The previous essays have presented a (frequently tragic) history of the Muslims of Southeastern Europe. The development of national identities among the Muslim populations has been an important chapter in this story. A recurring theme in the different case studies presented in this special issue is that the ways in which the Balkan Muslim population perceived itself did not always match the perception of the Christian population, especially the nationalists. Likewise, while the non-Muslim population often considered all Muslims to be an undifferentiated mass (usually referred to as “Turks”), the Muslims themselves often had highly nuanced and complex self-perception. While this self-identification included Islam as an important component, Islam was by no means the only, or even most important, aspect of identity.

There is certainly some sound logic in the observation by Trivimi Velliste, the former Foreign Minister of Estonia: “The safer Estonians feel about their independence, the more convinced they are that no one will enslave them again [and] the more likelihood they will be more generous [about Russians in Estonia].” The sad conclusion of this article is, however, that the gain of Estonians’ security has not given way to a spirit of generosity but to a more restrictive and irrational citizenship policy.

In Rossettiren obsesioa (Rossetti's Obsession), a short and explicitly meta-literary novel published in 2000, Ramon Saizarbitoria presents a Basque writer wrestling a formidable lover: the Spanish readership. The question that Eugenia, the woman from Madrid, constantly asks the writer, “¿Qué os pasa a los vascos?” (“What's wrong with you Basques?”), encapsulates the ambiguity of the relationship which unites these two indisputably allegorical characters. The difficult interaction between the powerful Spanish literary field and the emerging Basque literary field, doomed to coexist and moved by reciprocal feelings of fascination and irritation, becomes the novel's subject matter. Is translation — and its corollary, an access to a larger literary market — a pure and neutral instrument of liberation for the writer who expresses himself in a minority language, or could it become, in certain circumstances, a threat to his autonomy?

The word nationalism, as it is generally used in the United States by scholars and journalists, is a pejorative term. If by using the term the writer himself does not mean to evoke unfavorable associations, then by necessity he fails because the educated public in America understands the word to be derogatory. The question therefore is seriously to be considered whether the word continues to be serviceable for impartial analyses of world politics and modern history. Many journalists and unfortunately, also many historians and political scientists use the word as nothing other than an elegant expletive to disparage statesmen and countries–foreign and their own. One may suspect that diplomats and men of affairs have already learned to consider the word useless for day-to-day decisions. Unless scholars begin to use the word with more precision and discrimination, they will be forced to follow the example of practical men of affairs.