If the eight months since the August coup have shown us nothing else, it is that the “nationalities problem” not only will survive the death of the Soviet Union but may well intensify. For Russia in particular the past year has witnessed what might be called the “The Nationality Problem—Round II” whereby many of the same pressures that brought down the Soviet Union are now mounting within the Russian Federation (or simply, “Russia”—the delegates at the recent Congress of Peoples’ Deputies were unable to settle on a single name). There are many ironies about all this, but let me just cite a few.

This article focuses on Miroslav Hroch's book titled Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe and it tries to build on Hroch's model of small nation-formation mainly on a methodological level. The aim is to incorporate the “subjective” dimension in Hroch's analysis of the “objective” factors that lead to nation-formation, by opening up the discursive level to investigation. I suggest that the comparative study of nation-formation needs to remain connected to the study of nationalism as a phenomenon, including the investigation of the discursive plane, of the political languages, and histories of concepts. In this sense, the article seeks to link Hroch's work to Begriffsgeschichte and to present a range of interpretations on how these two could work together, on a methodological level. The answers come mainly from Reinhart Koselleck's theorizing on the relation between social history and the history of concepts. This article also addresses compatibility problems that aim to encourage a more integrative type of analysis that would entail an in-depth and critical revisiting of Hroch's model. At the same time, Hroch's model proves to be flexible enough to be situated at the intersection of more types of history writing.

For more than 100 years, ethnographic accounts have highlighted the non-nativeness of the Komi diaspora to the Kola Peninsula, contrasting it with the indigenous Sami population. Their legal status there has been a vexed issue unresolved by Tsarist administrators, Soviet ethnic policies, present-day ideas of multiethnic civic nation, and global indigenous activism. In the everyday life, however, there are no apparent differences between the two ethnic groups and their traditional lifestyles in the rural area of Murmansk region. Juxtaposing historical ethnographic accounts on the Izhma Komi with my fieldwork experiences among the Komi on the Kola Peninsula, I show how ethnographers uphold dominant ideologies and promote different state policies. The ambiguous ethnic and indigenous categorizations from their accounts reverberate in popular stereotypes, political mobilizations from below, and state policies from above. In this way, they make an interesting case for the practical problems of generalization and essentialism.

National identity is constructed through successive identifications with significant Others. This article discusses the phenomenon of change and continuity in Czech identity. It is focused here on the identification towards the EU, which has become the most significant Other of today in two ways: (a) (change) contributing to overcoming the identity crisis provoked by the drastic changes that occurred between 1989 and 1993 (change of regime, disappearance of the USSR and the break-up of Czechoslovakia), and therefore the subsequent drastic changes in relations with past significant Others: communism, the USSR, and the Slovaks; and (b) (continuity) reaffirming one of the fundamental elements during the national revival in the nineteenth century, democracy, upon which the various identifications towards the EU have been aligned. According to the differing interpretations of what democracy means, and three other criteria of the “levels of Othering,” the EU has been “imagined,” on the one hand, as an entity where Czechs can flourish in their identity and ensure their freedom and democratic values (positive Other), and, on the other, as an “oppressor” entity which portrays democratic deficit, restricts freedom, and threatens Czech national identity (negative Other).

In the first days of August 1914, as enthusiastic crowds hailing the German declaration of war on Russia and France swarmed in front of the imperial residence in Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II famously declared that he no longer knew political parties, only Germans. The remark was intended to be rhetorically inclusive, of course, to signal the surmounting not only of party-political divisions but also of the empire's chronic class, confessional, and regional tensions. But for one of the empire's most marginalized groups of subjects—those millions who did not consider themselves of German descent and who spoke Polish rather than German as a native language—the Kaiser's invocation of a common German identity was more effective in underlining the limits rather than the promise of civic solidarity. Unlike the Habsburg Monarchy or (to a lesser extent) the Czarist Empire, where Polish nationalists could hope to reconcile commitment to their national cause with faithfulness to an imperial dynasty or even a diffuse sense of patriotism to a multinational state, the Hohenzollern monarchy had, over the previous half-century, become virtually synonymous with hostility to all things Polish. Upholding the Prussian monarchy, it seemed, was functionally inseparable from promoting a culturally homogenized German nation-state.

One of the most spectacular developments concerning the Baltic States in the last ten years is the interest of the People's Republic of China in the fate of the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians.