Editorial: Focus on Central and Eastern Europe

Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics, 2023

This article intends to make a contribution to our understanding of how the Russian empire was shaped by its colonies by shifting the focus away from the circulation of knowledge between the European empires and onto crosscultural transfers between the imperial center and one part of Central Asia – the Buryat lands in southern Siberia and Outer Mongolia, during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The article looks at these transfers through the life of one remarkable individual, Tsyben Zhamtsarano, a Buryat from the Aga region on the eastern shores of the Siberian Lake Baikal. It argues that Zhamtsarano's case strikingly exemplifies a situation concerning the production of knowledge about the colonial periphery in which the colonized could have an upper hand, and their pre-eminence could be, at least partially, acknowledged in the imperial center. It is also demonstrated in the article how and why such an empowerment could only be temporary in Russia's ever changing imperial context. The turn contemporary scholars have taken, away from focusing on discrete national traditions and towards studying entangled histories and cross-imperial transfers, as much as it has affected research on the Russian empire, tends to be overly Eurocentric. Transfers and dynamics of political and cultural entangle-ments are usually understood to be those between Russia and other European empires, who each learned something from the other about the techniques of controlling their colonial peripheries. 1 In this interpretation contemporary scholars adopt the viewpoint of their subjects of study. In relation to Central Asia, for instance, various actors in late imperial Russia themselves drew parallels

Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2020

1999

There are a lot of theoretical models explaining the outburst of nationalism in the post-Soviet space since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some authors stress that nationalism in East Europe is in principle different from relatively liberal and «inclusive» nationalist traditions of West Europe, where the membership of an individual in a nation became a function of his civil behavior, and of countries of immigration, where tolerance towards an ethnic «other» has been a natural feature of state-building. It was argued that ethnic nationalism in East Europe was based on traditions of the local life in communities which meant that the membership in them was grounded on the feelings of kinship, collectivism and solidarity, which prevented the formation of a civil nationalism (Greenfeld, 1993). This hypothesis is not confirmed with empirical studies, in particular, in Russia, showing that a large part of citizens identify themselves with both their ethnic group, the state and the region even during the period of painful transition and that self-identification changes are rapidly enough and to an increasing extent concern the values of civil rights and of political freedom (Chernysh, 1995; Drobizheva et al., 1996). Anyway, there is evident that the frequency and the acuity of ethnic conflicts or their probability do not depend strictly on the ethnic, social and demographic structure of population and that the assessment of ethnpolitical risks cannot be based on the only one group of factors. For instance, the ethnic composition of Latvia, Kirghizstan and Kazakhstan is similar, but the processes of nation-and state-building and the fate of national minorities in these newly independent countries differ strongly. Areas with the most worrying ethnic situation do not coincide with the border zones between civilizations, i.e. between the ethnic groups separated by a longer cultural distance, as it was predicted by S.Huntington. They do not coincide as well with the spaces shared by different peoples-notably, because ethnic borders in the post-Soviet are seldom linear («fronts», in terms of Huntington), but represent rather vast transitive strips. Obviously, this issue depends on the complex interplay of ethnic, religious, political, regional and other identities. The role of the territorial factor is clearly salient. The objective of this paper is to examine specific and typical features of nation-and state building in the post-Soviet space as a whole and, in particular, 1) peculiarities of territorial identities; 2) the role of different means used by political elites in these processes. I. Specific ethnic and political identities 1. Mixed, blurred and «hierarchical» identities. It is already well shown that the relationship between identity and territory becomes more complex (Paasi, 1996; Newman and Paasi, 1998) and that the «deterritorialization» of the state leaded to the creation of multi-layered and mixed identities, and this is especially peculiar to Central and East European countries (Kolossov and O'Loughlin, 1998). National identity, though still occupying the central place in the hierarchy of human territorialities, is gradually losing its hegemony. In the contemporary interrelated and interdependent world, more and more individuals have a mixed ethnic background, move between regions and countries as a result of urbanization and globalization, or are forced to live their homes because of civil wars, ethnic conflicts or environmental disasters. In the post-Soviet space, like in many East European countries outside the borders of the

NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences, 2022

John Connelly’s history of Eastern Europe or Eastern Central Europe as he sometimes calls it, is divided into five parts. Part I, “The emergence of national movements”, presents the scope of the book and introduces his thesis about the strength and resilience of ethnic nationalism in the region, linked to linguistic nationalism, indicating that in many cases there was a national consciousness before the dawn of modern nationhood, a notion which challenges the more common idea that links mass national consciousness to modernisation, specially to the advent of print culture. Part II, “The decline of empire and the rise of modern politics”, goes through different moments in nineteenth century European history, which affected the future of the region and its eventual organization into nation-states, such as the 1848 revolutions or the 1878 Berlin Congress. Particularly interesting is chapter nine, on the origins of National Socialism, where Connelly explains the response of ethnic Germans of Austria and Bohemia for being left out of unified German nation-state led by chancellor Otto Von Bismarck. Many Germans of Bohemia and Austria, as Connelly states, saw their natural space in the infamous Lebensraum. Later on, in only three allied states did the Nazi agenda coincide well with the mind-sets of the governing elites: Romania, Croatia, and Slovakia. Not coincidentally, these were the places where nationalists were most insecure about their nationalism.

Trust and Peace Building in the South Caucasus, 2015

It is commonly perceived that one of the core tenets of Soviet ideology was centred on the eventual abolishment of national distinctions and the progressive drawing together of nations under Communism. Shorthand analysis, then, often compares the ethno-political conflicts that erupted after the breakdown of the USSR along its southern rim to an explosion of primordialist sentiments akin to forces that blow off the lid of a pressure cooker: once the repression of nationalist emotions eased, the claims of the nation to exclusive rights and predominance in the homelands irresistibly burst out into the open. When looking more closely at the discourse and practice of Soviet nationality policy, however, this metaphor is hard to sustain. We argue, quite to the contrary, that this policy, combined with regional particularities prevalent in certain constituent states of the USSR, did not permanently temper nationalist feelings. It rather seems to have prepared the ground for the national chauvinism which made the fall of the Soviet Union so violent in some areas, including in the South Caucasus.

East/West, 2018

he Eastern Question-that perennial chestnut of standard histories of the nineteenth-century Middle East-has recently been dusted off and revisited in response to historical signposts such as the bicentennial of 1815 or the centennial of World War I. Most new approaches give greater scope to the global setting, which includes the Ottoman Empire and the twenty-odd countries that emerged from its collapse in 1918. Lucien J. Frary and Mara Kozelsky argue that "harmful policies prompted by the Eastern Question have their roots in Western imperial ambitions, greed, and periodic hysteria" (15). As they point out, in spite of remarkable recent work on the Ottomans and the Russians, it is all too easy for some new crisis to prompt the world's leaders to reassemble the pieces of the Eastern Question puzzle. The introduction by Frary and Kozelsky (3-33) includes a comprehensive review of the historiography, starting with J. A. R. Marriott's long influential work from 1917, The Eastern Question: An Historical Study in European Diplomacy, with its six principles-the Ottomans in Europe, Balkan irredentism, the Black Sea straits, Russian Mediterranean aspirations, Habsburg interests in southeastern Europe, and, finally, European, especially British, attitudes toward all of these issues (14). The topic of the Crimean War has been subject to considerable revisionism, which includes many scholars agreeing on the war's status as the most egregious of the Eastern Question follies. Similarly, the global hysteria over the Balkans in 1878, which generated some five hundred titles in Great Britain during the period (11), is increasingly viewed as the beginning of the crises leading to World War I. The ten essays in this volume reflect the new scholarship, and they offer some interesting views on a host of localized and intimate questions that arose because of the politics of the Eastern Question-politics that contributed to sectarian violence, national movements, economic rivalry and dislocation, migration and resettlement, and colonial administration (6). Victor Taki (35-72) explores the ambiguity of Romanian-Russian relations during the Ottoman period. While pre-1800 boyars could be relied on to support Russia, the period of Russian occupation in the 1830s led to a growing distrust that culminated in the 1848 revolution and thereafter the construction of a national story that emphasized Latin, not Slavic origins. During the Crimean War, the Romanians supported the Ottomans and constructed a history of the "former capitulatory regime" as a means of maintaining their independence from the Pan-Slavism and "'Asiatic despotism . Taki, moving on to post-1989 strategies, T

2008

Contents Mysterious knocks, flying potatoes and rebellious servants: Spiritualism and social conflict in late imperial Russia Julia Mannherz The Ukrainian Stundists and Russian Jews: a collaboration of evangelical peasants with Jewish intellectuals in late imperial Russia Sergei Zhuk “Forebears”, “saints” and “martyrs”: the politics of commemoration in Bulgaria in the 1880s and 1890s Stefan Detchev Celebrating the nation: the case of Upper Silesia after the plebiscite in 1921 Andrzej Michalczyk Three states, one common past: chance or malediction? The role of history and historiography for the formation of collective identities and mutual relations in Belarus, Lithuania and Poland Rüdiger Ritter The Bulgarian monarchy: a politically motivated revision of a historical image in a post -socialist transitional society Markus Wien Emerging institutional order? National Investment Funds in Poland Maria Aluchna

Europe-Asia Studies, 2020