Many scholars have written on Soviet nationality policies, including language policies. This article does not aspire to add to the general literature of the subject. Rather, it is concerned with one particular decision of the Soviet leadership regarding the periodical press. All information presented here is derived from Soviet sources. Those sources include, first of all, a periodical that is not generally known in the West, which may explain why the decision in question was not noted by foreign observers when it was announced in that particular periodical.

The Estonian Language Law, passed by the Estonian SSR Supreme Soviet on 18 January 1989, was the first of its kind in the Soviet Union. It helped launch a wave of similar legislation in other union republics and symbolized a new level of assertion of republican rights against Moscow and the tradition of centralized control. It is no coincidence that the Language Law was drafted and became available for public discussion at virtually the same time as Estonia's declaration on sovereignty (16 November 1988), also a first in Gorbachev's USSR. Indeed in late 1988 and early 1989 Estonia was leading the way in the movement for decentralization in the Soviet empire as the major political goal began to shift from autonomy to independence. This article will assess the origins and nature of the law itself as well as its implementation and impact over a nearly five-year period to late 1993.

The post-1989 rise of ethnic conflicts in the former Eastern Bloc have led to the renewed salience of minority rights and their prominence in international relations. The 1990s witnessed a proliferation of legal instruments and offices dedicated to minority rights at the intergovernmental level (mainly within the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Council of Europe, but also the United Nations). After decades of arguing that rights of persons belonging to national, ethnic or religious minorities can be sufficiently ensured within the framework of universal human rights, attributed to individuals regardless of group membership, liberal political theorists (most notably Will Kymlicka) have started to advocate the need to supplement these traditional human rights with minority rights (meaning certain group-differentiated rights or “special status” for minority cultures) in order to ensure justice in multicultural states.

The fate of democracy in Kazakstan may well depend less upon decisions taken in Kazakstan's capital, Almaty (the capital is now Aqmola), than upon what takes place in Kazakstan's far-flung and disparate regions. This should come as no surprise to anyone who appreciates the history and complexities of democratic development. The history of democracy is a history of bottom-up initiative. The democratic institutions that are the most successful and enduring are those that originate from the common and everyday interests and concerns of citizens. Even in historical cases where the political institutions of democracy were adopted consciously and deliberately to break with authoritarian tradition, democracy has been closely associated with local control, self-governance, public participation, and citizen empowerment. The fate of Kazakstan's constitutional order, on the other hand, depends almost exclusively upon decisions taken at the “center” of the new Kazakstan government. The establishment of a constitutional order is a highly conscious and deliberate process. It is also a highly political undertaking. To what extent has the democratic process in Kazakstan corresponded to the process of the establishment of a constitutional order in Kazakstan? To what extent has constitutional development supported limited, accountable government based on popular sovereignty? To what extent can democratic process and constitutional development be expected to mutually reinforce one another in Kazakstan's future? The answers to these questions have great importance for the development of democracy in Kazakstan. They have great importance for the efforts of the international community to encourage democratic development in Kazakstan. These are the key questions of this article.

In the years that have passed since NATO forcibly compelled Yugoslavia to withdraw its military and police forces from Kosovo and the province was placed under U. N. guardianship, the Kosovo crisis of 1999 has been examined from a variety of angles. Although many insightful analyses have documented the horrific and deplorable events that led up to the crisis, one important factor that has received relatively short shrift is the way in which the U. S. was drawn into the conflict. In particular, it has remained overlooked that the United States, qua superpower, had a significant impact on the policy formulations of the belligerent parties. This essay is based on the proposition that the United States does not formulate policy and operate in a vacuum, but rather that the U. S. is itself a critical factor in the calculations of other actors in the international system. These actors make strategic calculations based upon their expectations of American actions and reactions. The U. S. policymaking community, on the other hand, seems to formulate policies without considering the implications of the fact that other actors might anticipate U. S. actions or even attempt to provoke a desired response.

By the year 1453, when the vestigial remains of the Byzantine Empire were destroyed with the fall of Constantinople, much of the Balkan peninsula was already in the hands of the conquering Ottoman Turks. The overthrow of Byzantium in that year was the capstone in a century-long process that transformed an originally militant Muslim Anatolian border emirate into a powerful Muslim empire that straddled two continents and represented a major contender in contemporary European great power politics. Over half of the population subject to the Ottoman sultan were Christian European inhabitants of the Balkans: Greeks, Serbs, Vlahs, Albanians and Bulgarians. With the conquest of Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II Fatih, the victorious Turkish ruler, faced the quarrelsome problem of devising a secure means of governing his vast, Muslim-led empire that contained a highly heterogeneous non-Muslim population.