The present article is concerned with the ethnopolitical dimensions of the environmental problem within the Russian nationalistic movement in the USSR. As distinct from Western Europe, there has never been a “pure” ecological movement in the Soviet Union, and until recently the environmental issue has been raised mainly by national movements as a part of the national question.

Football (soccer) provides a useful prism for analysis of the long transition of the Serbian state and society since 1991. To a striking extent, the world of professional football and the attendant phenomena of financial corruption and football hooliganism have informed both the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and the current concerted attempt to create a “European Serbia.” During the 1990s, football in Serbia to a significant extent became synonymous with organized crime and the criminalization of the Serbian state. Since 2000, the persistent phenomena of crime, violent hooliganism and lethargic reforms have mirrored the difficult and halting transition of the post-Milošević state. Although recent events highlight the reluctance of the Serbian authorities to confront these problems, both government and sports officials are coming to see reform of Serbian football as a key element of the establishment of the rule of law.

This paper follows the almost contemporaneous emergence of the two primary antiwar initiatives in Belgrade and Zagreb to explore how they acted as hotbeds from which permanent human rights organizations appeared in the newly created nation-states. Drawing mostly upon in-depth interviews with antiwar activists from Serbia and Croatia, I argue that the dominant patterns of protest expansion were different in the two countries. While cooperation and tensions existed within both antiwar groups, the Antiwar Campaign of Croatia acted as a broker, leading toward the multiplication of civic initiatives; on the other hand, the Belgrade Center for Antiwar Action was characterized by ideological, professional, and personal divisions, which caused a rapid fragmentation of antiwar undertakings. This paper outlines the main reasons for such expansion patterns (scale-shift processes) and discusses them in the light of recent theoretical advances in political contention studies.

This study examines attitudes towards language and ethnicity among nearly four hundred high-school students in the Teschen region of the Czech Republic and Poland. The borders of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia meet in this region of mountains, coal mines, and heavy industry which earlier in this century was bitterly contested by Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Katherine Verdery writes that “[i]n the modern period, nation has become a potent symbol and basis of classification within an international system of nation states”; in turn, nationalism “is a political utilization of the symbol nation through discourse and political activity, as well as the sentiment that draws people into responding to this symbol's use.” However, the idea of “nation state” and its functioning can be seen as a part of the larger hegemonic constructions that operate on the level of “common” beliefs that legitimize existing social hierarchies and divisions of economic resources, and on the level of relationships between states and nations.

How is it possible for a Rusyn nation-builder to have contributed to the historiography of Ukraine to such a significant degree that one might suspect that Paul Robert Magocsi is really a Ukrainian nation-builder? Like all social-science puzzles, this one dissolves upon closer inspection. Magocsi resembles a Ukrainian nation-builder – or perhaps even is a Ukrainian nation-builder malgré soi – precisely because he is a Rusyn nation-builder. That is so because all nation-builders are always builders of at least two nations, their own and the others.

This article is the second in this series, following “Part 1: The Legacy of Early Institutionalism: From Gypsy Fiefs to Gypsy Kings”, which covered the period from the arrival of Gypsies to Europe until the mid-nineteenth century and was published in Volume 32, Number 3 of Nationalities Papers. Part 2 describes the birth of the first modern forms of ethnically-based political and social organizations established by Romani elites from the nineteenth century up until the Second World War (WWII). The main pattern of the development of Romani representation and administration until the mid-nineteenth century—as described in Part 1—distinguished between institutionalization from within and without. In the time period described here, the pattern changes because the majority of organizations and institutions established in order to represent and administer Roma are started upon the initiative of Romani leaders. Some are, however, created under the umbrella or patronage of non-Romani authorities or organizations and their activities are controlled by these patrons; others are created in (various degrees of) cooperation with non-Romani authorities or organizations and a few are created and operate independently. In addition, during this period the first few non-Romani non-governmental organizations start to take interest in the plight of Roma, and some organizations are specifically created to address their plight and lobby “on their behalf.” The other pattern of the development that emerges in this period is the gradual ascent of the institutionalization to higher levels. While until the nineteenth century most of the Gypsies organized themselves locally and regionally (with the exception of the Polish Office of the Gypsy Kings and the Chief Voivods in Transylvania and Hungary), in this period we see the first attempts by Roma themselves to expand the institutionalization countrywide and even internationally. These patterns are again explored in the conclusion (and summarized in Table 1), while the main body deals with the various arrangements in a more or less chronological and geographical order.

With the rise of ethnonationalism, scholars have generated intense debates over civic nationalism versus ethnic nationalism. The Mongols at China's Edge represents another effort added to endorse ethnic nationalism with its application to the Chinese context. The author aims to “explore from diverse angles the moral and political implications and contradictions of minzu tuanjie (national unity) in the socialist China” (p. 1). A legitimate question raised by the author in the introduction is whether the regional autonomy granted to national minorities in China encourages a sense of separate nationhood for Mongols or contributes to the assimilation of Mongols into China.

First Visions

During the Soviet period Estonia, like the other national republics of the USSR, lacked a foreign policy of her own. While foreign ministries did exist, they had just a symbolic function: staffed by only five or six people, they were allowed minimal cultural and trade contacts with the Western countries and limited inter-communist party ties within the Soviet bloc. They had to report to the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs on every move they made and served, first and foremost, as cover organizations for the KGB. Designing more substantive foreign policies in the Baltic Republics actually began before they gained independence in 1991. In 1989–1990, the emerging political parties voiced their first visions of the future of the Baltic States, which, generally speaking, boiled down to becoming sovereign democratic states, striving for friendly relations with all countries of the world. By that time, under the pressures of perestroika and glasnost, the Soviet authorities had been compelled to loosen their grip on the foreign contacts of the union republics. Those contacts, however, could not be called yet a foreign policy. They could, rather, be identified as isolated moves in the arena of international politics.