In addition to rapid economic decline and the persistent political violence in the province of Kosovo, in the 1980s Yugoslavia experienced a veritable renaissance of nationalist ideologies of the “dominant nation” type. According to this kind of national ideology, its target nation is historically predetermined to be politically dominant on a given territory which is then chosen by the national ideology in question. From 1971–1972, when the Croat nationalist movement and the Serbian liberal communist elite was suppressed by Tito until the early 1980s, publication of any nationalist writings was effectively banned in all parts of Yugoslavia, except in Kosovo. While ending public polemics by national ideologues, the ban confined nationalist polemics to the closely watched realm of intellectual dissidence. At that time, intellectual dissidents aimed primarily at the delegitimisaton of the communist regime in Yugoslavia. For this purpose, nationalist—as opposed to liberal—dissidents argued that the Yugoslav communist regime not only intentionally belittled and disadvantaged their respective nations, therefore benefiting the competitor nation(s), but also that it had betrayed their respective nations’ national goals. However absurd these claims may appear when taken together, they reveal how limited the target of each national ideology was: it targeted only “its” nation, in the attempt to prove that the communist regime had failed that nation alone and should not have the right to rule over it. These “dominant nation” ideologies stood in sharp contrast to the official Yugoslav Communist Party ideology of “equal nations,” which maintained the equality of all nations and nationalities in all parts of Yugoslavia; according to the official ideology, no nation in Yugoslavia was, in theory, politically dominant in any part of Yugoslavia.

In a world of presumed nation-states nation has been, and still is, an intrinsic part of political legitimization. The claim of nationality has played an important role in such legitimization for the last two centuries. More than this, it has also constituted a fundamental collective entity for an individual's understanding of who they are in relation to those who are perceived as not sharing the nationality. This is nothing new, but in an era of globalization we are witnessing the rebirth of nationalism and nationality (Castells, 1997), where the power struggle over the political agenda will increasingly be about the struggle for the right to identity and the risks of exclusion from the national community. Even if this is the case it stands clear that everyday nationalism and nationalist struggles take different forms in different parts of the world.

The human rights situation has continued to improve as glasnost matures and as Gorbachev's plan to establish a law-based society unfolds. The loosening of restraints, which has been linked to the process of democratization, has had a dramatic impact on human rights. At the same time, the nature of the human rights issue in the Soviet Union has shifted from what it was even last year. Large-scale demonstrations are now mundane events, as is the right to speak one's thoughts freely or to go to church. What has changed is that the process of enforcing or guaranteeing rights is now being generated from below, whereas in the beginning this process started from above. The reform process now has a life of its own among the people, who are demanding all sorts of things.

First of all, is it true that the issue Professor Salitan talked about—that of indigenous rights of self-determination versus individual rights (sometimes called indigenous versus human rights, but I think this is a mistake in terminology)—is being exploited by centrists against the movements for independence?

This article presents the history of Belarusian national development in the light of Miroslav Hroch's theory and demonstrates how the initial process of national awakening typical for small nations in eastern and central Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century described by M. Hroch continued under Soviet rule after the Bolshevik revolution. Changes which were brought to Belarusian society together with socialist modernization in the Soviet state constituted “Phase D” (a term coined by Terry Martin) in Belarusian nation-building. As the history of Belarusian nation-formation illustrates, Hroch's scheme of three phases of national movements within small nations ignored a specific mode of small nations’ development in a multiethnic state and within the socialist formation. At the same time, the question about the status of the Soviet era's achievements in Belarusian national development appears to be an important issue for understanding the current political development in the country.