This paper seeks to analyze the nature of the German minorities in the Czech Republic and Poland. In order to achieve this goal, the relationship between Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic and Poland with the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany/FRG) forms an essential intellectual backdrop to our main theme. Reference to the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic/GDR) will be made as and where appropriate. As we shall see, tensions simmered between the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany/SED) and the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza Zjednoczona (Polish United Workers' Party/PZPR), and in reality relations between the two sides were poor. Reference will be made to wartime German occupation policy in both Poland and the Czech lands. Due attention will also be paid to the consequent expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia. However, due to limitations of space these themes, that have been exhaustively dealt with elsewhere, do not form part of our main focus of study.

English-speakers and Bulgarian-speakers seem to read the term “minority” differently. While in English it is more a demographic term, meaning part of the population which is numerically smaller and distinctive from the largest group (the majority of the country), to Bulgarians the term has inalienable political connotations: “minority” is an ethnic or religious group, the rights of which are protected by international agreements and law with far reaching consequences.

Relating nationalism to other ideologies or cultural value systems is an enigmatic scholarly activity. The enigma lies in the kaleidoscopic nature of nationalism and the ease with which it adapts to philosophically opposed ideologies. Nationalism, for instance, often assumes ties to liberalism, even though it presupposes a strong commitment to a national community that transcends individualism. It accommodates conservatism fairly well despite nationalism's modernizing mission, and it has often been paired with communism, regardless of the latter's internationalist rhetoric. Finally, nationalism and religion often go hand in hand, despite their deep philosophical incompatibilities and asymmetries. For example, nationalist ideologies often encourage violence against outgroup members even where religious doctrines strictly prohibit physical force. Inherently local, philosophically poor, and limited in scope or outreach, nationalism lacks a belief in afterlife salvation or in creative intelligence as source of meaning behind the universe. Yet it frequently dominates identity construction, overshadowing the primacy of Christianity or Islam which are universal in their message of salvation.

What happened in Poland in the early 1980s is fascinating in many respects. The possibility of changing the Communist system in a peaceful manner was once again tried without much success, this time by the mass movement of industrial workers, with some additional help offered by intellectuals. The importance of these events should be fully recognized. As Persky states, “For the first time, a workers' state had been forced to concede to its workers, among other things, the ironic right to form their own working class organization to defend themselves from the workers' state.” According to Ascherson, the success of Polish workers in setting up permanent representation beyond the control of the Party was a major achievement. In this respect the events of 1980/81 differed substantially from all previous workers' uprisings in eastern Europe.

The disintegration of the former Yugoslavia posed challenges for the universal concept of the Yugoslav Muslim nation for which several development paths were imaginable under the new circumstances. The concept of Bosniakdom, which was initially developed to address the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina, gradually grew to become a new and coherent national program to include all the Muslims of former Yugoslavia, primarily due to its new pan-Bosniak orientation. The present article traces the conceptual history of the national ideas of Muslimdom versus Bosniakdom within the former Yugoslav states, as well as the conceptual and institutional history of the pan-Bosniak idea and movement during the 1990s and 2000s. It does this by emphasizing the decisive role the Official Muslim Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina played in their development and divulgence. This article claims that, contrary to some expectations, the strategy of internationalization and universalization of the hitherto territorial concept of Bosniakdom toward Muslims in neighboring countries during the second half of 1990s and 2000s was closely linked to the idea of the construction of the Bosniak national state. It also proposes that the evolution of Bosniakdom into pan-Bosniakdom during that time primarily followed concerns related to that goal.

Despite the euphoria surrounding the 1989 revolutions, over the past 15 years voices have warned that resurgent nationalism may bring “democracy in dark times” (Isaacs, 1998; Tismaneanu, 1998; Ramet, 1997). Reflecting this fear, a stream of articles has asserted that nationalism in the East is different from the more civic nationalism of the West (Vujacic, 1996; Bunce, 2001; Schöpflin, 2003). If true, these sentiments should be reflected in the constitutions, documents that define the polity and the foundational values of the state in addition to creating the basic institutional order. Debates over religious references in the European Union constitution and the focus on constitutional change by Albanian forces in Macedonia in 2000 serve as reminders of the centrality of constitutions in contention over identity. However, as all constitutions in East Central Europe and the Balkans set out a democratic structure informed by a tangle of national and liberal ideas, they cannot be neatly divided between those which are nationalist and those which are civic, between those which respect minority rights and those which do not. In fact, what is striking about the constitutions is how they combine ideas of liberal individualism, strong democracy, and pluralism.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, nationality as an “ordering principle” became for the first time a significant factor for Russian imperial policy. Among the most thorny issues facing the imperial bureaucracy was the delimitation of the boundaries of the “Russian nation.” As is well known, St Petersburg never accepted either Ukrainians (at the time more often referred to as “Little Russians”) or Belarusians as separate nations. On the other hand, official Russia also did not deny the linguistic and cultural difference of these two groups entirely. Categories used in the 1897 census reflect this: under the category “mother tongue” (not surprisingly, no specific category of “nation” or “ethnicity” was included), those surveyed could respond “Great Russian,” “Little Russian,” or “Belarusian.” All three of these categories were then, however, subsumed into the larger category “Russian.” In a similar way, Russian officials never denied that Belarusians were in certain respects different from their brethren in central Russia. They did, however, indignantly reject the idea that these differences were so great as to exclude Belarusians from membership in the Russian nation.

Ethnic conflict is not—because there are no ethnic groups in conflict. This is the main conclusion of a comparison of so-called “ethnic conflicts” in the Balkans and in colonial India. A comparison of Muslim nation building in these two regions provides several valuable insights that go far beyond the specific cases. Thus far, there have been many hints in the literature on similarities between Bosnia and Pakistan or the Balkans and the Indian subcontinent as a whole. But there have been no systematic comparisons, though many parallels emerge when we look more closely.

The registration of citizens' ethnicity (“nationality”) in official documents was commonplace and often obligatory in the Soviet Union, and the practice continued in the Russian Federation through the 1990s. In 1997, the Yeltsin government replaced the Soviet internal passport with a new one not featuring the “nationality” entry. The new document was met with an instant wave of protests from Russia's regions, above all the ethnically defined federal subjects. They objected to the removal of the “nationality” entry, and also because the passport (unlike the Soviet one) did not have a section in the federal subject's own language(s) besides Russian, and did not display the emblems of the region in question.