Please bear with a specialist in international relations commenting on a series of presentations in comparative politics and economics. I will first try to identify a set of issues that arise from the presentations, and then I will spend a few minutes giving some of my own reflections on those issues.

The implementation of language laws in multilingual territories often leads to acrimonious political conflicts, as demonstrated by the recent experiences of Quebec, Estonia, Moldova and Slovakia, to name but a few. The pattern of such conflicts is remarkably similar. First, one group (generally, but not necessarily, the demographic majority) claims ancestry on a territory which it considers its “homeland”; then it succeeds in proclaiming its language (the main marker of group identity) the sole official language in the “public domain” of the given territory. This action triggers organized protest from the other linguistic group (generally the demographic minority), which feels aggrieved over such fundamental issues as group status, equal opportunity for upward mobility, and educational rights.

The Soviet Union's decision to force Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to accept its mutual assistance proposals in the fall of 1939 was one of the most dramatic events in modern Baltic history. The new Soviet-Baltic relationship signalled the return of this region to Russia's sphere-of-influence and ended with the total absorption of the Baltic states into the U.S.S.R. the following year. A great deal has been written about the political-diplomatic discussions that led to the Soviet-Baltic mutual assistance pacts. Scholars, however, have paid far less attention to the impact of these new relationships on the various political institutions in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Particularly efforts of these systems to adapt to their new status vis á vis Moscow.

The collapse of socialist regimes resulted in tremendous regional realignments in the regions surrounding the heartland of Eurasia. Remarkably, not only states, but also transnational actors have played significant roles in this process. This study highlights transnational ethnicities (Mingrelians, Armenians, and Muslims) in Abkhazia, and tries to describe how the involvement of transnational religious organizations (such as the Armenian Apostolic Church and Turkey's Diyanet) affected the politics around these minorities. In the Black Sea rim, interstate and transnational politics are rather autonomous from each other. For example, when scores of powerful countries, such as the United States and European Union member states, desperately tried to ignore Russia's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, regarding it as a lawless act, Turkey's Diyanet admitted that Russia's recognition of Abkhazia created a new legal situation and began to fulfill its long-dreamed-of desire to help the Abkhazian Muslims. According to political conjuncture in Abkhazia, the same Gali population changes from Georgians to Mingrelians and back. This demonstrates how ethnic categories are used in a constructivist way in the Black Sea rim.

On 28 October 1918, a group of Czech nationalists stood on the steps of the Obecni Dům (Municipal House) in Prague and proclaimed their independence from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, allying themselves with the new state of Czechoslovakia. Their declaration marked the beginning of a new era in the Czech lands, one in which Czechs, as the majority nation, hoped to redefine the terms of political discourse. The new Czechoslovak Republic, its Czech supporters declared, would be the antithesis of the Habsburg regime. In the place of a multinational Monarchy, they would erect a democratic nation-state. The second half of this political vision was complicated by the fact that the new Czechoslovakia actually contained many ethnic groups, but Czechs still tended to imagine their new Republic as the political expression of the Czech nation. At the same time, this “Czech-centered” politics also emphasized the democratic basis of the new country. Czechoslovakia, Czech leaders said, would be a state governed by its people and dedicated to protecting their rights and freedoms as individuals. A political culture that rested on both ethnic nationalism and democratic values obviously contained some internal tensions: the need to protect the interests of one specific nation and the duty to protect the individual rights of all citizens could rub uncomfortably against each other. Yet, at that moment in 1918, most Czechs failed to register this potential for ideological conflict, instead seeing an essential link between democratic politics and the good of the Czech nation. For many Czechs, democracy itself was a need of the nation, a political structure crucial to Czech national self-realization. This idea came from one prominent conception of Czech nationhood that had captured the public imagination in the fall of 1918. According to this strain of Czech national ideology, the Czech nation had a sort of democratic character. This meant that only an egalitarian, democratic government would suit a “Czech” state. So, paradoxically, a universal language of rights and freedoms was the key to building a truly national Czechoslovak Republic. It was with a state that emphasized equality and personal freedom that the Czechs would fulfill their national destiny.

The general picture of early Soviet nationality policy has been one in which Moscow embarked on an inexorable path of centralization immediately after 1917. While there is much truth to this portrait it ignores the persistent rivalries within local party organizations and among the non-Great Russian nationalities. Bashkiria in the years 1917-23 is a case in point. The struggles over the creation and development of a Soviet Bashkiria touched off an intense round of acrimonious conflicts there and in Moscow among Great Russian, Bashkir, and Tatar cadres that was only resolved by the imposition of centralized authority during the twenties. The significance of this experience lies not only in its typifying the complex mosaic out of which Soviet nationality policy evolved, but also in the profound impact the question of Bashkiria had for the development of the Sultangalievist national deviation in the middle twenties.

Contemporary Slovene literature from 1950 to the present has been deeply influenced, above all, by two major factors: first, its own tradition through a century-long development, and secondly, the socio-political position of literature immediately after the Second World War. As concerns tradition, it should be noted that the beginning of literature in the Slovene language coincided with the arrival of Protestantism in the sixteenth century; only sparse religious records are known from previous centuries. This literature remained within the framework of ecclesiastical needs until the late eighteenth century, similar to those found in Lithuania, Estonia or Finland. At the end of the eighteenth century, Slovene literature began to resemble the Central European literature typical of Croatia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. This is not only evident in the same literary trends and genres, but above all in the fact that national ideology as well as social and moral ideas acquired a significant role in its concepts.

After darkness fell over the provincial town of Lihula on 2 September 2004, youths pelted riot police with stones. Nothing like this had ever happened before in the peaceful and orderly small Baltic State of Estonia. The police were protecting a crane and its driver sent by the Ministry of the Interior to remove a monument honouring those Estonians who fought on the German side against the Red Army during the Second World War. In the evening of 26 April 2007 demonstrators in Tallinn pelted riot police with stones and went on a rampage of smashing windows and looting. The Estonian capital had never experienced anything like this. The police were protecting the site of a monument honouring Soviet soldiers who had fought against Nazi Germany. At night, when the rioting had ceased, a crane ordered by the Ministry of Defence removed the monument.

Although no contemporary Tatar source presented a Tatar view of the famous battle of Kulikovo Field in 1380 the modern Kazan’ Tatar historian Rustam Nabiev has published a major revisionist reinterpretation of the event based upon what he considers an objective analysis of fourteenth-century Rus'-Tatar history and relations. Nabiev concludes that the battle did not happen at all as narrated in Muscovite literary works of the Kulikovo Cycle. In reality Muscovite Grand Prince Dmitrii Ivanovich did not defeat Emir Mamai on the Don River; instead Dmitrii and his princely retinue participated in the defeat of Mamai by the army of Khan Tokhtamysh in the region of the Northern Donets and Kalka rivers. Nabiev's critique of the Russian national paradigm of the battle has some merit but it overlooks previous Western scholarship which had already made many of the same points, oversimplifies current Russian scholarship about the battle, and arbitrarily manipulates the sources to create a fantastic and fictitious scenario. Even so his views deserve to be refuted on scholarly grounds, not by an ad hominem dismissal as a reflection of “Tatar chauvinism.”