has become a phenomenon which cannot be ignored either in the West or in the USSR. The authorities in the USSR, though upset, are compelled to recognize the existence of dissidents in the country and the troubles they cause. The attempts to stifle dissent which are mainly in the form of harsh and repressive measures undertaken by the authorities generally fail to achieve the desired results. The dissidents according to circumstances prevailing change the tactics of their struggle, but the phenomenon of dissent — the resistance to the regime — continues.

The radical right in the Ukrainian political spectrum is dominated by three movements—the Nationalist Union Ukrainian State Independence (DSU), the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA, formerly the Ukrainian Inter-Party Assembly, UMPA) and the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (KUN). The UNA is dominated by the highly secretive Ukrainian Nationalist Union (UNS) which grew out of the nationalist wing of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Youth (SNUM). The KUN was launched in 1992 in Ukraine as the overt arm of the émigré Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera faction (known commonly as OUN revolutionaries, or OUNr).

Republican reforms are an interesting topic, especially for those of us who have despaired of the prospect for any real market reforms by the central government. The last year has provided a ray of hope. The governments in the Baltics, Armenia, the RSFSR, and later Kazakhstan, all announced plans for privatization and the creation of a market system that extended well beyond those of the central government. Whereas central initiatives—there now appear to be far too many to name—over the last two years appeared to be halting and indecisive, the vitality of the republic sovereignty campaigns suggests that economic transformation has much better prospects at the grass-roots. We all know some of the evidence that exists for this: the fact that, in the Baltics for example, the rate of formation of cooperatives has been much higher, almost twice as high as the average for the rest of the Soviet Union; that in Estonia, the percentage of joint ventures far outweighs the share of Estonia's contribution to the Soviet GNP, and so on. We know that the RSFSR went ahead and adopted the 500-day plan, or at least announced that it was doing so, even after the Shatalin plan was rejected at the national level.

Recent unrest and the 2014 elections have corroborated the impression of Bosnia as a failing state, one that is constantly being undermined by the three-way impasse between constituent ethnic groups of Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. Major history museums in Bosnia, however, provide a more complex picture. This paper analyzes museums and exhibitions on twentieth-century history in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Jajce, with regard to their narrative strategies, their aesthetic appearance, and the commemorative practices in their respective locations. From this perspective, the use of history in building group identity in Bosnia is far from coherent. Although museums are one means to assert firmly entrenched national identities both old and new, they compete at the same time with nostalgic commemorations of socialist Yugoslavia and with equally nostalgic references to the Austrian occupation. Various civic groups struggle to assert their visions of belonging, mostly with rather modest financial means. Based on these findings, this paper will explore not only the underlying assumptions of what history and, in particular, museums are all about, but also how visions of the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina are inscribed in these uses of history – if indeed they are.

This chapter is concerned with the swift and unexpected political and social breaks that occurred at the end of the eighties in Eastern and Central Europe and which we have been experiencing as necessary, inevitable, foreseen but delayed. A simultaneous, particularly media-created analysis, has characterized them as a “peaceful revolution,” but at least two questions arise.

At the beginning of his political career, Count Kuno Klebelsberg, the remarkable future Hungarian Minister of Culture and Education of the 1920s, prepared a statement on emigration from Hungary for Prime Minister Kálmán Széll in 1902. “[W]e must correct a great and general mistake, that might unfortunately lead to disappointment,” Klebelsberg warned the PM. “Unwilling to make a distinction among people from the point of view of nationality, we call everybody residing in Hungary a Hungarian. This is how it became fashionable to speak of 'the emigration of Hungarians' when emigration was discussed, giving the general public, unaccustomed to making distinctions, the mistaken belief that we are talking about the emigration of Hungarians who speak the native tongue. This is why the return of the emigrants and corresponding official arrangements are demanded. The case is different, however. The two largest contingents contributing to the [“Hungarian”] emigration are Slovaks and Ruthenes.”

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN, came into being in 1929 as an “integral nationalist” movement that set itself the goal of driving Polish landowners and officials out of eastern Galicia and Volhynia, joining hands with Ukrainians in other countries, and establishing an independent state. The OUN defined Jews, along with Russians and Poles, as aliens and enemies. There was no need, wrote an OUN ideologist in 1929, to list all the injuries that Jews caused Ukrainians. “In addition to a number of external enemies Ukraine also has an internal enemy … Jewry and its negative consequences for our liberation cause can be liquidated only by an organized collective effort”. The article examines archival documents, publications by OUN members, and recent scholarly literature to trace the evolution of OUN thinking about Jews from 1929 through the war years, when the German occupation of Ukraine gave the OUN an opportunity to stage pogroms and persecute Jews, and the prime minister of the state that the OUN proclaimed wrote that he supported “the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine”.