This article examines the dynamic relationship between the two major dimensions of memory and justice in the context of post-communist countries: truth-telling and retroactive justice. This interdependent and uneasy relationship is illustrated by recent attempts at constructing a new historical narrative of the communist past in Romania in the wake of the de-secretization of the files of both the Communist Party and the communist secret police (Securitate). A systematic analysis of the activity of institutions that have been directly involved in research and public education about the recent past – the National Archives, the National Council for the Study of Securitate's Archives, and the Institute for the Investigation of Crimes of Communism – is undertaken. The work of these three institutional actors shows a direct relationship between truth-telling in its various forms (access to archives, opening the files and exhumations) and any subsequent retroactive justice and restitution. The main argument of the paper is that while deep-seated dichotomies between former communist and anti-communists in addressing the past still persist, a more nuanced way of seeing the regime that explores the ambiguous line that divides outright repression from cooptation is emerging.

Albania, founded at the Congress of Vlora on November 12, 1912, has a far more homogeneous national population than its neighboring states in the Balkans. The Sixth London Conference of the great powers in 1912–1913 ruthlessly divided the territories inhabited by Albanians. The conference fragmented more than half the territories inhabited by ethnic Albanian regions as follows: in the east and the northeast—Kosova, Dibra, Ohri, Struga and Pollugu up to Shkup (Scoplje); in the north—Tivari, Ulqini, Tuzi, Plava and Gucija; and in the south—Camerija. These lands, with an autochthonous Albanian population, were annexed by Serbia, Montenegro (in 1918 by the new Yugoslav State) and by Greece in 1913. Thus, the borders of Albania were confined to an area of 28,748 square kilometers and a population of a little more than 800,000.

I met Walker Connor in 1972 at the Glazer and Moynihan conference on ethnicity held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Glazer and Moynihan 1975). We thought we would be intimidated by the company at the conference: Talcott Parsons, Daniel Bell, Andy Greeley, Orlando Patterson, Bill Petersen, and Lucian Pye – a good sample of the elders of social theory. By then Walker had published three articles in World Politics in five years – perhaps a record – including one containing his splendid deconstruction of the theories of Karl Deutsch. But I think we acquitted ourselves well enough – especially Walker did. He was the star of the show, with numerous observations on boiling or incipient conflicts across the globe that many of the elders did not know about (or did not know existed). Unfortunately, he did not submit an essay for the volume that came out of the conference (Glazer and Moynihan 1975).

National relations in the Second Republic contained a number of problems which throughout the entire interwar period did not find an appropriate solution. Among those was the question of the Orthodox Church in Poland. Although its believers comprised over 11 percent of the country's population, up to 1938 the Polish authorities did not legally regulate the organizational and material situation of the Orthodox Church in Poland, which was founded as a unit independent of the Russian Orthodox Church after the proclamation of an autocephalous status in 1922.

Why do people go to war? My own interest in this question emerged from the context of my dissolving country and Serbia's increased engagement in a very strident form of ethnonationalism. Although social scientists have sought to understand the roles of ethnonationalism in fostering state-organized violence, few scholars have sought to understand the gendered nature of men's motivations for participating in war. The case of the inter-ethnic wars in Croatia and Bosnia, following the break-up of Yugoslavia, presents an unparalleled opportunity to understand more about how the processes of ethnonationalization and masculinization operate in everyday life, and about how men from Serbia made sense of their decisions about participation in the wars. In the present paper I explore the ways nationalism and masculinity intersect and overlap, influence and are influenced by war participation, by looking closer into the war volunteers from Serbia who joined the Yugoslav wars of secession, 1991–1995.

As in other countries of the Danubian Basin, the Hungarians of historic Subcarpathian Rus' (Hungarian—Kárpátalja), present-day Transcarpathia, did not become a national minority until 1919. Before then they were simply Hungarians—and part of the dominant state nationality—living in the northeastern corner of the Hungarian Kingdom. With the border changes that occurred in 1919-1920, the Hungarians of Transcarpathia/Subcarpathian Rus' found themselves within the borders of the new state of Czechoslovakia. Since then borders and countries have changed several times, so that Transcarpathia's Hungarians have found themselves in Czechoslovakia (1919-1938), again in Hungary (1938-1944), in the Soviet Union (1945-1991), and in an independent Ukraine (1991-present). Regardless of what state may have ruled Subcarpathian Rus'/Transcarpathia, it has remained a distinct administrative entity—at times, with a degree of autonomy—throughout most of the twentieth century.

To explain nationalist politics in Poland, researchers and observers have sometimes speculated about the dispositions of the electorate, popular sentiments, public fears for the loss of sovereignty, the people's historically ingrained preference for nationalist rhetoric, and their feelings of discontent about the economy. This article argues that hypotheses about the existence of nationalist sentiments within the electorate have tended to eclipse an important question about the main producers of nationalist rhetoric: Why do certain mainstream parties at certain points in time decide to frame their program as nationalist, even when there is no objective reality that seems conducive to the creation of great public concern about typically nationalist issues? This article explores this question by looking at various campaigns for Polish parliamentary elections since 1997. My argument is that when seeking to explain the motivations behind major campaign turns toward nationalism we should not merely understand them as responses to voter sentiment and voting behavior. Instead, we should see them as crucially driven by the transactional logic of inter-party competition in a party system that is in constant flux.

Estonia emerged from World War I economically devastated, with no significant industrial base to build its economy. Yet, within twenty years, it had come to play an important economic role among the Baltic states and seemed destined to assume an equally important position throughout northeastern Europe because of its wise development of its vast oil shale deposits.

On 10 December 1997, accompanied by much pomp and fanfare, President Nursultan Nazarbaev triumphantly declared Aqmola to be the new capital of Kazakstan in accordance with a 1995 decree he had signed in Almaty. Henceforth, he ordered, all official state business would be transferred from Almaty to Aqmola as expeditiously as possible. Even more dramatic was the context in which President Nazarbaev chose to make the announcement, namely, in the company of the then Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomydrin. Clearly, the intention was, once again, to impress on Moscow Nazarbaev's determination to demonstrate specifically to Russia his personal commitment to transform Kazakstan into a genuine, independent post-Soviet state, or so one could interpret the timing of the event. But, before subjecting the long move from Almaty to Aqmola to further analysis, it might help to bring some perspective to the phenomenon of capital shifting, a practice that dates back at least to classical times.