In General

The Estonian Center Party was founded in Tallinn on October 12, 1991, shortly after Estonia had regained its independence. The formation of political parties had begun in the country in 1988, and the Estonian Center Party, along with the Estonian Coalition Party and some other influential political forces, sprung up in the so-called second party-building wave. The main core of the party Board (11 members) and most of the rank-and-file members have come to politics via the Estonian Popular Front, and, accordingly, they have taken with them their experience and built their political credo on the programmatic views of the Popular Front. The party defines itself as a center force on the Estonian political scene. (The distribution of political forces does not yet correspond to that common in Western countries.)

This article is the fourth in this Nationalities Papers series, following Part 1 which covered the period from the arrival of Gypsies to Europe until the mid-nineteenth century, Part 2 describing the birth of the first modern Romani organizations from the nineteenth century up until the Second World War (WWII) and Part 3a covering the first wave of expansion of Romani activism countrywide after 1945. As mentioned in Part 3a, the period between WWII and 1970 can be distinguished from the previously covered periods by the emergence of the following phenomena: (1) modern Romani political organizations at the national level, (2) their unification through international Romani umbrella organizations, (3) some limited Romani participation in non-Romani mainstream political or administrative structures, (4) an international Romani evangelical movement, (5) reconciliation between Romani political representation and the Catholic Church, (6) national institutions created by various governments to aid the administration of policies on Roma, (7) rapid growth of non-governmental organizations addressing Romani issues, and (8) some limited cooperation between Romani organizations and intergovernmental organizations.

Common historical wisdom has it that the Peasant Revolt of 1907 and the elections of December 1937 reflected the profound anti-Semitism of the Romanian peasantry. And since the events of 1907 and 1937 have also been looked upon as decisive in determining the course of the history of the peasantry, if not of Romania as such, it seems only proper to assess the accuracy of these contentions.

The revolt of 1907 was indeed a social movement directed against the exploitation of the impoverished Moldavian and Wallachian peasantry by Romanian landlords and Jewish “arendaşi” (Leaseholders). After 1907, and throughout the interwar years, Romanian historiography and political propaganda stressed the anti-Semitic character of the uprising in an effort to exonerate the absentee, and other, Romanian landowners and to emphasize the exploitative nature of Jews and Jewish capitalism. The Jewish question was organically connected with the peasant question in a variety of ways, all condemnatory of Jewish and Judaizing capitalism.

As none of the major political parties of pro-World War I Romania—or, for that matter, few of interwar Romania as well—paid more than lip service to the economic and social plight of the peasants, it was convenient to regard the Jew as the root cause of all the evils affecting the peasantry. Before World War I, populists and, paradoxically, socialists enunciated political theories regarding “neoserfdom,” which, however different in origin, converged in demands for radical land reform. The reform came not because of such demands but because of the Bolshevik Revolution and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. Officially, it was unrelated to any political ideology, certainly separated from the Jewish question which, in theory, was resolved concurrently with the peasant question through the granting of citizenship and extension of political rights to the Jews of Romania. Following the countrywide agrarian reform in Greater Romania the peasant and the Jewish questions were in fact severed as Jews and Jewish capitalism had virtually no connections with the land.

More than 20 years after the violent break-up of Yugoslavia European efforts to create sustainable States in the Western Balkans, as discussed in the papers of this Special Issue, have brought about some progress, but a lot of work remains. This conclusion will draw on some of the themes developed in the previous papers and contrast to what extent EU Member State-Building provides a new framework for enlargement and what the key questions of sustainable expansion of the EU and functional statebuilding through conditionality will be. It concludes that the EU's current engagement with the Western Balkans faces many problems and obstacles and therefore some reconsideration might be necessary.

The late Mykola Chubatyi, a leading Ukrainian historian who resided in this country since 1939, recalled in one of his numerous writings (Ukrains'ka istorychna nauka i ii rozvytok ta dosiahnennia, Philadelphia, 1971) an event involving then Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Asked by one of his associates why he never mentions Ukraine, Rusk answered: “Ukraine is not a statenation and there never existed a Ukrainian state.” Reminded by an insisting friend that this is not the case, because Ukrainians have had their statehood in the Middle Ages and again during the seventeenth century and the Ukrainian SSR is after all a member of the United Nations, Rusk instantly and professorially fired back that Russia always had some problems in the South.

Alexander Motyl

In this discussion, let us exclude economic issues altogether. While I would not presume to fill an economist's shoes, I would like to rephrase one or two issues from a political scientist's perspective that might then be worthy of discussion. This rephrasing is essential because the discussion of economic reform in the Soviet Union has been noticeably lacking in any kind of context or any appreciation of the genuine political situation in the Soviet Union. What strikes me in the economists’ discussions of what should be done in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland is that, by and large, there is very little consideration paid to precisely the issues that have been raised by today's presentations. There is almost no consideration of the constitutional and political confusion referred to by John Hazard; very little talk about the social decompression and the societal problems described by Peter Juviler; complete ignorance of the gender, equality, and age conflicts addressed by Michael Paul Sacks; virtually no appreciation of the ethnic conflicts discussed by Robert Lewis; no understanding whatsoever of the cultural problems pointed out by Edward All worth; and very little appreciation of the security dilemmas referred to by Jack Matlock. In other words, the economic discussion, even if theoretically correct, and reflective of the best textbook version of what should be done in such circumstances, seems to be totally disembodied from any of these other contextual realities, and thus, almost foreordained to fail.

This article explores the relationship between minority city-level and state-level political representations through the analysis of the contested implementation of state education policies in Tallinn and Riga. Referring to the US debate on this issue, the article asks what role minority incorporation into city-level power structures can play for its substantive representation. The comparison between Tallinn and Riga reveals two potential answers to this question. The case of Riga illustrates how city-level representation can be an alternative representative channel through which the minority can put pressure on state government and magnify its political voice within the country's democratic space. On the contrary, the case of Tallinn illustrates how a municipality can be an alternative locus of representation, which does not guarantee minority empowerment but rather entraps the minority at the local level within the implicit understanding that the minority (or at least the parties that get the minority vote) can “have its share” locally, but it cannot hope to influence state policies. The comparison between the two cases reveals different levels of legitimacy of the minority's voice in the democratic debate of Estonia and Latvia, and shows the risks and opportunities linked to the two models of minority city-level incorporation.

This article explores the role of maps in the construction and development of ethnographic taxonomies in the mid-century Russian Empire. A close reading of two ethnographic maps of “European Russia” produced by members of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, Petr Keppen (1851) and Aleksander Rittikh (1875), is used to shine a spotlight on the cartographical methods and techniques (lines, shading, color, hatching, legends, text, etc.) employed to depict, construct, and communicate these taxonomies. In doing so, this article draws our attention to how maps impacted visual and spatial thinking about the categories of ethnicity and nationality, and their application to specific contexts and political purposes within the Empire. Through an examination of Keppen's and Rittikh's maps, this article addresses the broader question of why cartography came to be regarded as such a powerful medium through which to communicate and consolidate particular visions of an ethnographic landscape.

A series of events in 2008 influenced the Karabakh conflict resolution efforts: the Kosovo declaration of independence, the August war, and Russian recognition of independent Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Two new diplomatic initiatives to resolve the Karabakh conflict were launched immediately after the August war, one by Russia and the second by Turkey. This article discusses why the two initiatives failed, and the structural problems of Karabakh conflict resolution efforts.

After the fall of socialism, besides the attempts to reach national reconciliation, radical reconfigurations and reinterpretations of the past were used to negotiate local, national and transnational identities and strengthen national agendas. In most of the formerly socialist countries, the historical interpretation significantly resembles the struggle over the legitimacy and authenticity of this representation. The author argues that in post-socialist Slovenia instead of the anticipated democratization and break with ideologically predestined historical work after 1989, at least three competing politically contaminated ways of interpreting the past gained momentum: the so-called liberal-conformist position, which insists that we have to look at the future and forget the traumas of the past; the revisionist standpoint which, at least in Slovenia, is the most aggressive one; and the objectivistic approach practiced by most Slovenian historians after 1991. To do that the author investigates how collective memories are mobilized in general, formal and in particular more personalized and/or emotional narratives and traces the changes in Slovenian memorial landscape divided into categories: the authoritarian type, defined by a desire for direct colonization of the interpretation of the past related to the Second World War; the conciliatory type that tries to achieve “reconciliation”; the conflicting type that clashes with the iconography of an existing partisan monument as an alternative interpretation.