The creation of an Austrian province, titled “The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria” (“with the Grand Duchy of Cracow” added later) was the result of the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772. The addition of this territory to the already imposing number of Habsburg's realms was ostensibly based on the dubious claim of the Hungarian kings to sovereignty over the medieval Ruthenian (Ukrainian) realm of Galicia and Volhynia. Under the subsequent Polish rule, the southern part of this duchy was organized as the województwo ruskie (Ruthenian [Ukrainian] Province), which was one of the several provinces in the so-called Ziemie Ruskie (Ruthenian Lands) of the Commonwealth, or rather of the Korona (Kingdom of Poland), vis-à-vis the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Galicia as an Austrian creation included small parts of the adjacent Ruthenian provinces of Podilia (Podole), Volhynia and Belz, (i.e. Galicia proper), and in the west also the province of Cracow, with territorial enclaves, really medieval relics, such as the “Duchy of Oświȩcim [Auschwitz]” and “Duchy of Zator” (i.e. the non-historical “Western Galicia”). Under Austrian rule, Galicia became a common home for Ukrainians (officially called Ruthenians) in the eastern counties and Poles in the western counties. Many Poles lived in Galicia proper. The Polish or Latin-Polish culture deeply influenced the Ukrainian population. However, it stubbornly, though inarticulately, maintained a sense of ethnic community with the Ukrainians who lived under the Russian imperial rule. A prominent Polish historian (and for more than a decade President of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow), Stanislaw Smolka, ascertains the “common features” of the “ethno-historical indivudiuality” known in Polish history as Ruś (Ruthenia) which had been “dormant through the centuries but never moribund [obumarla].” This Ruthenia “at the present attempts to find for herself a new distinguishing name and wants it to be ‘Ukraine'.” He also determines “the historical continuity” in the past of the old Ruthenia of Yaroslav and Monomakh and the “Ruthenian Lands” of the Commonwealth.

The 15 October 2003 presidential election went down in the history of Azerbaijan as a turning point for three reasons. First, it provided a legitimacy for the transfer of power from ailing President Heydar Aliev to his son Ilham. Second, it demonstrated the unwillingness of the so-called “international community” to risk jeopardizing geostrategic and economic interests by unequivocally condemning blatant falsification of the ballot. And, third, by failing to condemn falsification of the ballot, the international community has signaled to other entrenched Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) leaders that they have little to lose by following the Azeri example. However, the developments one month later in Georgia evidently worried them that the popular protests that forced President Shevardnadze from power could have adverse repercussions for incumbent leaders across the region.

In 1944 Poland was re-established for the second time in the twentieth century. Between the Lublin manifesto of 22 July 1944 and the Potsdam conference of summer 1945 a communist-dominated regime had formed, which was had little in common with the Second Republic that had been founded between the declaration of independence on 9 November 1918 and the peace of Riga with Bolshevik Russia signed in March 1921. Post-war Poland was significantly smaller, geographically further to the west, and ethnically more homogeneous. The Holocaust had destroyed Europe's most sizeable Jewish population, the loss of the kresy (eastern borderlands) to the USSR had reduced the size of eastern-Slavic minorities and the expulsion of the Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia further helped to create an ethnically homogeneous country. For the first time in her history, Poland had the structure of a nation-state. Through the destruction and catastrophe of Nazi occupation and genocide the goal of firebrand Polish nationalists such as Roman Dmowski had been achieved: a Poland inhabited by ethnic Poles. Still, the new Poland was less independent than its predecessor; from 1944 onwards it was part of the emerging post-war Soviet Empire. Polish sovereignty had fallen victim to Stalin's “revolutionary-imperial paradigm.” Expansion of Moscow's power was as much a priority of the Soviet leadership as the export of Bolshevik revolution.

I am not sure how to respond to these presentations since they were all very different in form and content. Maybe that says something about the monster with which we are trying to grapple.

As these pages are being written, a fragile cease-fire is holding in Croatia, and the Bosnian legislature is about to declare Bosnia-Hercegovina an independent state despite the strenuous opposition of close to forty percent of the population. When hostilities began in Croatia, the Serb insurgents there called themselves cetniks and referred to their enemies as ustasa, World War II labels which the Serb media promptly adopted. Bosnian Serbs might call themselves cetniks too, should it come to open hostilities in that republic, but they will have trouble finding a label that would be applicable not only to their Croat, but also to their Muslim enemies.