Following an introduction to the changes in how ethno-racial identity is conceptualized in the social sciences and humanities by the destabilization of categorical frameworks, the author looks at how law reacts to these discussions and paradigm shifts, and argues that legal and administrative approaches face severe linguistic and conceptual limitations by operating within a “choice” and “fraud” binary. The article then questions if the free choice of identity exists as a principle of international minority protection law, a legal field that arguably represents a global political and ethical consensus. The author makes two claims. First, according to the basic tenet of legal logic, a proper right to free choice of identity allowing people to opt out of racial, ethnic, or national (minority) communities would necessitate the freedom to opt in to the majority or to any chosen group. The second claim, however, is that international law would not actually construct an approach to opting in. Thus, the right to free choice of identity is not an autonomous, sui generis right under international law.

The dilemma of spontaneity versus formalization is more or less valid for all societies. Freedom as the availability of alternative courses of action has been a precious cultural and moral value in history. The functional requisites of societies, related to communication, production, distribution, defense, replacement of members, and social control (Lenski, Lenski, 1974:28) have provided a more or less convincing justification for the limitation of freedom. Specialization, hierarchy, rules, procedures, impersonality and cult of competence, all these bureaucratic characteristics have been treated for centuries as remedia for laziness, irresponsibility, and parochialism. The progress of formalization has historically contributed to the strengthening of authority, as a legitimized power which brings about compliance of people to behave according to the will of those who occupy crucial positions. However, rigidification of such structures has several negative side effects: dissolution of several important and useful human bonds, ineffectiveness against external change, internal struggle between various groups to preserve and enlarge their areas of discretion (Crozier 1963), keeping too much to the rules, over-adherence to organizational means (and not ends), spoiling of superiors by the power enjoyed by them, superiors spending too much of their time and effort in controlling subordinates, etc. Strict separation of office and incumbent, in the sense that the official does not possess his office, has been historically beneficial for the material well being of societies, but it also has limited the personal involvement of office occupants. In the bureaucracies people who occupy crucial positions tend to develop vested interests within the scope of their jurisdiction. The constituent parts of bureaucracies resist actions which do not serve their own purposes (the problem of recalcitrance), and people in control of these parts become the prime beneficiaries (Blau, Scott 1962) of them. The ‘rules of the game’ that apply to the bureaucratic organizations as human artefacts quite often prevent them from achieving a dynamic equilibrium, namely to react to forces of change in an adaptive manner. Those organizations easily transform themselves from goal-seeking entities into the security-seeking mechanisms. Following Etzioni (1965) it is possible to say that they follow a ‘survival model’ instead of an ‘efficiency model'.

There was a fateful inevitability to the military actions in Dagestan that began on 2 August 1999 and concluded on 16 September. During the 2 years preceding, tensions within Dagestan's Islamic community had been building between fundamentalist Wahhabis and traditionalists. These tensions were exacerbated by Dagestan's sharp economic decline. Unemployment, which was running at 80% by August, contributed to growing dissatisfaction, especially in Dagestan's rural regions. These tensions reached critical proportions in the Botliksky rayon, particularly among young men belonging to the Andi ethno-linguistic sub-group of the Avars. Many of the latter were attracted to military training camps operated in Chechnya by Emir al Khattab, leader of the Wahhabite Islamic djamaat (village or connected group of villages) at Karamakhi, Chabanmakhi and Kadar, and by Shamyl Basayev, leader of the Islamic Congress of the Peoples of Ichkeria and Dagestan. In these camps rural Dagestani alienation met Chechen militancy and international Islamic fundamentalist support. Meanwhile Wahhabism grew increasingly influential in Chechnya as rival political leaders appealed to puritanical Islam in order to bolster their claims to authority and legitimize their political agendas.

Rather than stress policy to explain the geographic and ethnic bases of nationalism in the USSR, my emphasis will be on the universal features of these processes, or what we can learn about these important aspects of nationalism from comparative investigation: logic should compel one to demonstrate that the processes under investigation are not universal before one accepts a unique approach to the study of a region, country, or nation. Clearly, not all societal processes in the USSR are universal. The centrally planned economy is directed by policy, which, of course, affects geography, demography, and nationalism indirectly, and the unique aspects of Soviet society and history also affect these processes. However, empirical research indicates that there is a considerable universality in demographic, geographic, and ethnic processes in the USSR. Marxist-Leninist nationality policy has not been very effective, largely because such processes are difficult to control in any society and are not well-understood in the USSR.

This article examines the reverberations in Russia of the Euromaidan protests and the fall of the Yanukovych regime in Ukraine. It shows how the events in Kyiv provoked a major crisis in the Russian nationalist movement, which was riven by vituperative denunciations, the ostracism of prominent activists, the breakdown of friendships, the rupture of alliances, and schisms within organizations. Focusing on pro-Kremlin nationalists and several tendencies of opposition nationalists, it argues that this turmoil was shaped by three factors. First, the Euromaidan provoked clashes between pro-Kremlin nationalists, who became standard-bearers of official anti-Euromaidan propaganda, and anti-Putin nationalists, who extolled the Euromaidan as a model for a revolution in Russia itself. Second, the events in Ukraine provoked ideological contention around issues of particular sensitivity to Russian nationalists, such as the competing claims of imperialism and ethnic homogeneity, and of Soviet nationalism and Russian traditionalism. And third, many nationalists were unprepared for the pace of events, which shifted rapidly from an anti-oligarchic uprising in Kyiv to a push for the self-determination of ethnic Russians in Crimean and southeast Ukraine. As a result, they were left in the uncomfortable position of appearing to collaborate with the oppressors of their compatriots.

This essay concentrates on the psycho-sociological and socio-cultural aspects of relations among ethnic groups in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Region, especially between Slovenes and the other ethnic groups. Therefore it will not deal with the following two points: the ethno-minority problem of the Slovenes in Italy in demographic and ecologic terms (such as, for example, the number of members in a specific group, their territorial dislocation, etc.), or the problem of their socio-professional relations and of their institutional structures (such as, the distribution of minority group members in the professional stratification, the existence of economic, political and cultural structures within the minority groups, etc.).

The Western Balkans have seen rapid changes since the end of the violent conflicts in the 1990s. The European Union (EU) has been one of the main drivers for change, focusing on the political, economic and social transformation of the region to prepare the countries for membership in the Union. This introduction to the special issue will clarify the key terms and their interaction in the Western Balkans. EU enlargement has never before been this complex and inter-connected with processes of state-building and democratization. The focus on conditionality as the main tool of the EU in the region has had positive and negative effects. It can be argued that the EU is actively involved in state-building processes and therefore the term EU Member State Building will be used to explain the engagement of the Union with the countries in the region. This paper will discuss the concept of EU Member State Building, its potential and its pitfalls. It will be demonstrated that the stabilization of the region is unlikely to take place without an active role for the EU; however, the current approach has reached its limits and it is time to think about alternative options to integrate the Western Balkans into European structures.

Traditionally in Eastern Europe, one national group constituted a majority in the countryside but a minority in the urban areas. Thus, while the cities of Eastern Europe possessed a disproportionate share of an area's political and socio-economic resources, for the most part they were ethnically alien to the peasantry. This was not a problem until the nineteenth century, which by 1914 turned Eastern Europe into a cauldron of inter-ethnic and anti-Semitic tensions. In the subsequent struggle for power, the national movements of both the urban and rural areas claimed the cities as well as the surrounding countryside. Inasmuch as these movements did not possess a common set of interests, whatever the proposed solution — whether territorial autonomy, irredentism, independence, expansion, or the maintenance of the status quo — hardly any provision was made for minority rights.

Until recently, the words “nationalism in the USSR” would conjure up images of violent clashes among different nationalities in the republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia or the political struggle of the Baltic states to secede. But last year, the Soviet media began reporting for the very first time about an armed confrontation between a tiny Asian minority and the Russians; that is how the Tuva ASSR emerged from obscurity. It is always difficult for Western scholars to discern the truth of what they are told, especially if their only access to the information is through articles and programs on TV or radio emanating from the central Soviet press which may be patchy in coverage, uneven in quality, or sometimes written by journalists who have never been to the part of the country they are writing about.

On 4 March 1914 the Young Czech party newspaper Národní listy published the startling accusation that a prominent Czech politician, the National Socialist Karel Šviha, was a paid informant of the Habsburg imperial police. The paper alleged that for several years Šviha, who was the chairman of the National Socialist party's parliamentary club, had exchanged information on the activities of his colleagues for a police stipend. In the weeks that followed, the public was treated to a daily diet of charge and counter-charge in the Prague newspapers, a carnival of mutual recrimination that concluded with an elaborately staged public trial of Šviha in an attempt to settle once and for all whether he was truly an informant. During the proceedings leading figures of most of the main Czech political parties either sat in judgement of Šviha or testified for one side or the other, many of them displaying for all to see a level of personal animosity previously reserved for the Bohemian Germans or the Imperial government. As one observer (a National Socialist) put it, by the summer of 1914, “there was no nation in Europe as internally disorganized as were the Czechs” and according to another (a Young Czech), political life in Prague had reached a state where it was “everyone against everything.”