Since the Rose Revolution (2003), Georgia has encountered an unprecedented scale of institutional reforms concomitant with the rise of American and European involvement in the “democratization” process. Various scholars have suggested that Georgian nationalism developed from an ethno-cultural basis to a more civic/liberal orientation after the Rose Revolution. This paper analyzes Georgian nationalism under President Mikheil Saakashvili to demonstrate the significant divergence between political rhetoric on national identity, the selection of symbols, and state policy toward the Georgian Orthodox Church versus state policy toward ethnic minorities. The aim of this article is to examine the at times conflicting conceptions of national identity as reflected in the public policies of Saakashvili's government since the Rose Revolution. It attempts to problematize the typologies of nationalism when applied to the Georgian context and suggests conceptualizing the state-driven nationalism of the post-Rose Revolution government as “hybrid nationalism” as opposed to civic or ethno-cultural.

In the last two decades the Soviet Union has definitively entered the age of television. Although a Petersburg engineer allegedly “laid the foundation of television” (by designing the cathode ray tube!) as far back as the beginning of the century, and a Russian engineer in Uzbekistan reportedly transmitted the image of a human face in 1928, the Soviets lagged well behind the Western world in the development of the new medium through the 1950s. In 1960, however, the Central Committee of the Communist party declared that “television, along with the press and radio broadcasting, is called upon to play an important role in the education of Soviet people in the spirit of communist principles [ideinost'] and morality, of intransigence toward bourgeois ideology and morality, [and] in the mobilization of the workers …. “ Thereafter, Soviet television progressed at a rapid rate. Between 1961 and 1975, the number of television receivers in the country increased more than eleven-fold. The enormous Ostankino Center in Moscow was built to serve as the main production and transmission base, and a network of cables, relay stations and earth satellites was established to carry broadcasts to the far corners of the Union.

In this article I present a decade-long affair over the erection of the Monument in Belgrade to those killed in the wars of the 1990s where the official Serbian policy was to manage its contested past through cover ups and cultural reframing rather than public acknowledgement. I demonstrate here that, though the open competitions to erect a monument dedicated to the fallen of the wars of the 1990s were an opportunity to negotiate different mnemonic agendas, the ruling political elite, as the dominant actor, promoted Serbian victimhood as it meant to bridge gaps in the opposing domestic and international demands. I suggest here that the mnemonic battle in present-day Serbia proves to be an exemplary case of how a post-conflict nation state mediates its contested past when caught in the gap between the domestic demands and those of international relations.

Mass deportations of native populations (Jews included) from territories annexed by the USSR in 1939–40 in amicable division of spoils with Nazi Germany and its allies had everywhere the same historical background and followed roughly the same procedure. Territories in question included the states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in their entirety, parts of Finland, nearly one-half of pre-1939 Poland, and the formerly Romanian regions of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina.

The Gulag Handbook states that in 1936 “the entire native populations of Finns, Estonians, Letts, Lithuanians, Poles, and Romanians…were transported” from the border zone of the USSR. Many such peoples began to appear unreliable through Stalinist eyes because they “had relatives across the border,” and “might undermine [propaganda that people] abroad were suffering and that no better life existed than that in the USSR.” Several former officers of the security police confirm that the 1930s saw purges of “unreliable elements” from border regions, including not only “class aliens” and political malcontents, but also minorities whose kinship with populations of neighboring states facilitated the movement of people and of information across borders. More importantly, numerous personal accounts gave rise to the perception in the contemporary Finnish government and popular circles that their brethren were being systematically eliminated from the Soviet borders with Finland and Estonia.

Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism has led to an unleashing of ethnic strife and a worsening of the economic conditions of the Roma, who by any measurement occupy the lowest rung of the social ladder. In the former Yugoslavia, the situation has been aggravated enormously by war, rampant nationalism, forced emigration, ethnic cleansing, and economic sanctions. The nearly four-year war in the region took a heavy toll on all the successor states except Slovenia.

The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes inherited a considerable number of Germans along with its ex-Habsburg territories when it was established in December 1918. The two most important German communities in inter-war Yugoslavia were the Germans of Slovenia and the Germans of the Vojvodina and Croatia-Slavonia, the so-called Donau Schwaben (Swabians). There were also scattered pockets of ethnic Germans in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Yugoslavian ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche), like the other Yugoslavian non-Slav minorities, were objects of discrimination by the Yugoslavian government. The Slovenian German community responded to this hostility by developing a virulent German nationalism which, after 1933, rapidly turned into Nazism. The Swabian community, on the other hand, generally tried to cooperate with the central government in Belgrade. The Swabians remained rather ambivalent toward the rising Nazi movement until the tremendous successes of the Third Reich in 1938 made Nazism irresistibly attractive. In the face of the government's anti-German policies, why did each of these German communities manifest such different attitudes towards the Yugoslav state during the inter-war period? This article will show how several factors of history, demography, and geography combined to produce the different reactions of the two groups.

It is well known that the idea and practice of cross-border cooperation have been developed in postwar Europe with the intention of overcoming the economic and social isolation of border regions and reconciling the hostilities between former enemies. But as a precondition for this process the new map of European borders had to be perceived as “final” and “just,” and as such it was legitimized on international and national levels. Moreover, it was the universal acceptance of the principle of the invariability of borders which made it possible for national governments to grant border regions more freedom in their contacts with the neighbours. The same applies in principle to the former socialist countries, where cross-border cooperation is supposed to help overcome the post-Cold-War division of Europe.

The Koran and the Bible are God's grace Which is what all four holy Books embrace; To scorn and segregate this or that race Would be the darkest stains on one's face.
Aşik Veysel

Nationalist movements everywhere aim to create “territorially bounded political units (states) out of homogeneous cultural communities (nations).” Unfortunately, ethnic, linguistic, religious, political, and personal identities rarely coincide with geographical boundaries that enclose nation states. There are always groups within nation states whose identities are different from the majority. The leaders of nation states often see the presence of multiple ethnic communities within a single nation state as a sign of tension and instability, a threat to the integrity and indeed the very survival of a nation state. Consequently, they seek ways to culturally homogenize the nation so that the state and the nation come to coincide with one another.

Even after the conflicts of the early 1990s that brought them to their de facto independence, both Abkhazia and Transnistria remained strongly multi-ethnic. In both territories, no single ethnic group is an absolute majority and Russian is the language that is mostly spoken on the streets of Sukhumi and Tiraspol. Legislators of both entities felt the need to deal with multi-ethnicity and multilingualism, including in their constitutions, in laws related to education, or more directly with specific language laws (1992 law “On languages” in Transnistria; 2007 law “On the state language in Abkhazia”). The protection of linguistic rights that is formally part of the legislation of both territories finds limitations in practice. The language of education has proved to be particularly contentious, in particular for Moldovan/Romanian language schools in Transnistria and Georgian language schools in Abkhazia. Why are language laws in Abkhazia and Transnistria so different, in spite of the fact that they are both post-Soviet, multi-ethnic territories that became de facto independent in the early 1990s? The different approaches found in Abkhazia and Transnistria represent remarkable examples of language legislation as a tool for nation-building in ethnically heterogeneous territories.

Kazakhstan has experienced more powerful pressures of migration unlike any other republic of the former Soviet Union. An especially great number of immigrants came to Kazakhstan during the Soviet period. Many peoples of the former Soviet Union, often against their wishes, took up residence in the republic. The recent situation in Kazakhstan is characterized by a further intensification of migratory processes. Their complicated character, both in the past and today, has, in many aspects, influenced the present-day problems of the republic.