As a people, the Slovenes have never had their own national state. Integrated into the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Slovenes have lived on a subnational level. Only Yugoslavia was recognized as an international subject and remains a member of the United Nations Organization to this day; thus, Slovenia—the homeland of Slovenes—did not enjoy the full status of a nation and the Slovene national identity was not internationally recognized until recently. Slovenes are now determined to achieve permanent recognition, no matter the cost.

Hitler's coming to power in Germany had its key consequences upon the fate of the German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. The German community in Romania constituted no exception. After 1933, a process of radicalization can be noticed in the case of the Transylvanian Saxons, one of the several German-speaking groups in Romania. The phenomenon has already been analyzed in its political and economic dimensions, yet not so much in its social ones. This article looks at the latter aspect, its argument being that the Nazification of the Transylvanian Saxon community can be best comprehended by using a conceptual framework developed by political scientist Donald Horowitz in the early 1970s. The analysis uses a series of contemporary sources (diaries, issues of the official periodical of the Lutheran Church in Transylvania, Kirchliche Blätter), but also a wide range of secondary sources, academic and literary. Consequently, the article shows that especially after 1933, the Lutheran affiliation, highly relevant for the production and reproduction of the traditional model of Transylvanian Saxon identity, shifted from the status of a criterion of identity to a mere identification indicium. At the same time, the attraction of a (Pan-) German identity, with its Nazi anchors, became stronger and the center of gravity for Transylvanian Saxon identity radically moved towards German ethnicity, in its National-Socialist understanding.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by the sudden rise of nationalist movements in almost all Soviet ethnic regions. It is argued that the rise of political nationalism since the late 1980s can be explained by the development of cultural nationalism in the previous decades, as an unintended outcome of Communist nationalities policy. All ethnic regions are examined throughout the entire history of the USSR (49 regions, 1917–1991), using the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach. This paper aims to make at least three contributions to the field. First, it is a methodological contribution for studying nationalism: a “quantification of history” approach. Having constructed variables from historical data, I use conventional statistical methods such as SEM. Second, this paper contributes to the theoretical debate about the role of cultural autonomy in multiethnic states. Finally, the paper statistically proves that the break between early Soviet and Stalinist nationalities policy explains the entire Soviet nationalities policy.

The development of the Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine, located in Mongolia's South Gobi province, promises to rebuild the nation after two decades of economic and social instabilities following the 1990 revolution. While the company promotes the mine as the teleological solution to Mongolia's development, the state and public remain ambivalent, as concerns about a resource curse and Dutch Disease loom. In this paper, I argue that Oyu Tolgoi remains contested due to tensions between corporate and state actors as well as public concerns about the potential negative political, economic, and environmental effects of mining. Debates over the Oyu Tolgoi investment agreement negotiations and the immediate repercussions of the agreement signing reveal how the dual teleologies of building mineral nations crystallize in the neologism “Mine-golia.” This paper begins to fill a gap in the literature on mineral nations which privileges the role of the state, leaving how corporations engage in nation-building underexamined.

Applying a historical institutionalist theoretical perspective to the ethnic minority policy domain, the article attempts to explain why state policies toward minorities may be difficult to reverse once introduced. Focusing on a case study of the cultural status of the Vojvodina Hungarian minority in Serbia, the article attempts to find out the forms taken by self-reinforcing dynamics associated with minority-related policies, once they are de-institutionalized. The paper deals with the evolution of the concept of Hungarian cultural autonomy in Vojvodina in the context of the transition from the socialist framework of minority rights protection, applied in the Socialist Autonomous Province of Vojvodina under the 1974 Constitution, to the system established by the Law on National Councils of National Minorities and the Statute of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina adopted in 2009, after the interim period of state centralization in the 1990s. The Vojvodina case study exemplifies the costs faced by governments aspiring to reverse these policies and allows the identification of path-dependent factors behind the collective action processes related to the main principles of these policies, and conditions that allow these principles to outlive the abolishment of respective institutional arrangements, persist across radical political and social changes over time, and re-emerge at later historical stages, in new institutional settings.

From the historical and scholarly perspective, Russian-Ukrainian relations occupy a unique niche in inter-ethnic relations, as they are framed by long-standing “fraternal rivalry,” imperial and colonial experience, and a complex understanding of identity, which are still at work today. Although the phenomenon has been the subject of numerous studies, little has been done to explore their encounter in emigration. The scope of these works has been limited to examining the relations between these two groups in the familiar territory of their homelands (i.e. either in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or in the period following the dissolution of the Soviet Union), and scholars have usually not made a strict delimitation between the concepts of the homeland and hostland. But certainly, the Russian–Ukrainian encounter in emigration in the interwar period created its own discourse, which differed from the pre-revolutionary and Soviet discourses. Its main features are (1) further alienation and a feeling of difference between the two groups; (2) a growing metaphysical view of the homeland, accompanied by ethno-symbolic manifestations of national identity; and (3) a sense of mission to preserve their culture and identity from erosion engineered by the Bolsheviks.

It was more than evident last year that the ideology of the Brezhnev period—that coherent world view, that set of concepts that structured Soviet reality—was on its last legs. Significantly, that particular ideology is now quite dead. It is no longer on its last legs; it is no longer dying; it has been eliminated from political discourse within the Soviet Union. One may go so far as to say that Marxism-Leninism is virtually absent from Soviet discourse as well. One example is this year's May Day slogans. They could have been found at any peace demonstration in the United States. They have nothing to do with that which we knew as communism in the Soviet Union.

The Communist movement in interbellum Poland was a small political entity that did not constitute a threat to the power of the state, nor did it become a visible presence since it failed to attract a majority of the working class. The movement, overall, consisted of a number of parties, organizations and groups, usually illegal, but some at times provisionally legal. The Communist Party of Poland - CPP (Komunistyczna Partia Polski - KPP) was the main party, entrusted with the guiding role by the Comintern, and also the umbrella organization and ideological reference point for the Communists throughout the twenty-year existence of the Second Polish Republic. The CPP was originally formed under the name “Communist Workers' Party of Poland” - CWPP, (Komunistyczna Partia Robotnicza Polski-KPRP). In 1920, it briefly took on the designation “Section of the Communist International” of which it was a founding member. By virtue of its name, the Party proclaimed a total proletarian orientation, ignoring the reality of an almost completely agricultural Poland at the time.

In the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the landscape of Armenia's capital has transformed tremendously. Promoting a new vision for the city, Armenia's political elites have imbued the urban landscape of Yerevan with narratives of modernization, progress and a renewed sense of nationalism. While this new vision is noticeable throughout Yerevan's landscape, it is most apparent in three places in the center of Yerevan - Opera Square, Northern Avenue and Republic Square. These three prominent places represent the vision that the Armenian elites have for the city of Yerevan, while at the same time serving as backdrops for the expression of a critical voice regarding the changing urban landscape from the local residents. These three places are compelling representations of the tensions and struggles that are present in contemporary Armenian society. In this article, I examine the symbols and narratives that Armenia's elites produce and promote in and via these places, and consider the complicated set of reactions from residents that have formed in response.

This article addresses the relationship between the concepts of national identity and biopolitics by examining a border-transit camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers in Germany. Current studies of detention spaces for migrants have drawn heavily on Agamben's reflection on the “camp” and “homo sacer,” where the camp is analyzed as a space in a permanent state of exception, in which the government exercises sovereign power over the refugee as the ultimate biopolitical subject. But what groups of people can end up at a camp, and does the government treat all groups in the same way? This article examines the German camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers as a space where the state's borders are demarcated and controlled through practices of bureaucratic and narrative differentiation among various groups of people. The author uses the concept of detention space to draw a theoretical link between national identity and biopolitics, and demonstrates how the sovereign's practices of control and differentiation at the camp construct German national identity through defining “nonmembers” of the state. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork at the Friedland border transit camp and on a discourse analysis of texts produced at the camp or for the camp.