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The historical impact of national movements in Europe has been dramatic and continues to be an issue of major importance. Leading historians authoritatively discuss European nationalism in its historical context.
The authors in this collection of essays address the largely neglected but significant economic aspects of the national question in its historical context during the course of the twentieth century. There exists a large gap in our understanding of the historical relationship between the 'national question' and economic change. Above all, there is insufficient knowledge about the economic dimension of the historical experience with regard to the former multi-national states, such as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia; and equally too little is known about the economic component of national tensions and conflicts in bilingual Belgium or Finland, or the multilingual Spain or Switzerland. At the same time as emphasis is placed on the complex relationships between the economy and society in individual European countries, questions of state, identity, language, religion and racism as instruments of economic furtherance are at the centre of the contributors' attention.
This volume assembles the papers presented at the conference The International Context of the Galician Language Brotherhoods and the Nationality Question in Interwar Europe (Council of Galician Culture, Santiago de Compostela, October 2016). The different contributions, written by historians, political scientists and linguists, shed new light on the political development of the nationality question in Europe during the First World War and its aftermath, covering theoretical developments and debates, social mobilization and cultural perspectives. They also address the topic from different scales, blending the global and transnational outlook with the view from below, from the local contexts, with particular attention to peripheral areas, whilst East European and West European nationalities are dealt with on an equal footing, covering from Iberian Galicia to the Caucasus. Contributors are: Bence Bari, Stefan Berger, Miguel Cabo, Stefan Dyroff, Lourenzo Fernández Prieto, Johannes Kabatek, Joep Leerssen, Ramón Máiz, Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, Malte Rolf, Ramón Villares, and Francesca Zantedeschi.
This study of nationalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union develops an original account of the interlocking and opposed nationalisms of national minorities, the nationalizing states in which they live, and the external national homelands to which they are linked by external ties.
The resilience of nationalism in contemporary Europe may seem paradoxical at a time when the nation state is widely seen as being 'in decline'. The contributors of this book see the resurgence of nationalism as symptomatic of the quest for identity and meaning in the complex modern world. Challenged from above by the supranational imperatives of globalism and from below by the complex pluralism of modern societies, the nation state, in the absence of alternatives to market consumerism, remains a focus for social identity. Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe takes a fully interdisciplinary and comparative approach to the 'national question'. Individual chapters consider the specifics of national identity in France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Iberia, Russia, the former Yugoslavla and Poland, while looking also at external forces such as economic globalisation, European supranationalism, and the end of the Cold War. Setting current issues and conflicts in their broad historical context, the book reaffirms that 'nations' are not 'natural' phenomena but 'constructed' forms of social identity whose future will be determined in the social arena.
Even before it collapsed into civil war, ethnic cleansing, and dissolution, Yugoslavia was an archetypical example of a troubled multinational mosaic, a state without a single national base or even a majority. Its stability and very existence were challenged repeatedly by the tension between the pressures for overarching political cohesion and the defense of separate national identities and aspirations. In a brilliant analysis of this complex and sensitive national question, Ivo Banac provides a comprehensive introduction to Yugoslav political history. His book is a genetic study of the ideas, circumstances, and events that shaped the pattern of relations among the nationalities of Yugoslavia. It traces and analyzes the history and characteristics of South Slavic national ideologies, connects these trends with Yugoslavia's flawed unification in 1918, and ends with the fatal adoption of the centralist system in 1921. Banac focuses on the first two and a half years in the history of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, because in his view this was the period that set the pattern for subsequent development of the national question. The issues that divided the South Slavs, and that still divide them today, took on definite form during that time, he maintains. Banac provides extensive treatment of all of Yugoslavia's nationalities; his sections on the Montenegrins, Albanians, Macedonians, and Bosnian Muslims are unique in the literature. In this unbiased account, all of the principals and groups assume a tragic fascination. When published in 1984, The National Question in Yugoslavia was the first complete introduction to the cultural history of the South Slavic peoples and to the politics of Yugoslavia, and it remains a major contribution to the scholarship on modern European nationalism and the stability of multinational states.
A highly topical examination of the effect of European integration on relations between states and minority nations. This new collection brings together the leading specialists in the field, and covers a wide range of cases, from Northern Ireland in the West, to Estonia and Latvia in the East, and Cyprus in the South-East. The contributors assess how European integration has affected the preparedness of states to accommodate minorities across a range of fundamental criteria, including: enhanced rights protection; autonomy; the provision of a voice for minorities in the European and international arena; and the promotion of cross-border cooperation among communities dissected by state frontiers. The comprehensive chapters stress the importance of the nationality question, and the fact that, contrary to the hopes and beliefs of many on the left and right, it is not going to go away. Beginning with an introductory essay that summarizes the impact of European integration on the nationalities question, this accessible book will be of strong interest to scholars and researchers of politics, nationalism, ethnic conflict and European studies.
This pioneering work treats the Ukrainian question in Russian imperial policy and its importance for the intelligentsia of the empire. Miller sets the Russian Empire in the context of modernizing and occasionally nationalizing great power states and discusses the process of incorporating the Ukraine, better known as "Little Russia" in that time, into the Romanov Empire in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This territorial expansion evolved into a competition of mutually exclusive concepts of Russian and Ukrainian nation-building projects.
Special emphasis is placed on the interplay between Romantic culture and social, political and economic change in this study of the course of Romanticism in various European countries.
