Although most contemporary theories of nationalism and identity formation rest on some form of social constructivism, few theorists of nationalism and identity formation interrogate social constructivism as a social construction – a social science concept “imposed” on the non-self-consciously constructivist behaviors of people, who generally do not believe they are engaging in construction. Since social constructivism – unless it is a metaphysics about what is real – is really about the concept of social construction, the first task of constructivists is to ask not how various populations have engaged in social construction but how social construction should be defined. As this article shows, constructivism is at best a run-of-the-mill theoretical approach – perfectly respectable, but no different from any other theoretical approach in the social sciences. It is only when social constructivism makes outlandishly radical claims – that all of reality or all of social reality is constructed – that it is unusual, exciting, and wrong.

In 1920 the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic emerged upon the ruins of German and Polish occupation. It replaced the short-lived Belarusian Democratic Republic as the embodiment of national statehood. The ensuing decade came to be an important but ambiguous period in Belarusian history. New state institutions such as the Commissariat of Public Enlightenment, the Institute of Belarusian Culture, and the Belarusian State University carried out unprecedented “nation-building” policies designed to reverse the effects of tsarist Russification and foster the development of Belarusian national culture. Parodoxically, many of the same institutions also implemented various aspects of “Sovietization.” A myriad of measures under the label “socialist construction” served to integrate ever more closely Belarus into the Soviet Union.

“We, the nationals of a big nation, have almost always been guilty, in historic practice, of innumerable cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult innumerable times without noticing it.”

Much has been made over the past few years of China'vs ambitions of regaining control of its irredentist claims in the East and South China Seas. While some of this speculation focuses on the massive amounts of money the People's Republic of China (PRC) has funneled into its naval modernization program, other analysts are more interested in the drivers behind the increasingly popular sentiment that the country must “reclaim” its lost territories. The Chinese Communist Party can ill afford to ignore the voice of an already disenchanted population if it hopes to stay in power, particularly in regard to matters of national pride. As a result, in dealing with China's irredentist claims, nationalism in particular can be a powerful ideological factor in shaping the nation's foreign policies. This is especially apparent in the case of irredentism, where nationalism can often override diplomatic and strategic imperatives. This paper addresses the question of how does the nationalist discourse vary between two territorial disputes, the East and South China Seas. It uses discourse analysis to examine developing trends among online social media and news sites. This in turn allows for the construction of a framework of how nationalism develops among both elite and grassroots audiences.

The Baltic Way

Over the millenia the destiny of the Baltic nations has been shaped by their location on the crossroads of Northern and Eastern Europe. The history of the Baltic nations is one of the cooperation between the west and the east but it is also a history that is marked by a power struggle between the east and the west. This power struggle condemend the Baltic nations to languis under the domination of foreigners who have always tried to deny or restrict the rights of the native populations to determine their own destinies. But even under the domination of the foreigners the Baltic peoples—the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanians—have managed to maintain their own cultural identity.

In May 1951, students at the District Party School of the Socialist Union Party of Germany (SED) in the southern Thuringian city of Suhl evaluated the agitation and propaganda assignments that they had recently completed. Such assignments were a regular exercise in the instruction of future cadres. From these discussions, the difficulties that traditional German nationalism posed to the SED become clear. One student cited words of a party comrade he had talked to on the question of befriending the Polish and the Czechoslovak peoples. Instead of sticking to the official ideological line that rejected chauvinist ideas, this comrade had responded: “[…] I will never make friends with the Czech people. To me they are not human beings.” This anger directed against the Czechs by a German communist may have arisen from the frequently brutal deportation of Germans from Czechoslovakia after 1945: the Czechs had not made exceptions for German anti-fascists. It could also be explained by continued anti-Slav sentiment dating from the Nazi years. The file does not elaborate how the incident was resolved. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that nationalist sentiments had survived the collapse of Nazism even with members of the SED. How did the SED counter this heavy national mortgage?