This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Miroslav Horch's 1985 Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations in English translation. The work first appeared as Die Vorkämpfer der nationalen Bewegungen bei den kleinen Völkern Europas in 1968. The English translator of this famous study, Ben Fowkes, has since established himself as a prolific expert on East European nationalism (1996, 1999, 2000, 2002). Hroch's work has now influenced several generations of scholars interested in many different parts of the world. To examine its influence on the course of nationalism studies, this themed issue of Nationalities Papers offers both a retrospective on Hroch's work and discussion of its continued relevance for several different branches of nationalism studies.

This research examines and analyzes how the politicization of the environmental issue in Armenia led to the emergence of the Nagorno-Karabakh (N-K) nationalist movement in Azerbaijan as the USSR went into terminal decline in 1991. It is important to stress that the Karabakh movement that emerged in Armenia in February 1988 with a clear agenda on serious ecological problems escalated quickly in the subsequent weeks and months to demand the preservation of the cultural identity of Karabakh Armenians in Azerbaijan. Air pollution of Yerevan, Ashdarag, Yegheknatsor, and later Sdepanavan and Ghapan was a significant threat to the existence of the Armenian people. For the Armenians, air pollution was ecological genocide, and cultural discrimination against Karabakh Armenians was cultural genocide. The Armenians associated ecological and cultural genocides with the 1915 genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenian nation. This study shows that initially the Karabakh movement did not have political goals. However, as it intensified with an enormous consciousness it transformed to a nationalist movement with a political and ecological agenda. This study also analyzes ethnic mobilization by activists in Armenia and the emergence of the N-K nationalist movement from 1985 to 1991 in light of Soviet nationalities policy and the window of opportunity caused by the political transformation at the center (Moscow). The activists of the environmental and nationalist movements were the same.

Values play an important role in any culture, shaping attitudes and aspirations, and supporting economic activities. They are widely acknowledged to be defining elements of business culture for managers and workers alike, despite difficulties in tracing the exact linkages they have with behaviors and events (Connor and Becker 1994). They impact individuals’ ability to make critical adjustments under conditions of accelerating technological change and unprecedented expansion of information transfer (Rothschild 1992). They also are thought to affect how well technological changes and economic activity are integrated with dominant social-political structures, helping to make public policy harmonious with frames of reference individuals hold, and lending meaning to appeals for courses of action (Buchholtz 1986).

Although the Greek citizenship tradition has contained both ethnic and civic elements all along, up until recently, at least according to the existing literature, it has replicated the geographical logic of a European divide between the East (ethnic) and West (civic). Lately, this tradition has been in flux as it appears to be moving along and changing positions across a hypothetical citizenship axis running along the two constitutional poles of nationality: ethnic descent and civic community. This paper attempts to shed light on this tradition in transit by bringing to the fore contemporary tensions between ethnic and civic elements of citizenship. More specifically, these ongoing frictions have been mostly manifested in the ever-changing conditionality of the terms of acquisition of Greek citizenship by second- and “one-and-a-half” generation migrant children. Most importantly, these antagonisms between an ethnicized (ethnic) citizenship and a politicized (civic) nationality became discursively played out within the arena of migrant integration discourse. However, one question remains: What can the Greek case tell us about the broader politics of citizenship and belonging in Europe and beyond?

The question whether a Slovene cultural historian is warranted and justified to speak of a “Slovene Humanism period,” was in Slovene historiography seriously raised in the thirties. Asked in a dispute over a suggestion that a number of scholars, by provenience Inner Austrian Slovenes, who between 1450 and 1525 paved the way for Italian Renaissance Humanism at the University of Vienna, belong to Slovene cultural tradition, the question was answered with the proposition that in the Slovene lands of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries an atmosphere of interests and activities existed which indeed might be understood as a “Slovene Humanism.” In the discussion which followed and which is even today far from terminated, the concept “humanism” has been, of course, understood in very loose and broad terms, so that soon even such Protestant Reformers as Primož Trubar (1508-1586) could be proclaimed “Humanist writers.” What I propose to do in this paper is to reexamine this question; in addition, I hope to be able to show that the proposition I wish to develop in relation to a period in Slovene cultural history, may be applicable to the cultural and social history of Slavic nations in general.

Very few people outside Slovakia ever heard of Alexander Dubček prior to his elevation to the position of the First Secretary of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia in January 1968. A few years later, after a shortlived prominence, his name fell into oblivion, appearing only occasionally as a symbol of the “Prague Spring” and “socialism with a human face.”

The amount of writing relevant to the short career of Dubček and the developments in Czechoslovakia in 1968 is tremendous; yet it is not possible to write a “definitive” study on the “Prague Spring” and Dubček's role in it, for the story of those events is still unfolding. Also, interpretations of the Dubček phenomenon will continue to vary due to bias of authors and the lack of hard evidence. Finally, the archives of the Communist parties of the Soviet bloc countries and private papers of Communist party officials are not accessible. It is not possible, for political, personal, security or other reasons, to obtain the one particular piece of evidence — the one vital letter, memorandum of conversation, revealing diary, or a note of personal communication — which would explain conclusively why Dubček rose and fell.

In a famous article during the Soviet period, Walker Connor once asked, rhetorically:

In the summer of 2009, statues stood leaning in a yard, beyond Independence Square in Astana. The situation was incongruous and constituted an enigma: Why were these monuments left alone in shambles? This paper argues that nationalistic city making is more of a resource for people involved in patron/client relationships and a contingent outcome, rather than a planned strategy. This case study, drawing on evidence gathered through qualitative methods with artists and urban-planners, hence reveals a paradox: in Kazakhstan, there surely is a state incentive to produce nationalistic symbols, but in the absence of a mid-term strategy, city-planners and the people they work with improvise in order to answer local authorities' demands, and use this opportunity to advance their own interests. Hence, the political production of space is considered a fuzzy process, contingent on the agency of multiple subjects, and treated as an outcome of Foucauldian “micro-physics of power.” But even though it is erratic, it still creates the built environment which will be reacted upon by citizens. Finally, this sociopolitical perspective on nationalistic urbanism demonstrates that Astana's scenery is a fuzzy “landscape of power” instituting an erratic Kazakhstani regime, based on the political economy of symbolic goods.