After having published a book, an author must take into account that his text remains unprotected, and becomes an object of new readings which reflect different social and political conditions, and the interests of subsequent generations of readers. Consequently, an author's concepts and opinions are open to various reflections and can be used as arguments or tools of analysis, as inspirations, models, or targets of criticism. These processes occur independently of an author's expectations and original goals. In a broader sense, we can agree with antiquity: “Habent sua fata libelli.” My book on the “Social Preconditions of National Revival” has been no exception, and it is a great pleasure for me to realize that this book has survived so many decades to live its “second life,” and that its original meanings and concepts inspire new interpretations, even if they have sometimes been misunderstood or exploited as arguments in totally different conditions and settings. It is a pleasant surprise to observe that my methods, typologies and generalizations can be (successfully?) discussed and used, naturally in a modified version, as tools to analyze developments and conflicts in very distant countries and times. Alexander Maxwell has given an excellent and well-informed overview of this differentiated and sometimes controversial second life. All other contributions to this issue, analyzing concrete cases, could be understood as indications that my scientific efforts have made sense, and sometimes inspired researchers up to the present day.

On 27 February 1992, almost 47 years after the end of the Second World War, Chancellor Helmut Kohl of a re-united Germany and President Václav Havel of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic [the ČSFR] signed a Friendship Treaty between their two countries in the Spanish Room of Prague Castle, the residence of the Czechoslovak president. While this treaty could have signalled a new era of Sudeten German-Czech relations, in fact it did not, as some 2,000 protesters who greeted Kohl and Havel with denunciatory placards following the signing made clear. Why not?

In this essay I explore the ways in which the internal Albanian politics of memory in Kosovo rely on a longer, lived history of militant self-organisation than the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) war period alone. On the basis of recent ethnographic research, I argue that the memory of prewar militant activism is symbolically codified, ritually formalized, and put on the public stage in Kosovo today. Not only has this process effectively rehabilitated and consolidated the personal, social, and political status of specific former activists, it also has produced a hegemonic morality against which the actions of those in power are judged internally. On the one hand, this process reproduces shared cultural references which idealise ethnonational solidarity, unity and pride and which have served militant mobilisation already before the 1990s. On the other, it provides the arguments through which rival representatives of the former militant underground groups (known as Ilegalja) compete both socially and politically still today. Although this process demarcates some lines of social and political friction within society, it also suggests that international efforts to introduce an identity which breaks with Kosovo's past and some of its associated values, face a local system of signification that is historically even deeper entrenched than is usually assumed.

The Enlightenment instilled European and European-rooted societies with certain fundamental principles which are generally taken for granted; among the most important are democracy, education, and human equality. Not all of mankind experienced this period of cultural history, but in those areas that the Enlightenment touched, a tautology functions in the collective subconscious that where there is democracy and where there is an educated people, there will be equality. Western nations—their politicians, scholars, and common folk alike—believe that a preordained consequence of the system of democratic rule in a developed country is open-mindedness and tolerance; in contrast, it is generally maintained that non-democratic governments where knowledge is evidently censored and controlled, such as those of the former Soviet Bloc, produce narrow-mindedness and intolerance.

This article examines determinants of persistent regional political cleavages in post-Communist Ukraine. The question is how significant the role of culture is compared to ethnic, economic, and religious factors in the regional divisions. This study employs correlation, factor, and regression analyses of regional support for the Communist/pro-Russian parties and presidential candidates and pro-nationalist/pro-independence parties and candidates in all national elections held from 1991 to 2006, the vote for the preservation of the Soviet Union in the March 1991 referendum, and the vote for the independence of Ukraine in the December 1991 referendum. This study shows that the pattern of these regional differences remained relatively stable from 1991 to 2006. Historical experience has a major effect on regional electoral behavior in post-Communist Ukraine. The legacy of Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak rule is positively associated with the pro-nationalist and pro-independence vote; the same historical legacy has a negative effect on support for pro-Communist and pro-Russian parties and presidential candidates and on the vote for the preservation of the Soviet Union.

This article analyzes electronic letters to the editor on the coverage of the riot in Kondopoga (2006) and the bombings in the Moscow subway (2010). Letters to electronic media are used for the first time as a source for popular opinion on nationalism and ethnic conflicts in Russia. The first argument of this study is methodological: a comparison between the polls and the letters suggests that letters to electronic media represent public opinion on nationalism even though Internet users still constitute a minority of Russian citizens. This study also claims that the letters under examination indicate a move from extreme nationalism to so called “banal nationalism,” the term coined by Michael Billig, during the period between 2006 and 2010. Finally, the article argues that the concept of the civic nation is not yet well understood or accepted by Russian citizens. Although this concept, expressed in Russian by the newly coined word rossiane, became somewhat more popular in 2010 than it had been in 2006, the ethnic understanding of Russian still prevails. The basis for the new identity rossiane, as it is presented in the letters, lacks common memories, myths and traditions that would resonate strongly in popular imagination.