The presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe and the reshaping of Europe's internal borders sped up the separation between the Eastern and Western blocs in the first years after the end of the Second World War. In countries where communism had been declared illegal or lacked the support of the electorate before 1944, the accession of communist leaders to governmental structures had been advanced by the politics of the Soviet Union, based on systematised political intimidation, institutionalised violence, and blackmail. The communist authorities then legitimised their political positions in relation to the historical past of their countries and according to the development of their societies after the Second World War.

The drastic changes in the Balkans in the 1990s and the disintegration of Yugoslavia in particular have resulted in a large number of publications attempting to explain the break-up of this country and the political developments in the Balkans. Some of these publications deal partly with the local Muslims who were engaged in the Balkan conflicts but, with some exceptions, they are focused mainly on recent developments, with less attention paid to the historical contexts in which the Muslim nationalist movements were shaped.

This article follows earlier discussions about the current status of Romani refugees and migrants within Europe and the role of human rights in the process of accession of Central European states to the European Union (EU), in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Volume 13, Number 2. Romani migration opens up central issues of democratisation in Eastern Europe and of the role played by the EU in shaping that process. Human rights appear to have been accorded secondary importance and were replaced by the political doctrines of accession as efforts to manage and control migration, particularly of so-called undesirable migrants, such as the Roma, have reached a hiatus. The argument offered here is that discrimination of the Roma has been defined as no more than a social problem so that governments, both East and West, can proceed with the political agenda of enlargement. To demonstrate this point, the article reviews some Czech governmental documentation related to the treatment of Roma and places it within the context of the debate around accession within the broader framework of EU harmonisation of immigration policies.

At the turn of the century a major social, economic and political transformation was taking place in Russia, which at the time was a vast trans-continental empire extending from Warsaw in the west to Vladivostok in the east. Many rival currents of thought and various political movements presented their solutions for Russia's political, social and ethnic conflicts. In 1917, adherents of one Marxist current, the Bolsheviks, seized power in Russia and after a prolonged and extremely bloody Civil War consolidated their regime in the early 1920s. Among the nations of the world Russia alone adopted as its guide for the solution of its problems and conflicts Marxist ideology, invented about seventy years earlier in Germany, an ideology that its founders thought offered a solution for all of the important problems of humanity at large. For, indeed, Marxism was a comprehensive system of thought, which claimed to explain the entire history of humanity and to offer a vision, a scientific blueprint, for humanity's future. In that blueprint the phenomena of conflict, power, and politics were to make room for totally new principles of social organization: solidarity, cooperation, and a rational management of resources and people, i.e., planning.

The outcome of Turkey's June 2011 elections temporarily quelled – though by no means entirely put to rest – growing concern over the creeping autocratic tendencies of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). To ensure that democracy remains durable, the AKP must now clearly demonstrate that it is willing to shun heavy-handed tactics and instead engage the opposition in a genuine dialog regarding important matters of constitutional change, especially those related to individual rights and identity issues. A slide toward autocracy has been an all-too-common pitfall in Turkish politics over the years. Should it so choose, the AKP is well poised to break the cycle at this critical juncture in Turkish politics.

“Belgrade ‘Targets’ Find Unity ‘From Heaven,’” read the front-page headline of a somewhat staggered New York Times, only five days after NATO bombs began falling on Serbia. Instead of hiding in bomb shelters or, as US officials had hoped, rebelling against their government, Serbs were busy singing patriotic songs at public squares, throwing rocks at the Goethe Institute, wearing medieval Serbian military uniforms and carrying signs equating Bill Clinton to Ottoman emperors, Croatian fascists and Napoleon. Thus a population which had for years expressed nothing but discontent with its government suddenly became “unified from heaven—but by the bombs, not by God.” Uniting them “behind their soldiers, their Kosovo and even President Slobodan Milošević” was, Belgrade's then-Mayor explained, a seemingly incomprehensible mélange of “myth and superstition.”