The purpose of this article is to investigate to what extent civic commitment and the political culture from the Estonian first republic survived communism at an individual level. Have representatives of the Estonian inter-war generation who endured Soviet occupation been able to remain civically committed even though they were disconnected from democratic institutions for a major part of their lives? Sometimes labelled “republican,” this generation matured into early adulthood during an unusually formative period in Estonian history, when the new democratic state was taking shape in between the two world wars. Hence, it fulfils the criteria of a political generation as “a group of human beings who have undergone the same basic historical experiences during their formative years.” The analysis contributes to two different, although in this context interrelated, discussions. The first addresses the roots of Estonia's successful post-communist experiences, the second the extent to which early socialization endures dramatic institutional shifts.

After World War I, Austria, Germany, Russia, and Turkey moved from dynastic-imperial political regimes to quasi-republican regimes justified on the basis of popular legitimacy. Prior to this transition, in the management and political (in)significance of ethnic categories these empires broadly resembled each other. After World War I, the core successor states to these four empires pursued radically different policies in dealing with ethnicity as a social category. One can therefore speak of distinct Austrian, German, Soviet/Russian, and Turkish models in managing multi-ethnic populations, models which persisted since the 1920s. Both the emergence of different regimes of ethnicity in the 1920s and the persistence of these policies throughout the twentieth century present very intriguing puzzles for political science. It is not possible to “explain” either the emergence or the persistence of these distinct policies within the confines of this paper. Instead, the major differences between state policies in these four countries will be described in detail in order to highlight the important differences and the most significant features of each case. Since the major contours of these policies did not change throughout the twentieth century, I will limit myself to a brief description of period-specific nuances in the distinct national trajectories between the 1920s and the 1990s. Finally, I will focus on a period of significant change in the late 1990s in Germany, Russia, and Turkey, and inquire as to the causes of these changes.

For more than a decade, the five Central Asian republics have been “readjusting” their academic institutions in response to the new borders created by the fall of the USSR and subsequent independence in 1991. Both the university system and the Academy of Sciences have been called on to rethink their research policy in order to meet the new national stakes and current political demands. Thus, the elaboration of a national discourse is a particularly relevant object of study in order to observe the different modes of legitimization of the new Central Asian states and the scholarly tools they deem necessary for their political ratification. Consequently, in retracing the genealogy of the contemporary historical analyses we must pose a question regarding the development of the academic disciplines and the data concerning their political environment. Does Tajik independence in 1991 involve rethinking the genesis of the nation and the scholarly fields linked to the elaboration of the national narrative? Why have the political authorities declared 2006 the “year of the Aryan civilization”?

The paper will focus on the structures of collective identities of the Russian-speaking population of Estonia. Particular cultural and political orientations held by individuals and frequencies of self-categorization as Russian, ex-Soviet, citizens of Estonia, etc. have been discussed extensively. Much less attention has been paid to the structures of self-identification, which draw out people's thinking patterns. The paper is based on the methodological premise that analysis and interpretation of the disposition of different types of self-categorization is worth the effort, as it helps to elucidate the general meta-structures behind people's interpretation of different identification narratives and provides an opportunity to make prognoses about future scenarios.

On 27 June 2004, Serbian voters went to the polls for the third time in a year to choose a president. The winner of the first two rounds of voting, Tomislav Nikolić, Deputy to the President of the extreme right Serbian Radical Party (SRS), lost the third round of voting to the more liberal Borisav Tadić by just under 8 percentage points (53.2 to 45.4), and the Radicals failed to form a ruling coalition in government. Nevertheless, more than five years after the last war in the disintegration of the Yugoslav state, the largest political party in the largest of the successor states has been characterized as the most extreme right party in the Balkans today. Indeed, the Radicals have been an enduring force in Serbian politics for the past decade and a half, sometimes ruling in coalition with Slobodan Milošević's Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). SRS founder Vojislav Šešelj, a flamboyant, obstreperous, highly influential figure, and his fellow Radicals have sought and in many ways succeeded in shaping the post-communist transformation of Yugoslav politics and society, calling for a return to the true spirit of Serbia, when the nation was strong because its men defended its honor as well as its borders.

The economic status of a country may be analyzed and measured in terms of a number of different attributes and components. The present study focuses on capital formation (i.e. generation of new wealth in the form of capital) because capital formation is a major and comprehensive determinant of the economy's growth. The ability of an economy to generate sufficient new capital is the foundation of its strength and vitality; only to a limited extent may domestic capital formation be supplemented by foreign funds.

Civil society, to the extent that it exists today in Bosnia, has developed alongside the recasting of women's roles in public life. Researchers equate civil society in Bosnia today almost exclusively with non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The early post-war NGOs grew out of the peace movement that took shape before and during the open conflict of 1992–1995. Peace organizations evolved to a large extent from feminist organizing and organizations in the Yugoslav republics of Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia. Thus, to study the origins of Bosnian civil society, we must begin with the struggle for equal rights for women in modern Yugoslavia.