An expanding literature on money and identity is built around the assumption that political elites deliberately use currency design to foster national identities. However, the empirical evidence in favor of this assumption has been fragmentary. Drawing on detailed primary sources we demonstrate nationalist intentions of political elites involved in currency design. We also examine how political elites use banknotes as official pronouncements on who is and who is not part of the nation and what the official attitude toward foreigners is. By tracing changes in the inclusive and exclusive messages directed at an intra-state or international audience we document that there is no connection between ingroup (national) love and outgroup (foreigners, minorities, opposition) hate. The amount of exclusive messages to outgroups culminated in conditions of perceived threat when political leaders tried to mobilize pre-existing identities to secure or maintain political power. In contrast, the officials deliberately tried to broaden ingroup boundaries in order to build international communities. Finally, we document that in the case of limited support for the new conception of identity, officials tried to depict the old and the new identity as complementary, embedding the new identity in existing discourses.

Before engaging in empirical treatment inherent in the title, I will outline the model on which my analysis is based. I begin with the observation that natural languages are codes which groups of people have conveniently adopted for the purposes of communicating and of information storing. The costs, both explicit and implicit, associated with a given code can be divided into two categories.

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.