J. V. Stalin, in his 1923 denunciation of Sultan Galiev, formerly Stalin's own assistant in Narkomnats, stated:

This article analyzes the effects of nationalizing policies of the state, processes of democratization, and uneven socio-economic development on the rise of Kurdish ethno-mobilization led by the PKK terrorist organization since the 1980s in Turkey. Three features of the Turkish modernization context are identified as conducive for the rise and continuation of Kurdish ethno-mobilization: a) a nation-building autocratic state that resisted granting cultural rights and recognition for the Kurds; b) democratization with the exclusion of ethnic politics and rights; c) economic regional inequality that coincided with the regional distribution of the Kurdish population. It is argued that autocratic policies of the state during nation-building accompanied the development of an illiberal democracy and intolerance for cultural pluralism. These aspects of Turkish democracy seem to be incompatible with both the liberal and consociational models of democracy that accommodate ethnicity within multiculturalism.

The administrative division of late imperial Russia made few concessions to minority populations, who often found themselves divided among several provinces. The Bolshevik ascendancy to power changed the situation; Vladimir Lenin's “federal compromise” marked a breakthrough from the tsarist unitary practice to a system of governance which, at least on paper, made allowance for the ethnocultural diversity of the population. The chief designers of the Bolshevik nationality policy believed that a federal arrangement would offer a framework for controlling undesirable national sentiments during the transitional stage when class identities would gradually replace ethnic attachments. However, it turned out that for non-Russian groups the national-territorial autonomous units were not simply empty containers, free of cultural and emotional meaning, in which their political socialization would occur. These units became an integral part of their national identity; ethnicity obtained “legal” territorial roots and the various territorial units began to function as vessels of ethnic consciousness.

This article draws on international relations theory to attempt a reframing of the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict in Nagorny Karabakh as an enduring rivalry (ER): a particular kind of interstate conflict known for its longevity and stability. The article begins by identifying a number of conceptual deficits circulating around this conflict, notably the notion that it is a “frozen conflict,” before introducing the ER framework and its analytical dividends for this case. Different layers of the ER between Armenia and Azerbaijan are then explored at systemic, interstate, domestic, decision-maker, and temporal levels, with a view more toward identifying directions for future research than conclusive findings. Among the article's tentative conclusions are the primacy of endogenous over exogenous factors in explaining the durability of the rivalry between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the impacts of the passage of time on the human and physical geography of the territory under dispute, and the convergence of conflict dynamics across disparate levels.

During the conservative period in Hungary between the two world wars, three unusual young women, Erzsébet Árvay, Judit Kárász, and Viola Tomori, joined a vanguard of youth who claimed to lead a new generation of Hungarians. As members of the Szeged Youth, they took up the cause of the peasantry of the Great Hungarian Plain, an isolated and neglected population presumed to bear “original Hungarian characteristics.” Until recently, the relationship between gender and nationalism in studies on Eastern Europe has been neglected. Current developments in post-communist societies have sharpened our realization that historical periods are experienced differently and have different implications when seen from the vantage point of women rather than men. Intriguing questions are raised concerning these women's participation in the Szeged Youth Movement and their active role with the peasantry. In a society often characterized as restrictive and limiting, what was the experience of the young woman activist? Was she accepted by her peers as their intellectual equal? How did she feel about her final place in national affairs? These questions are elusive and complex, yet the example of the Szeged Youth Movement in the 1920s and 1930s provides a compelling study of the intersection of gender and national identity in the Hungarian context.

During the interwar period in Hungary, the question of the fate of the Hungarian “nation”—which included the Hungarian population in the territories lost after World War I—took precedence over all others. This was true in respect to women's issues as well. The peace settlement was viewed as a national tragedy, reviving fears that the Hungarians or magyarsag would disappear, swallowed up by the surrounding Germanic and Slavic peoples. Virtually the whole population believed that the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, which had reduced the Hungarian state to two-thirds of its former size, leaving 33.5% of the ethnic Hungarian inhabitants outside the borders, had been unjust and should be revised. The government under Prime Minister István Bethlen struggled to restore economic stability and to regain acceptance by the Western powers, on whom revision of the treaty depended. Certain moderate reforms were introduced, including the extension of the franchise to women and the broadening of educational opportunities. Yet, social insurance reforms for the urban populations were not extended to the masses of peasantry and rural proletariat, which still constituted over half of the population. In fact, the need to maintain the support of the large landowners precluded any extensive land reform, and Hungary remained a country of large estates.

What was Soviet patriotism? A definition of the term offered by the Soviet ideological apparatus in 1953—a “social, historically conditioned feeling of love for one's motherland“—raises more questions than it answers. Patriotism was a concept foreign to classical Marxism; indeed, the concept, along with the corresponding term “the Soviet people,” entered mass usage only in the mid-1930s, when the Soviet government moved away from class as the dominant paradigm for interacting with its society. The relationship of Soviet patriotism to nationalism, the predominant political identity in twentieth-century Europe, was also ideologically fraught. Patriotism was sharply distinguished from nationalism (natsionalizm) in the Soviet lexicon. The first referred to a healthy allegiance to a community that was consistent with universal values of enlightenment, justice and democracy; the second was a jingoistic and reactionary ideology utilized by the bourgeoisie to mislead the working class. Despite this distinction, Soviet patriotism was supra-national, not anti-national, as it “harmoniously combined” the national traditions of the different Soviet nations with “the common, fundamental interests of all working people in the USSR.”

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.

This paper examines the controversial music genre rabiz in relation to political and socioeconomic developments in post-Soviet Armenia. Rabiz, an urban folk-pop genre characterized by melismatic singing and “oriental” embellishments, is a ubiquitous soundtrack to everyday life in the country, with lyrics commonly covering romance, male friendship, and family ties. Ethnographic observations suggest that its popularity draws on the affective appeal with which it captures common hardships and aspirations of post-socialist transition. In spite of this, rabiz is almost universally denounced by nationalist intellectuals and liberal citizens for foreign influences, sentimentality, consumerism, and conservatism. While for the cultured classes, the rejection of rabiz as “un-Armenian” is often an integral part of the construction of a virtuous self, the alternative conceptions of performers and fans reveal the polysemy of Armenianness as a moral category.

The article analyzes the material or objectified reproduction of the Basque demos since democracy was established in Spain in 1980. Spain holds within its territory diverse regions and political communities and the Basque case is a highly illustrative example of how the development of regional state institutions is fundamental for the reproduction of distinct democratic demoi not merely in their political but also socio-economic dimension. This paper argues that, in our current European context, political distinctions cannot become effectively objectified and instituted power structures without state institutions being able to uphold a differentiated system of stratification.