The establishment of the Nemzeti Casino (National Casino) in Pest helped establish civil society in nineteenth-century Hungary. Count István Széchenyi, hoping to modernize Hungary on the English model, established the casino in 1827 as a public forum for the Hungarian nobility. By transcending caste divisions between nobles and bourgeois elites, Széchenyi's casino served as an unofficial parliament and stock exchange, and generally helped cultivate Hungarian patriotism. The Pest Casino inspired a nation-wide trend for casinos, which in turn formed a civil society in opposition to Habsburg absolutism. Yet when the casino movement spread to Hungary's minority nationalities, Jews, Slovaks, Romanians, and particularly Croats, the casino also contributed to national divisions in Hungary's ethnically diverse population that affected the course of the 1848 Revolution.

A statistical analysis of publications in the Belorussian language during the last decade reveals an ominous decline in the number of titles and imprints. This has been accompanied, however, by a parallel increase in Russian-language publications in the BSSR. These factors seem to indicate an attempt by policy-makers to homogenize the Soviet population at the expense of Belorussians, and perhaps other nationalities as well.

This article investigates the politics of national identity implemented in Rijeka after World War II, when the city was integrated into socialist Yugoslavia. These national and political transitions posed various challenges to the consolidation of the Yugoslav Communists' power. The nationalities policy embedded in the slogan “Brotherhood and Unity” was the official answer to the national question, promoting collaboration among the Croatian majority, the Italian minority, and other national communities in the city. This article focuses on the definition of postwar Rijeka's image, investigating the relationship between Yugoslav socialism and national identities in everyday political practice. The negotiation of the representation of national identities in a socialist society led to ambivalences, contradictions, and contentions expressed in and through Rijeka's public spaces, highlighting the different orientations of cultural and political actors. The process of building socialist Yugoslavia in this specific borderland context reveals the balance and tension between the multinational framework and the integrative tendencies pertaining to the legitimization and consolidation of the socialist system.

The study of politics is popular in Russian history; the examination of Russian politics in its regions is not, at least, not yet. The spectrum of interpretations about autocratic politics includes the parading of litanies of imperial arbitrariness and/or manipulation of interest groups against each other, incidents of ministerial incapacity to restrain the autocrat, examples of the inordinate power of favorites, the failure to establish regularizing institutions that would restrain autocrats, and a series of interesting categories including such wonderfully suggestive terms as “free floaters” proposed in Alfred Rieber's important article on the subject. Whether one is wedded to the notion that tsars decided all in the nineteenth century, or advocate some scheme that emphasizes the plurality of conflicting interests at play in decisionmaking, however, the pattern of scholarly production suggests that regional politics has been of secondary importance, and that in any event documentation often is lacking; in short, such approaches are not seen as ideal lines of inquiry. This article seeks to make a contribution to the debate about the politics of autocrats by examining a localized question where documentation is rather complete and where ministerial/bureaucratic lines may be traced fairly closely, in an attempt to shed added light on Russia's leadership in a time of great crisis, specifically the aftermath of the humiliating defeat in the Crimean War and the tension surrounding the preparations and implementation of the Emancipation and other reforms. To be specific as well as anticipatory, it is argued that there are regional questions of great national, indeed international, importance to autocrats, that the Caucasus was so recognized in the post-Crimean War period, and that those involved in the region affected policy decisions in ways that rivaled, as well as displaced, senior officials in the capital.

The Program of the CPSU adopted at the 27th Party Congress (1986) included a guarded reference to the nationality question. It observed that the “nationality question, as it has been inheritedfrom the past, has been successfully solved.” This reference to nationality problems as a remnant of the fading capitalist past was not designed to suggest that problems of a national character have ceased to exist in the Soviet Union today. Gorbachev made this point to the Congress delegates noting: “Our achievements should not create the impression that there are no complications in nationality processes. The contradictions characteristic of all development are unavoidable in this sphere as well.” The violent outbursts of a national character in Kazakhstan in December 1986 provide fresh evidence that ethnic tensions lurk just beneath the surface. These tensions have been held in check largely by the threat of reprisals from central authorities who have regarded meaningful expressions of nationalism as treasonous.

On 24 February 1992, Belarusian foreign minister Piotr Kraǔchanka told a visiting European Community delegation in Minsk that he wanted to record his country's claim to Lithuanian border territory in the presence of an international audience. When asked whether the claims extended to Vilnius, Kraǔchanka said “yes,” but added that the border areas were really the ones at issue. In the late 1980s and early 1990s many Lithuanian officials expected Poland to make such claims on their country, to regain territory lost in 1939. By contrast Lithuanians paid little attention to what Belarusians were saying about the role of Vilnius in Belarusian history and the national identity of the 258,000 Slavs in the Vilnius region.

For veterans of the Russian winter, the term “thaw” will ever remain an appropriate metaphor for the waning of periods of control and repression. Unfortunately, many Soviet political thaws have given way quickly to resurgent winters. Perhaps most significant in the current Soviet thaw, the policies of glasnost and perestroika associated with Mikhail Gorbachev, has been the extent to which Soviet society has been invited to participate in it. Society, in its turn, has responded with the creation of numerous grassroots, unofficial social-action groups (samodeiatelnye obshchestvennye organizatsii).

J. V. Stalin, in his 1923 denunciation of Sultan Galiev, formerly Stalin's own assistant in Narkomnats, stated:

This article analyzes the effects of nationalizing policies of the state, processes of democratization, and uneven socio-economic development on the rise of Kurdish ethno-mobilization led by the PKK terrorist organization since the 1980s in Turkey. Three features of the Turkish modernization context are identified as conducive for the rise and continuation of Kurdish ethno-mobilization: a) a nation-building autocratic state that resisted granting cultural rights and recognition for the Kurds; b) democratization with the exclusion of ethnic politics and rights; c) economic regional inequality that coincided with the regional distribution of the Kurdish population. It is argued that autocratic policies of the state during nation-building accompanied the development of an illiberal democracy and intolerance for cultural pluralism. These aspects of Turkish democracy seem to be incompatible with both the liberal and consociational models of democracy that accommodate ethnicity within multiculturalism.

The administrative division of late imperial Russia made few concessions to minority populations, who often found themselves divided among several provinces. The Bolshevik ascendancy to power changed the situation; Vladimir Lenin's “federal compromise” marked a breakthrough from the tsarist unitary practice to a system of governance which, at least on paper, made allowance for the ethnocultural diversity of the population. The chief designers of the Bolshevik nationality policy believed that a federal arrangement would offer a framework for controlling undesirable national sentiments during the transitional stage when class identities would gradually replace ethnic attachments. However, it turned out that for non-Russian groups the national-territorial autonomous units were not simply empty containers, free of cultural and emotional meaning, in which their political socialization would occur. These units became an integral part of their national identity; ethnicity obtained “legal” territorial roots and the various territorial units began to function as vessels of ethnic consciousness.

This article draws on international relations theory to attempt a reframing of the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict in Nagorny Karabakh as an enduring rivalry (ER): a particular kind of interstate conflict known for its longevity and stability. The article begins by identifying a number of conceptual deficits circulating around this conflict, notably the notion that it is a “frozen conflict,” before introducing the ER framework and its analytical dividends for this case. Different layers of the ER between Armenia and Azerbaijan are then explored at systemic, interstate, domestic, decision-maker, and temporal levels, with a view more toward identifying directions for future research than conclusive findings. Among the article's tentative conclusions are the primacy of endogenous over exogenous factors in explaining the durability of the rivalry between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the impacts of the passage of time on the human and physical geography of the territory under dispute, and the convergence of conflict dynamics across disparate levels.

During the conservative period in Hungary between the two world wars, three unusual young women, Erzsébet Árvay, Judit Kárász, and Viola Tomori, joined a vanguard of youth who claimed to lead a new generation of Hungarians. As members of the Szeged Youth, they took up the cause of the peasantry of the Great Hungarian Plain, an isolated and neglected population presumed to bear “original Hungarian characteristics.” Until recently, the relationship between gender and nationalism in studies on Eastern Europe has been neglected. Current developments in post-communist societies have sharpened our realization that historical periods are experienced differently and have different implications when seen from the vantage point of women rather than men. Intriguing questions are raised concerning these women's participation in the Szeged Youth Movement and their active role with the peasantry. In a society often characterized as restrictive and limiting, what was the experience of the young woman activist? Was she accepted by her peers as their intellectual equal? How did she feel about her final place in national affairs? These questions are elusive and complex, yet the example of the Szeged Youth Movement in the 1920s and 1930s provides a compelling study of the intersection of gender and national identity in the Hungarian context.

During the interwar period in Hungary, the question of the fate of the Hungarian “nation”—which included the Hungarian population in the territories lost after World War I—took precedence over all others. This was true in respect to women's issues as well. The peace settlement was viewed as a national tragedy, reviving fears that the Hungarians or magyarsag would disappear, swallowed up by the surrounding Germanic and Slavic peoples. Virtually the whole population believed that the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, which had reduced the Hungarian state to two-thirds of its former size, leaving 33.5% of the ethnic Hungarian inhabitants outside the borders, had been unjust and should be revised. The government under Prime Minister István Bethlen struggled to restore economic stability and to regain acceptance by the Western powers, on whom revision of the treaty depended. Certain moderate reforms were introduced, including the extension of the franchise to women and the broadening of educational opportunities. Yet, social insurance reforms for the urban populations were not extended to the masses of peasantry and rural proletariat, which still constituted over half of the population. In fact, the need to maintain the support of the large landowners precluded any extensive land reform, and Hungary remained a country of large estates.

What was Soviet patriotism? A definition of the term offered by the Soviet ideological apparatus in 1953—a “social, historically conditioned feeling of love for one's motherland“—raises more questions than it answers. Patriotism was a concept foreign to classical Marxism; indeed, the concept, along with the corresponding term “the Soviet people,” entered mass usage only in the mid-1930s, when the Soviet government moved away from class as the dominant paradigm for interacting with its society. The relationship of Soviet patriotism to nationalism, the predominant political identity in twentieth-century Europe, was also ideologically fraught. Patriotism was sharply distinguished from nationalism (natsionalizm) in the Soviet lexicon. The first referred to a healthy allegiance to a community that was consistent with universal values of enlightenment, justice and democracy; the second was a jingoistic and reactionary ideology utilized by the bourgeoisie to mislead the working class. Despite this distinction, Soviet patriotism was supra-national, not anti-national, as it “harmoniously combined” the national traditions of the different Soviet nations with “the common, fundamental interests of all working people in the USSR.”