The Party of Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM) has been a highly controversial actor since its election in February 2001. The party initially governed under a hail of domestic and international criticism for its East-leaning foreign policy and authoritarian domestic politics. Yet, although with a diminished vote share, it was re-elected on 6 March 2005 in broadly free and fair elections on a pro-European platform with relations with Russia at a nadir.

Politics in Hungary since 1989 has been focusing on nation-building. Each government has had a license to articulate what it is to be Hungarian, in the public realm with public funds. While current political debates are heated and focus yet again on defining Hungarian national identity, this article takes a distance from contemporary politics. It studies a situation ten years earlier, when the current government party Fidesz -which took a landslide victory in the 2010 general elections after eight years of socialist-liberal government - was in office for the first time from 1998 to 2002. Exploring the debate from the perspective of architecture, it reveals how Fidesz sought to mark their space and express their sense of nationhood in Budapest around the millennium. Beside publicly sponsored institutions and commemoration, architectural forms became contested as they were used to express nationality. The National Theatre, Millennium Park and House of Terror Museum, each broke with the urban flow in the left-leaning metropolis while representing the Fidesz discourse on Hungary. The article, besides analyzing postcommunist nation-building, reflects on the interconnection between architecture, politics and memory in an urban symbolic landscape. It discusses how myths of nationhood can be represented in the cityscape.

The Estonian National Independence Party (ENIP) was founded on August 20, 1988, by former political prisoners, human rights activists, representatives of independent youth groups and intellectuals, at a risky time, when the political power in occupied Estonia was still monopolized by the communists.

This article focuses on how the Other is represented and understood in films produced in Romania during periods of radical political, social and economic change. Specifically it addresses films produced during the years of communism and the planned economy, during the transition to democracy and to capitalism, as well as films produced during the period of democracy, capitalism and membership in the European Union. The research acknowledges two main aspects: the changing face of the Other over time (the socialist state, the foreign investors, the West, etc.) and the consistency of the fantasy structure. More specifically, the relationship between self and the Other generally follows a strict masochist fantasy script in which the Other has the power to constrain freedom, to inflict pain, and to function as an essential element through which pleasure is understood and experienced. The research proposes an understanding of this structure of fantasy, reflected in film through the existence of a national psyche written by the main myths and stories embraced by the society in discussion. This structure of fantasy hails and constructs a certain subject that has a basic masochistic psychic structure.

Focusing on material culture, this article considers a range of issues concerning the cultural policies, ideologies, and identities that have underlain Serbian development since the Middle Ages, and tests some widely held yet previously uncontested views. In particular it questions the Serbs' perceived affiliation with the Byzantine Empire and challenges the view that this affiliation was so pervasive that it influenced Serbian development and national formation in the modern age. It is argued that Byzantium had little if any role in the Serbs' cultural development - neither in historical memories nor in surviving traditions. Serbia's Byzantine culture is largely a myth developed in the 1930s by the Serbian clergy as a corollary of the Russian-inspired Svetosavlje ideology. This myth was meant to dislocate Serbia's cultural identity from its secular European sources and reposition it closer to Orthodox Russia.

The Romanian Academy (and much of the country's historical establishment) is packed with Holocaust deniers and trivializers, many of whom indulge in Holocaust obfuscation against the background of the post-Communist “competitive martyrdom” between the victims of the Holocaust and the Gulag. Quite a few of these deniers and trivializers are also former secret police informers. On closer examination, however, it turns out that explaining the reluctance to face the country's “dark past” as being the independent variable resultant of the post “Romanianization” of the Communist Party and its Securitate is a partial explanation at best. A substantially more convincing one might be provided by scrutinizing the phenomenon as the product of post-mnemonic cultural traumas.

This article uses the early career of Nichifor Crainic (1889–1972) to show why Orthodox Christianity became a central element of Romanian ultra-nationalism during the 1920s. Most Romanian nationalists were atheists prior to the First World War, but state-sponsored nation-building efforts catalyzed by territorial expansion and the incorporation of ethnic and religious minorities allowed individuals such as Crainic to introduce religious nationalism into the public sphere. Examining Crainic's work during the 1920s shows how his nationalism was shaped by mainstream political and ideological currents, including state institutions such as the Royal Foundations of Prince Carol and the Ministry of Cults and of Art. Despite championing “tradition,” Crainic was committed to changing Romanian society so long as that change followed autochthonous Romanian models. State sponsorship allowed Crainic to promote religious nationalism through his periodical Găndirea. Crainic's literary achievements earned him a chair in theology, from which he pioneered new ways of thinking about mysticism as an expression of Romanian culture and as crucial to understanding the Romanian nation.