The development of university courses and programs in Ukrainian studies is a recent phenomenon in the ninety-year-old history of Ukrainians in Canada. It begins only with the end of World War II and coincides with the influx of the postwar immigration. Not only did this newest Ukrainian-Canadian population provide the bulk of the teaching staff for Ukrainian programs, but also the development of courses and programs was greatly stimulated by the educational needs of the various generations in this sector of the Ukrainian population. Prior to 1945, university courses in Ukrainian studies did not exist at Canadian universities. In evaluating the late arrival of Ukrainian studies on Canadian campuses, one should not lose sight of the fact that Slavic studies in this country are a relatively new development, stimulated by the last war and in particular by the need to deal with the Soviet allies. The first courses in the Russian language were introduced only in 1943, at Carleton College and Dalhousie University. The development of Ukrainian programs quickly followed the instroduction of Russian studies in Canada.

History is one of the many instruments available for the persuasive construction of a nation. In Moldova, the Party of the Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM), in office from 2001 to 2009, advocated for a Soviet-based version of the Moldovan nation. This “Moldovanism” boasted of the existence of a “Moldovan People” and was relied upon to justify the independence of the former Romanian province. Vladimir Voronin, the party's leader and president of the Republic during this period, promoted this “civic” Moldovan nation and created what seemed to be a coherent and ad hoc construction of an independent Moldovan nation.

This paper focuses on communist political discourse during this eight year period. Through the use of Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper focuses on the discursive construction of the Moldovan nation. It is based on Voronin's official speeches and messages from key occasions such as Independence Day and Victory Day.

This paper demonstrates the varied use of history in these speeches which improves understanding of the process of the construction of a nation. Moreover, it demonstrates that this construction, far from being coherent, was also sometimes contradictory. Indeed, discourse was adapted to the immediate context and audience. Finally, the paper explains how an explicitly “civic” discourse can be implicitly and, sometimes even explicitly, “ethnic” and “exclusive”.

Economic nationalism was an important element of political conflict between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia. As the Czechs developed their own (avowedly national) industrial and financial base, they not only competed with the Germans in an economic sense, but they also challenged German Bohemians' prominence in business associations and in local and provincial government. While the Czechs embraced an “optimism of work,” German Bohemians felt a need to defend their economic superiority.

Nation-building is a process which is often contested, not just among different ethnicities within a nation-state, but also among the titular ethnic majority. This article explores the contested nature of the nation-building process in post-Soviet Kazakhstan through examining cinematic works. Utilizing a post-modern perspective which views nations and national identity as invented, imagined and ambivalent it identifies four discursive strands within recent post-Soviet Kazakh cinema pertaining to nationhood and national identity (ethno-centric, civic, religious and socioeconomic). Rather than viewing government-sponsored efforts of identity formation in cinema as a top-down process in which the regime transmits its version of nationhood and identity, the discursive strands revealed in this article illustrate there are varying understandings of what constitutes the nation and national identity in Kazakh cinematic works. Furthermore, the strand which focuses on the socioeconomic tensions of modern nation-building in Kazakhstan uncovers how film is used as a site for dissent and social critique of Kazakhstan's modern political condition. What the article illuminates is how discourses related to nation-building can be both competing and complementary and that nation-building is a fluid and transgressive process in which among the titular majority there is no fixed unambiguous understanding of nationhood and national identity.

This article uses ideological criticism to examine how and why victimage, identity and nationalism are produced through everyday discursive practices of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. Wander contends that the ideological turn in criticism confronts and studies what is professed and obscure, and Greene argues that part of this criticism involves unmasking forms of domination. Examining cultural or rhetorical narratives is part of ideological criticism. The narratives in this study can be regarded as competing vernacular memories representative of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. The participants invoke personal and collective memories with official national histories to explain contemporary victimization as a continuance of historical victimage. This use of the past can serve to legitimize their national and political claims, as well as to justify violence against the other group, since historical victimage provides a rationale for hating the other group and perpetuating a vicious cycle of violence.

Like the declarations of the newly empowered republican elites in Jeffrey Kahn's text, murky notions of federalism, democracy, sovereignty and the rule of law mar current debates about Russian federalism. Lacking some foundational understanding of these concepts as applied to the Russian context, analysts neither agree on the nature of the problems nor the potential means to resolve them and analyses frequently degenerate into subjective judgments about the intentions of political actors involved in the institution-building process. Jeffrey Kahn's Federalism, Democratization, and the Rule of Law in Russia comes the closest of any currently available work to providing a framework for discussions of Russian federal reform by tracing the development of contemporary Russian federalism and attempting to place it within a carefully constructed federal typology. In this respect, this work is essential reading for anyone interested in issues of federalism and post-Soviet Russia.

At the beginning of the 1930s, Portuguese political elites were committed to the recovery of the “lost glory” of the era of the so-called Portuguese Discoveries, a past age which was (and still is) often considered as the golden period of Portuguese history. The new Portuguese political regime, an outcome of a right-wing military coup d'etat in 1926, and its opposition on the left were united in arguing in favour of a Portuguese Empire. In 1934, during Portugal's I Exposição Colonial (1st Colonial Expo), the oppositionist newspaper O Diabo frequently praised the Portuguese Empire, setting the tone for the rest of the decade. In the second half of the 1930s, the glorification of the Empire by oppositionists became even more prominent, as exemplified by Portugal's Frente Popular's (Popular Front) programme, a political document that was the result of a convergence between Portuguese communists, socialists and republicans. Written in 1936, the programme is critical of “colonial imperialism's policy,” but not really of colonialism in general. According to Frente Popular, colonialism was morally acceptable because it can aid “other less civilized peoples, so that they can gradually join international life, until they reach the final stage of their complete autonomy.”

A series of time-honoured regular folk fairs take place in the Carpathian Mountains that are mainly economic but also socio-cultural events. The participants come from all the three Romanian principalities—Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania, that is, from all the historical provinces of the Romanian state as constituted after the First World War. These folk fairs are “two-land fairs” in the Eastern and Southern Carpathians and “three-land fairs” where all three provinces converge, as in the district of Vrancea. Over the centuries, such fairs advanced the perception that participants spoke the same language, shared the same religious belief, and belonged to the same neam, that is, implicitly to the same territory (the word neam being a vernacular term for “kin group,” but extensible to the notion of “people” and “nation”). In short, the folk fairs contributed to awakening Romanian national consciousness. Such evidence challenges modernist theory, according to which national consciousness should have arisen with the bourgeoise elite, who should have inculcated it into the public mind.

A personal note frames this essay. In recent years I have travelled with my Finnish colleagues from the University of Tampere to a number of international seminars and conferences organized in various European locations. While socializing with the other participants, my self-identification as Romanian has, on several occasions, prompted the question “are you Hungarian or Romanian …?“ No other options were ever offered, even though Romania has a quite sizeable Roma minority and a number of Saxons, though ever declining, still live in the country. At the same time, the ethnicity of my Finnish colleagues has never been questioned. True, Finns describe their country as a homogeneous place, yet Finland is a country with two official languages—Finnish and Swedish—ever praised for the treatment of its Swedish-speaking minority. And some other ethnicities—for instance, Roma and Sami—also live in Finland. Nobody interested? Or maybe there is more to it than simply a question of curiosity (or a lack of it). That the ethnicity of the Finnish participants was deemed irrelevant, whereas my ethnic identity seemed a topical issue for informal discussions during coffee breaks or conference lunches elicited my interest in the issue of national and ethnic identity. I have started to ask how collective identities, and especially national and ethnic identities, have been conceptualized and how those theoretical concepts have been deployed in the study of Central and Eastern European identities. Are there any differences in how Central and Eastern European identities are studied compared with Western identities?

On 2 August 1919 in the Upper Adriatic port city of Trieste (as it was called in Italian) or Trst (as it was referred to in Slavic languages), nationalist youths harassed socialist children returning from a group outing. The incident escalated into a riot. Police opened fire, and one nationalist was killed. On 12 July 1920, a nationalist mob incited by Fascists looted and burned Narodni Dom, the Slovene cultural center. The carabinieri, Italy's state police, collaborated in the attack, or at the very least stood by and watched as the building was torched using gasoline obtained from the nearby barracks. The next day, Italian nationalist demonstrators torched the Croatian-managed Adriatic Bank. Police at the scene stood on the sidelines and watched the bank burn. In the autumn of 1920, Fascist squads attacked a funeral procession mourning a socialist worker killed in a general strike. The socialists erected barricades in the streets of the San Giacomo quarter, a working class neighborhood. Police leveled the undefended barricades and intimidated the quarter's residents during a house-to-house search. In 1921, a firebomb exploded in the offices of Il Lavoratore, the local socialist newspaper. Police watched the premises burn. In all five instances, the forces of public security in Trieste stood by, unable or unwilling to stem violence and restore order in the city newly annexed to Italy from the Habsburg empire. The Italian liberal authorities officially disavowed mistreatment of ethnic minorities and members of the political opposition, but they found themselves unable to deal effectively with the clash among ethnic groups and political parties precipitated by the transfer of the territory to Italian sovereignty. They sympathized with those adopting extra-legal and violent strategies that they perceived as useful to further state political agendas and promote assimilation, or at least quiescence, of the border population.

This article examines the concept of sovereignty in elite and popular affection during the violent and turbulent events from April to October 2010 in the Kyrgyz Republic. Nationalist leaders promoted Kyrgyz ethnic values and ideals as the center of sovereignty held by some to be under threat. These events exemplify what we describe as the affective politics of sovereignty. We explore how emotion, in particular, serves as an important component of the constitution of sovereignty as both an international and popular institution. We explore how Kyrgyz identity has become intertwined with the sovereignty of Kyrgyzstan and clashes with Western multi-ethnic conceptions and practices.