Much has been made in the social sciences of the ambiguity of nationalism in Central Asia, where not only the boundaries between republics but between nations, languages, and peoples were drawn by the Soviet state. The similar ambiguity of Central Asian religiosity, however, has remained largely ignored. Perhaps religiosity, unlike the more recent idea of nationalism, is considered too fixed a construct for the modern and artificially created states of Central Asia. The division of religions into specific sects, each with its own explicit doctrine and precepts, would seem to preclude definitional necessity. Yet in the 1980s it was religiosity, malleable and stubborn, which proved as essential to the decline of the Soviet Union as did nationalism. As a vital component of identity, religion can exist without any clergy, place of worship, or understanding of sacred text, much as a nation can exist without a state or a government. The illusory aspects of religion, the comforts and mystery of rite and ritual, are as difficult for a state to control as national sentiment, and often prove the impetus behind the latter.

The main goal of the paper is to understand how substantive representation of minorities works through ethnic parties and what the relationship between substantive and descriptive representation is in this specific case. Focus on the traditional understanding of substantive representation is common when analyzing the representation of minorities and marginalized groups, but only a few studies look at the substantive representation of national minorities from a constructivist approach, and even fewer are centered on Central and Eastern Europe. The paper argues that besides ethnicizing their demands, representatives of minorities have a wide array of strategies to achieve their goals. Using the parliamentary representation of Hungarians in Romania as a case study, I show that the strategies chosen in ethnic claims-making are context-dependent: ethnicizing messages are used only in specific cases, while de-ethnicization is applied in debates thought to be important for their community. These are part of a bargaining process that help representatives to achieve their goals. Thus, the paper broadens the debate on substantive representation and has implications in coding, as most of the studies addressing the issue assume that descriptive representatives, in order to provide substantive representation, must ethnicize their demands.

This paper discusses the way in which a post-conflict European Union (EU) member immediately after accession both shapes and adapts to EU memory politics as a part of its Europeanization process. I will analyze how the country responds to the top-down pressures of Europeanization in the domestic politics of memory by making proactive attempts at exporting its own politics of memory (discourses, policies, and practices) to the EU level. Drawing evidence from Croatian EU accession, I will consider how Croatian members of the European Parliament “upload” domestic memory politics to the EU level, particularly to the European Parliament. Based on the analysis of elite interviews, discourses, parliamentary duties, agenda-setting, and decision-making of Croatian MEPs from 2013 to 2016, I argue that the parliament serves both as a locus for confirmation of European identity through promotion of countries’ EU memory credentials and as a new forum for affirmation of national identity. The preservation of the “Homeland War” narrative (1991–1995) and of the “sacredness” of Vukovar as a European lieu de mémoire clearly influences the decision-making of Croatian MEPs, motivating inter-group support for policy building and remembrance practices that bridge domestic political differences.

The processes of peace-building and democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) were instituted on 14 December 1995 by the Dayton Accords, which brought an end to the Bosnian War. While claiming their objectives to be reconciliation, democracy, and ethnic pluralism, the accords inscribed in law the ethnic partition between Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims by granting rights to “people” based on their identification as “ethnic collectivities.” This powerful tension at the heart of “democratization” efforts has been central to what has transpired over the past 16 years. My account uses ethnographic methods and anthropological analysis to document how the ethnic emphasis of the local nationalist projects and international integration policies is working in practice to flatten the multilayered discourses of nationhood in BiH. As a result of these processes, long-standing notions of trans-ethnic nationhood in BiH lost their political visibility and potency. In this article I explore how trans-ethnic narod or nation(hood) — as a space of popular politics, cultural interconnectedness, morality, political critique, and economic victimhood — still lingers in the memories and practices of ordinary Bosnians and Herzegovinians, thus powerfully informing their political subjectivities.

The big news is no news. I mean the new constitution that, presumably, is going to define the official relationship between the federal structure and the republic structure. It is being drafted by a constitutional drafting committee consisting of some very distinguished persons. But so far they have not been able to produce a draft, at least not a draft that has been published for the rest of the world to see. They probably have one in their own office.

During the late 1980s the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldavia, like many other regions within the former USSR, entered into a period of political turmoil. As the grip of the Communist Party weakened, increasingly serious conflict broke out between the Romanian-speaking majority and minority activists. Separatist forces quickly established themselves in two of the republic's regions, Transnistria on the east bank of the Dnestr river and the Gagauz districts in the south. Both claimed sovereignty and forcibly resisted the authority of the central government. By 1992 severe fighting was underway, especially in Transnistria, and Moldova appeared to be on the verge of a spiral into unrestrained civil conflict. Yet, by 1995, nationalist forces in Moldova had declined, and one of the two separatist conflicts, that in the Gagauz region, had been resolved by the peaceful reintegration of the Gagauz into Moldova. The second conflict, in Transnistria, was at least partially defused, and escalation was avoided.