115
CHAPTER 5
Ethnicity, Nationalism, and
the Challenges of Democratic
Consolidation
Zsuzsa Csergő
As Central and East European societies emerged from communism in the early 1990s,
people throughout the region expressed their preference for democracy, free markets, and
the European Union (EU). Many in the West expected the EU to supersede the political
ideology of nationalism, which has traditionally pursued the establishment of territorially
sovereign, culturally homogeneous nation-states. In earlier centuries, efforts to achieve
such congruence between the political and national units in Europe involved aggressive
efforts to change state boundaries, eject or assimilate nonconforming groups to “purify”
the nation, or encourage minority populations to repatriate to other countries.1
By the
end of the 1980s, such methods of nation-state creation were no longer acceptable in
the western part of the continent. Leading scholars of democratic development in other
regions, too, argued for a new paradigm to address the need for democracies to accommodate
ethno-cultural diversity.2
In Central and Eastern Europe, European integration
seemed to offer the best prospect for moving beyond the era of the traditional nation-state.
A lesson that much of the scholarly literature about nationalism drew from West
European development in this period was that, if democratization and marketization
could progress unhindered, politics grounded in ethnic and national identity would lose
its relevance, and more advanced—rational, individualist, and inclusive—notions of
citizenship would take its place. These were the thoughts voiced from within the Iron
Curtain during the communist decades by dissident Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and other
intellectuals who articulated alternative visions of a free society and spoke poignantly
about universal human values and inalienable individual rights and freedoms. Against the
backdrop of such expectations, the story of Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse
of the communist regimes is filled with reasons for disappointment. After decades of
democratization and Europeanization in the 1990s and 2000s, signs of autocratization
appeared in a growing number of countries in the region in the 2010s. This chapter
provides an account of how ethnicity and nationalism played a role in these trajectories
as defining features of institutional development before and after democratization and
EU membership.
Even after the initial euphoria over the end of communism, the voices expressing
themselves most forcefully spoke about “nationhood” and, in the overwhelming majority
116 ZsUZsA CsErgő
of cases, exalted the supposed inalienable rights of groups rather than of individuals.
Ethnically conceived national groups all over the postcommunist countries of Central
and Eastern Europe viewed democratization as the opportunity finally to achieve or consolidate
sovereignty over territories they claimed as their “national homelands.” National
aspirations contributed to the collapse of all three multinational federations (the soviet
Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia). Of the seventeen countries commonly considered
to belong to this region, twelve were established or reestablished after 1989 along
national lines. Only five countries continued within their existing borders. Conflicts over
nation-building became significant features of the difficult process of regime change in
most of these states.
Nationalism not only remained relevant after the collapse of communism but also
emerged as the most powerful ideology that most important and popular political elites
and parties advanced and that publics in these countries found appealing. At the same
time, the desire to “return to Europe” and join Western institutions was also a very significant
motivation throughout the region. In some cases, aspirations to strengthen national
cultures while joining an integrated Europe seemed fully compatible. For instance, people
throughout the West cheered the fall of the Berlin Wall, which led to the subsequent
reunification of the german state. Although wary of the disintegration of the soviet state,
Westerners also celebrated the reestablishment of the three Baltic states as examples of
forward-looking, Western-oriented nationalism. When mass nationalist violence broke
out in former Yugoslavia, however, influential public voices in the West began asking
whether Central and East Europeans were returning to their violent past rather than
transitioning into a peaceful and prosperous future in a common European home. some
argued that ancient hatreds made the rebirth of nationalism inevitable in such places as
the Balkans.3
Others argued that the process of democratization engendered manipulative
elites’ interest in employing nationalism.4
such arguments are often associated with
a debate between “primordialism” and “constructivism” in nationalism scholarship. The
first label describes explanations based on the assumption that enduring elements of
ethnic kinship serve as “primordial” sources of nationalism. The second label describes
arguments that emphasize the significance of institutions, particularly the modern state,
and the role of political actors in “constructing” nationhood.5
An increasing number of
scholars today question the usefulness of these labels and aim to develop more nuanced
explanations for the salience of ethnicity and nationalism in contemporary societies.6
Developments in other parts of the world since 1989 have demonstrated that neither
the popular appeal of nationalism nor the problems that this ideology poses for democratic
governance are specific to the postcommunist region. Wherever political elites
design nationalist strategies, the process reveals sources of tension rooted in the “Janusfaced”
character of nationalism: as with other political ideologies, nationalism is forwardlooking
in the sense that it articulates a vision of the future; at the same time, nationalist
strategies almost always call for turning to the past for self-definition.7
When nationalists
claim self-government rights for “the nation” on a “national” territory or “homeland,”
they usually offer a certain interpretation of history to justify these claims. Whether such
a historiography relies on historical evidence is less important than the degree to which
it can foster a sense of shared history and purpose. To express this idea, “national myth”
is the term most often used to describe national stories. some national myths have been
Map 5.1. Ethnic Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, 2014. The map includes
minorities over 0.2 percent of the population in the latest official census for each state.
118 ZsUZsA CsErgő
more successful than others in accommodating ethnic diversity. The so-called civic type
of nationalism, which builds community on shared political traditions, is potentially
more inclusive than “ethnic nationalism,” which requires members of the nation to share
a common ethnicity. Nonetheless, even countries commonly considered textbook cases
of “civic nationalism,” such as Britain, France, and the United states, reveal significant
similarities to “ethnic nationalism,” as schools, churches, the media, the military, and various
other state and private or public institutions perpetuate unified national stories and
literatures and mental maps of national homelands.8
In many instances, the national myth contains stories about ethnic competition over
territory, invoking memories of past ethnic dominance and subordination, which continue
to influence current state- and nation-building processes. Yet not all ethnic groups
engage in national competition. A key difference between ethnic and national groups is
that, although ethnic groups aim to reproduce particular cultures, only national groups
claim self-government rights on a particular territory.9
In postcommunist Central and
Eastern Europe, the majority and minority groups that articulated competing notions of
self-government rights were national groups that defined “nation” on the basis of ethnic
markers—most commonly language, in some cases religion. Yet significant differences
emerged in the way national aspirations were articulated and posed against one another.
Before offering explanations for these differences, the following pages provide a brief
account of state- and nation-building in the period that preceded democratization,
highlighting processes that created the conditions in which postcommunist democratization
and nationalism subsequently took shape.
Nationalism before Democratic Competition
The pursuit of modern nation-states by nationalist political elites and counter-elites
within the Hapsburg Empire began in the second part of the nineteenth century, and the
dynamics of these efforts revealed the fundamentally competitive character of modern
nationalism. Whether in the framework of the multinational Hapsburg state (reconstituted
after 1867 as the dualist Austro-Hungarian Empire) or its successor states, the nationalist
policies that a dominant ethnic group adopted invariably triggered resentment and engendered
conflicting nationalist aspirations from other groups. During this process, national
literatures emerged in vernacular languages, and national historiographies were written
and became justifications for nationalist demands. Czechs and Hungarians defined their
national myths and aspirations in opposition to Austria’s germans. After the creation of
the dualist state, the same pattern remained characteristic in both parts of the monarchy.
In the Austrian part, Czechs and slovenes challenged german cultural dominance and
articulated unsuccessful calls for national sovereignty. In the Hungarian part, the nationalist
movements of non-Hungarians (slovaks, Croats, and romanians) encountered
rejection by Hungarian elites.10
Besides challenging one another, nationalist political elites
also competed for international support and legitimization for their conflicting notions
of national power. The complex matrix of these domestic and international interests led
Austria-Hungary into World War I and, at the end of the war, resulted in the dissolution
of the monarchy into its successor states.
ETHNICITY, NATIONALIsM, AND THE CHALLENgEs 119
When the victorious powers agreed to establish the successor states at the end of
World War I, they relied on the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. The
demographic patterns of the region, however, made the delineation of clear “national”
borders impossible. The states created to bring justice to previously subordinate national
groups of the monarchy also became multinational, with new “titular” nations attempting
to establish political and cultural hegemony over national minorities. Although relations
of dominance and subordination were reversed after the dissolution of the AustroHungarian
state, the same pattern of nation-building continued, with multiple groups
sharing the same state but holding conflicting notions about legitimate territorial sovereignty.
Incompatible narratives about the “justice” of the post–World War I settlements
became part of conflicting national historiographies that have remained significant
sources of tension over territorial sovereignty in the region.
sovereignty is a fundamental principle of political organization and also one of the
most contested because it takes different forms, and these forms are at times incompatible
with one another. As J. samuel Barkin and Bruce Cronin observe, “There has been
a historical tension between state sovereignty, which stresses the link between sovereign
authority and a defined territory, and national sovereignty, which emphasizes a link
between sovereign authority and a defined population.”11
This tension had become particularly
apparent in Central and Eastern Europe by the mid-nineteenth century and
remained salient throughout the region’s history. Yugoslavia, created to provide southern
slav peoples with a common state, in reality comprised a diversity of national groups that
maintained strong prejudices and reproaches against one another. A famous expression
of slovene prejudices, for instance, is the 1927 statement by Catholic party leader Anton
Korošec: “In Yugoslavia it is thus: the serbs rule, the Croats debate, and the slovenes
work.”12
Even in Czechoslovakia, where the leadership established the strongest democratic
institutions in the region, large national minority populations remained discontented
with their status and continued to challenge the legitimacy of the new state.
With the political principle of national self-determination internationally legitimized,
competing nationalist aspirations crystallized in the interwar period and formed
the basis for strategies that later escalated into some of the atrocities committed during
World War II. The Hungarian government focused its efforts on regaining lost territories
and population. Wary of this Hungarian policy of irredentism, neighboring governments
that had gained significant territories from historic Hungary designed aggressive economic
and cultural policies to achieve more effective control over those territories and
their inhabitants. greater romania, for example, based its institutional policies primarily
on reordering the ethnic hierarchy in Transylvania in favor of romanian dominance.13
Hungarian organizations forcefully challenged these policies. similarly, in Czechoslovakia,
many germans and Hungarians joined political parties that challenged the legitimacy of
the state. These groups felt vindicated when Adolf Hitler dismembered Czechoslovakia
in 1938, occupied the Czech Lands, and helped to redraw contested political borders
throughout the region. The supposed right of the sizable german-speaking population of
interwar Czechoslovakia, the sudeten germans, to belong to a common german nationstate
served as a pretext for Hitler’s destruction of the Czechoslovak state. After germany’s
show of military might, the governments of Hungary, romania, and slovakia (a state that
Hitler helped create) each became Hitler’s allies at various times of the war, trusting that
120 ZsUZsA CsErgő
their participation on the victor’s side would help them establish, reclaim, or maintain
sovereignty over mutually claimed “national” territories and peoples. As a result of Hitler’s
policies, the Hungarian government was able to reannex two regions with majority
Hungarian populations (the southern region of Czechoslovakia in November 1938 and
northern Transylvania between 1940 and 1944). These sudden reversals of fortune were
as traumatic to the slovak and romanian inhabitants of these territories as they had been
for Hungarians after World War I. After the defeat of the Axis powers at the end of World
War II, the post–World War I borders were reestablished, and the conditions for nationalist
policies changed significantly.
The evolution of Polish state- and nation-building provides another example of
traumatic shifts in territorial and ethno-cultural boundaries in the context of great power
politics. By the end of the eighteenth century, the territories that had once been part
of the medieval Polish kingdom were split among the russian, german, and Austrian
empires. When an independent Polish state was created at the end of World War I,
that state incorporated an ethnically diverse population with complex histories of competition
that provided significant sources of conflict during the interwar period. This
multiethnic society was devastated during World War II. After the division of Poland
by the soviet Union and germany in 1941, the violence perpetuated on that territory
(primarily through state-designed strategies of ethnic cleansing but also through violence
committed by social actors) annihilated one-third of the population—including almost
the entire population of Polish Jews and large numbers of Poles, Ukrainians, and other
ethnicities.14
The peace agreements at the end of World War II re-created a Polish state
but within territorial boundaries that were moved significantly to the west. The boundary
shift was coupled with ethnic cleansing (“unmixing”) of a different kind:  millions of
ethnic germans from the western part of the new Polish state were forced out of their
homes and moved to postwar germany, and large numbers of Poles and Ukrainians were
forced to resettle in the west.15
As a result of these traumatic territorial and demographic
changes, the Polish state turned from a long history of ethnic diversity to significant
ethnic homogeneity.
Nationalist competition contributed also to the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1941,
when Hitler and Benito Mussolini divided the state among germany, Italy, Hungary,
and Bulgaria and established, in the center of the former federation, a Croatian state
ruled by the fascist Ustaša. In the bloody civil wars that engulfed Yugoslavia in subsequent
years, the Ustaša government led a violent campaign against Jews, roma, serbs,
and other groups; Yugoslav Partisans fought to defend villagers against terror; and the
extreme nationalists among serbian Četniks engaged in revenge attacks against ethnic
Croatians, Muslims, and Partisans. By the end of the war, over one million people were
killed, including serbs, Croats, Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims, Danube swabians
(a german-speaking ethnic group), Jews, slovenes, and roma.
Against the backdrop of such violence, many communist leaders in the region, among
whom ethnic minorities were represented in disproportionately high numbers, viewed
internationalism as an appealing alternative to nationalism. Although communism provided
leaders with unprecedented power to conduct “social engineering,” none of these
regimes succeeded in creating homogeneity in societies where multiple groups had earlier
competed for national rights. There emerged no sizable “non-national” Yugoslav population
in Yugoslavia, or Czechoslovak population in Czechoslovakia, capable of holding
Photo 5.1. Roma refugee camp in Zvecan,north of Kosovo,November 1999.Although the
exact figure is unknown,millions of Roma live in often substandard conditions throughout
Central and Eastern Europe and often have disproportionately high unemployment
rates. (Lubomir Kotek/OSCE)
122 ZsUZsA CsErgő
these federations together when the communist regimes began collapsing in 1989. The
soviet state was similarly unable to engender nonnational identities and loyalties.
Despite an initial emphasis on internationalism, in practice, nationalism remained
a key organizing principle during the communist period.16
In Yugoslavia, communist
leader Josip Broz Tito made the eradication of national antagonisms his primary goal
in 1945 and suppressed all overt manifestations of ethnic sentiment. Nonetheless, by
the end of the 1960s, slovenian, Croatian, serbian, and other national identities were
reasserting themselves in literature and the arts, and by the mid-1970s these groups
had achieved self-government in the constituent republics of the Yugoslav federation.
In the other part of the region that fell under Moscow’s dominance, each of the “brotherly
states” of Central and Eastern Europe pursued its own brand of nationalism in
domestic politics.17
The postwar Czechoslovak government, for instance, declared ethnic
germans and Hungarians collectively guilty of having contributed to Hitler’s destruction
of Czechoslovakia and gained soviet approval for the expulsion of these ethnic groups
from the country. Based on the so-called Beneš Decrees (named for the state’s president,
Eduard Beneš), Czechoslovakia expelled the overwhelming majority of ethnic germans
to germany and a large percentage of the Hungarian population, including much of the
Hungarian educated class, to Hungary.18
Those who remained in the state were denied
citizenship rights until 1948. Despite such a drastic policy to achieve an ethnic balance
favoring the state’s two titular groups, the Czechs and the slovaks, a significant number of
Hungarians remained in the slovak part of Czechoslovakia. Throughout the communist
decades, they were subject to economic, cultural, and educational policies that severely
restricted their ability to reproduce their culture and improve their socioeconomic status.
The relationship between the Czechs and the slovaks was also tense from the beginning
of cohabitation. Initial notions of a unified Czechoslovak identity were soon replaced by
efforts to loosen Prague’s control over the slovak part of the land in a federative structure
that better represented national interests.
Compared to Czechoslovakia, the postwar romanian communist government
adopted more minority-friendly policies. Because the ethnic Hungarian party was instrumental
in the communist takeover in romania, Hungarian minority leaders gained
Moscow’s support in achieving full citizenship rights, participation in the government,
and the right to maintain cultural and educational institutions. The same soviet government
that in Czechoslovakia gave its full support to President Beneš’s policies to expel the
german and Hungarian minorities, in romania facilitated the establishment of regional
autonomy for Hungarians in Transylvania in 1952. Although this autonomous region
was short-lived, the first communist-dominated romanian government was much better
disposed toward minorities overall than was the Beneš government in Czechoslovakia.19
As the influence of ethnic Hungarian leaders in the Communist Party weakened, however,
the government launched a nationalizing strategy that severely weakened the political
status and social structure of the Hungarian community in Transylvania. Beginning
in the mid-1960s, the government of Nicolae Ceauşescu launched a ruthless strategy to
consolidate a centralized unitary national state. Ethnic germans were offered incentives
to immigrate to West germany, and Hungarians were subjected to administrative,
economic, and educational policies aimed at their assimilation. Against such a backdrop,
ethnic Hungarians unsurprisingly played a significant role in the collapse of the
Ceauşescu regime in December 1989.20
ETHNICITY, NATIONALIsM, AND THE CHALLENgEs 123
Of the unitary communist states in the region, Poland and Hungary were the only
two that did not have sizable national minority groups. The small ethnic communities
that existed in these states presented no systematic challenge to majority cultural dominance.
Within the framework of the Moscow-led communist camp, the Hungarian government
also indicated little interest in influencing the conditions of ethnic Hungarians
living in the neighboring states. Under such circumstances, the significance of the
national principle appeared less prominent in either case than it did in the region’s multinational
states. Yet the absence of internal national minorities did not make nationalist
motivations irrelevant in these countries. In Poland, national aspirations contributed
to the emergence of solidarity, the most powerful anti-communist movement in the
region in the 1980s. In Hungary, interest in the national principle strengthened by the
end of the 1980s, especially with regard to Hungarian minorities living in the neighboring
states.
Democratization and Nationalist Competition
With the collapse of communism came the promise of change, and for majorities and
minorities alike, change brought a chance to redefine old ideas of citizenship and selfgovernment.
At the beginning of the process, most societies in the region experienced
a unifying spirit of euphoria over the collapse of repressive regimes.21
Democratization
offered unprecedented opportunities for these societies to articulate differences through
competitive elections, political parties, and parliamentary debates. The EU offered a
model of political integration and a way of transcending the nationalist competitions of
the past. Yet the most influential political actors throughout the region articulated their
intentions to achieve both stronger national sovereignty and European integration.
The international institutions that most of the newly elected governments aspired
to join—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Council of Europe, the
Organization for security and Co-operation in Europe (OsCE), and the EU—insisted
on peaceful negotiations about sovereignty issues. As various majority and minority
groups in the region asserted claims to “national” self-government, Western international
institutions reasserted the principle of individual rights, but they also began adopting
an impressive number of documents calling for the protection of the rights of minority
cultures. These documents signaled increased international awareness that many states
incorporate multiple nation-building processes and that tensions arising from these
situations must find lasting solutions acceptable to all parties involved.22
Despite the relative consistency of international expectations and the shared objective
of Central and East Europeans to return to a “common European home,” the
conditions under which this goal could be harmonized with nationalist aspirations
varied. Consequently, there were significant variations in the way nationalism manifested
itself throughout the region. The differences revealed themselves in the goals that leaders
and groups articulated and the strategies they designed to achieve those goals. An overwhelming
nationalist goal in the region was to establish national entities by creating new
states (e.g., in former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) or to reestablish precommunist state
borders (in the Baltic region). Another form of nationalism pursued national dominance
in existing states, despite minority opposition to this strategy (romania and Bulgaria).
124 ZsUZsA CsErgő
A third form aimed at strengthening a common sense of nationhood beyond state borders
(Hungary). The pages that follow offer explanations for these differences in nationalist
strategy, emphasizing the influence of preexisting state structure (federal or unitary),
national composition (whether national strategies involved internal or external national
minorities), and the choices of national elites (to what extent majority and minority
elites were willing to negotiate their claims within the emerging democratic institutions,
employing the prospects of NATO and European integration in the process).
FROM MULTINATIONAL FEDERATIONS TO NATIONAL STATES
The nationalist movements that pursued state formation emerged in the three multinational
federations:  Czechoslovakia, the soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. Although
each of the three dissolving federal states was ethnically diverse, only a limited number
of groups defined themselves in national terms and claimed rights to national selfgovernment.
In each case, the titular groups of substate administrative units were
most likely to claim such rights. These were the serbs, slovenians, Macedonians,
Montenegrins, and Croatians in former Yugoslavia; the Czechs and slovaks in former
Czechoslovakia; and the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians in the former soviet
Union. In each case, those engaged in state formation had to answer the following
questions: What would be the physical boundaries of the successor states? What would
“the nation” mean within those boundaries? Who belonged to the new political community
and under what terms? And what should happen to those who did not belong?
In all cases, the political elites who led the movements for national independence
played a very important role in shaping the debates about these questions. In the great
majority of cases, nationalist claims were negotiated peacefully, within the channels of
democratic political competition. In other cases, however, democratic forms of parliamentary
debate and party competition were unable to contain national conflicts, and
these conflicts escalated into devastating wars.
DEMOCRATIZATION DERAILED: NATIONALISM IN THE BALKANS
In former Yugoslavia, the substate borders of the republics did not coincide with people’s
mental maps of “historic homelands.” Consequently, national self-determination became
a vehemently contested idea in the Balkans, as multiple national groups living in a mixed
demographic pattern claimed the same territory as “their own,” and each group turned
to a different national myth and conflicting interpretation of past relations of dominance
and subordination, sacrifice and victimization.
serbs and Croats composed the majority of the state’s population as well as the overwhelming
majority in the three largest republics—serbia (and its autonomous provinces,
Kosovo and Vojvodina), Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Approximately 24  percent
of serbs lived outside the republic of serbia and 22  percent of Croats lived outside
Croatia. Tensions between these two groups influenced interethnic relations throughout
Yugoslavia. Montenegrins generally identified with serbs, and Muslims lived intermixed
with serbs and Croats. Only slovenia and Macedonia, with their very small serbian and
ETHNICITY, NATIONALIsM, AND THE CHALLENgEs 125
Croatian populations, were not drawn into serbian-Croatian competition.23
In such a
context, successive unilateral declarations of independence by nationalist elites contributed
to a cycle of conflict that marked the entire decade of the 1990s and caused devastation
and horror not seen in Europe since World War II.
The unilateral declaration of independence triggered military intervention even
in slovenia, where no other groups had articulated competing national claims for the
same territory. The fight for independent slovenia, however, was relatively uneventful
compared to the brutal wars that followed in other parts of the disintegrating state. The
Yugoslav army, by late 1991, had evolved into primarily a serbian army. In the absence of
serbian claims for slovenia as a “national homeland,” European mediation quickly convinced
the Yugoslav army to withdraw and hand over sovereignty to the slovenian state
in October 1991.
In other Yugoslav republics, where majority and minority political elites advanced
competing and mutually incompatible claims for the same “national homeland,”
these claims mobilized large-scale ethnic support that led to violent conflict. The serb
Democratic Party in the Krajina region of Croatia, for instance, immediately challenged
the emerging Croatian movement for an independent state by demanding administrative
and cultural autonomy for the serb-majority region. Unable to achieve this goal
immediately, the leaders of the four serb-controlled areas declared the formation of the
serb Autonomous region of Krajina in January 1991 and added in March the same
year that this region would “dissociate” from an independent Croatia and remain within
Yugoslavia.
This sequence of unilateral declarations of national sovereignty exacerbated an
already existing distrust and hostility among these groups and helped trigger a devastating
war in Croatia. The government of Croatia on one side and the Yugoslav state presidency,
as well as local serbian authorities, on the other employed armed forces to resolve the
crisis. The war ended in 1995 with the help of Us and European mediation, after brutal
destruction in Croatian cities and villages, great suffering among the civilian population,
and “ethnic cleansing” on both sides that resulted in the displacement of more than a halfmillion
refugees. Today, the serbian minority represents only slightly more than 4 percent
of Croatia’s population.
Competition over national sovereignty became particularly vicious in BosniaHerzegovina,
a republic in which three groups began their armed fight for an acceptable
state design in April 1992. The Party of Democratic Action, representing the majority
Muslim population, advocated an independent and unitary Bosnia-Herzegovina, with no
internal territorial division along national lines. The serb Democratic Party first rejected
separation from Yugoslavia and fought for a separate state in the serb-populated areas—
in the hope of future reunification with other serbian-inhabited territories of (former)
Yugoslavia. The Croatian Democratic Union allied itself with the Muslim party against
the Bosnian serbs but also staged its own secessionist attempt in Herzegovina from 1993
to 1994—a conflict resolved only through strong international pressure, which led to the
formation of a Muslim-Croat federation. The war over the fate of Bosnia-Herzegovina
lasted from 1992 to 1995 and involved the engagement of the serbian and Croatian
militaries as well as NATO forces. Although all three groups committed atrocities, serbian
troops were responsible for more crimes than their counterparts, and the Muslim population
suffered most grievously.24
126 ZsUZsA CsErgő
The Dayton Peace Accords, reached through international mediation in 1995, created
a loose confederation that holds the Muslim-Croat federation and the serb republic
in the common state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, dividing the Muslim-Croat federation
into separate national cantons and allowing the Bosnian Croats to maintain a close link
with the Croatian state. Although the serb Democratic Party no longer dominates politics
in the republika srpska of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the main political parties representing
the serb population have continued to articulate desires for an independent state.
The other territory over which some of the most violent nationalist conflicts
emerged outside Bosnia-Herzegovina was Kosovo, a region that features prominently
in the serbian national myth. Before 1990, Kosovo was part of the serbian republic
of Yugoslavia but had a majority ethnic Albanian population. In 1990, Kosovo lost its
autonomy under the emerging rule of slobodan Milošević. As a result, the Albanians in
this province were systematically excluded from institutions of political and economic
power, and their means of cultural reproduction (such as education in the Albanian
language) were virtually eliminated from state-sponsored institutions. When the opportunity
for democratization presented itself, Albanian members of the Kosovo Assembly
articulated the Kosovar Albanians’ right to national self-determination as early as 1990.
In september 1991, they organized a referendum in which an overwhelming majority of
Kosovars (99.8 percent) voted for independence. After significant efforts to achieve independence
through peaceful civil disobedience and the gradual construction of a “parallel
Photo  5.2. Croatian refugees fleeing from Bosnian forces in June 1993 near Travnik,
when the Herzegovinian Croats turned on the Bosnians, creating an internal disaster.
The Serbs reportedly sat in the hills laughing. (Jim Bartlett)
ETHNICITY, NATIONALIsM, AND THE CHALLENgEs 127
state” (e.g., parallel institutions of education and health care), the National Movement for
the Liberation of Kosovo (KLA) became impatient with this strategy and began a series of
violent attacks against serbs (police officers and civilians) in Kosovo. serbian authorities
responded with a massive offensive in July 1998, forcing the KLA to withdraw into the
hills. The serbs then began a ruthless and systematic process of ethnic cleansing, which
resulted in approximately seven hundred thousand ethnic Albanian civilians from Kosovo
being expelled from their villages and forced to flee to Albania or Macedonia. Despite
international intervention, including two months of massive NATO bombings against
military and industrial targets also in serbia, the serbian government refused to agree to
an independent Kosovo. When serb forces finally agreed in a June 1999 peace agreement
to withdraw from Kosovo, the agreement guaranteed the continued territorial integrity
of Yugoslavia (serbia-Montenegro), including the province of Kosovo, which has been
under UN administration since 1999. However, following the collapse of negotiations
over the final status of Kosovo between local and international actors and the publication
of a UN report calling for the independence of the former serbian province25
(albeit
under international supervision), the Kosovo Assembly adopted a unilateral proclamation
of independence on February 17, 2008. swiftly recognized by the United states and
some (though not all) EU member states, Kosovo’s independence remains challenged by
serbia. Tensions over the border have decreased after an EU-brokered deal in April 2013
recognized serb majority areas of Kosovo as autonomous at the municipal level; yet,
Kosovo suffers from weak state capacity and remains under considerable international
supervision.26
INDEPENDENCE AND EU INTEGRATION: THE BALTIC STATES
The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were reestablished without significant
border disputes within the territorial boundaries that these states had before their
forcible annexation to the soviet Union in 1940. Although russians had dominated the
institutions of power at both the federal and republic levels and ethnic russians had
settled in these republics in significant numbers, there were no significant disputes over
national territorial borders between russian nationalist politicians and the leaders of independence
movements in the Baltics.
An important factor in the absence of territorial disputes was that, although russians
were the ethnic group closely associated with soviet federal power structures, the ethnic
russian population in the Baltic republics overwhelmingly comprised relatively recent
settlers whom the native population viewed as colonizers. As the formerly dominant
ethnic group in the soviet Union, the russians remaining in the Baltic states stood to
lose the most at independence. Yet ethnic russians articulated no systematic challenge to
nationalist aspirations in the Baltics. The new states, with their prospects for European
integration, offered better socioeconomic conditions than neighboring russia. rather
than demanding self-government, let alone secession and unification with russia, ethnic
russian political organizations contested the exclusionary aspects of citizenship and
language laws and lobbied European institutions to pressure these governments to adopt
more minority-friendly policies. At least at the beginning of the 1990s, speaking the
128 ZsUZsA CsErgő
russian language did not signify ethnic or national identity in these states in the same way
that language was the primary marker of Latvian, Estonian, or Lithuanian identity. The
russian-speaking population included people of different ethnicities who had switched
to russian as the language of advancement to higher status. Consequently, no commonly
shared national myth existed among russian speakers in the Baltic states that could have
become the grounds for national sovereignty claims.27
The only sizable historical minority
in the Baltic region was the Polish minority in Lithuania. Although of roughly the same
size as the state’s russian minority (at the time, each made up roughly 10 percent of
the population), the Polish minority articulated a stronger challenge to majority nationbuilding
than russians in any of the three states—including Estonia and Latvia, where
russians made up a much higher proportion of the population.
The policies of the russian government in Moscow constituted another significant
factor accounting for differences between nation-building processes in the Yugoslav and
Baltic regions. With over one hundred thousand red Army troops stationed in the Baltic
republics when the soviet Union collapsed, many had feared violent russian opposition
to independence. Nevertheless, the russian government agreed to withdraw these
troops relatively quickly. In contrast to the serbian leadership’s involvement in mobilizing
serbian minorities in the secessionist republics and providing them with military
resources, the russian government aimed instead to eliminate discriminatory citizenship
and language legislation in these countries through indirect pressure on their governments
and complaints brought to European institutions.
In pursuit of national states, Baltic governments adopted policies to establish national
dominance over the institutions of the new state. After 1990, there was a strong sense
among these populations that democratization should bring national justice. Even though
they were formally titular ethnicities in their republics during soviet occupation, the share
and status of indigenous ethnic groups had decreased dramatically due to large-scale
deportation campaigns against the native population, the emigration of great numbers of
Balts to the West, and the massive influx of russians (see table 5.1).
As a result of these changes, russian became the predominant language in the public
domain, especially in the urban centers. The relationship between russian and the titular
national languages during the soviet era remained that of one-sided bilingualism despite
language legislation adopted in the final years of soviet political reform that aimed at
“emancipating” the Baltic languages. Non-russians had to be fluent in russian in order
to function fully and advance socioeconomically, but russian speakers were not learning
the languages of the republics in which they resided.28
Decades of aggressive linguistic russification, however, seemed only to reinforce
the Balts’ national aspirations, and the notion that russian presence represented “illegal
occupation” became a significant building block in strategies of state reconstruction.
After achieving independence in 1991, each of the three governments adopted citizenship
and language policies that established the dominance of the titular language in the state.
The policies of nationalist state-building were most aggressive in Latvia, where the ratio
of the native population compared to the russian-speaking population was the highest,
and most moderate in Lithuania, where the ratio of the russian minority was the lowest.
In Lithuania, all residents who had lived in the republic before independence obtained
citizenship simply by applying. In Estonia and Latvia, only citizens of the interwar
ETHNICITY, NATIONALIsM, AND THE CHALLENgEs 129
Estonian and Latvian states before soviet annexation in 1940 and their descendants
had an automatic right to citizenship. Citizenship laws required other residents to pass
a language-proficiency test in order to become citizens of the reestablished states, even
though during the soviet era hardly any russian school taught Latvian. As a result,
roughly a third of the population of Estonia and Latvia was excluded from citizenship.29
Citizenship laws also disadvantaged ethnic russians in the distribution of resources. The
1991 Latvian privatization law, for instance, excluded noncitizens. In Estonia, property
restitution similarly discriminated against russians.30
In general, the story of state- and nation-building in the Baltic region is about harmonizing
national sovereignty with European integration. “returning to Europe” and
obtaining protection from future russian reannexation by joining the EU were inextricable
parts of the pursuit of national sovereignty in this region.31
Employing the powerful
leverage that these motivations provided, European institutions—especially the
OsCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities, the Council of Europe, and the
EU—applied strong pressure on the Baltic governments to adopt more inclusive citizenship
laws and more pluralistic educational and language policies that complied with
“European norms.”32
After 1998, the governments of Estonia and Latvia began adopting
amendments to their citizenship laws that made the naturalization of “nonhistoric”
minorities easier. International pressure has been less successful in influencing them to liberalize
their language policies. Language legislation in both states also continues to reflect
a nationalist state-building strategy, although in most cases restrictive language legislation
was only moderately implemented.33
Tensions over language use continue. In Latvia,
Table 5.1. Ethnic Composition of the Baltic States
Nationality Percentage of Population
Ethnic Composition of Estonia (2008 Census)
Estonian 68.7
Russian 25.6
Ukrainian 2.1
Belarusian 1.2
Finn 0.8
Other 1.6
Ethnic Composition of Latvia (2009 Census)
Latvian 59.3
Russian 27.8
Belarusian 3.6
Ukrainian 2.5
Polish 2.4
Lithuanian 1.3
Other 3.1
Ethnic Composition of Lithuania (2009 Census)
Lithuanian 84.0
Polish 6.1
Russian 4.9
Other or unspecified 3.9
Source: CIA, The World Factbook 2013, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook.
130 ZsUZsA CsErgő
a new bilingual curriculum introduced in 2002 and 2003 required that minority-language
schools teach certain subjects exclusively in Latvian. In Estonia, a 2007 education reform
introduced similar requirements. In both states, policies that mandate the exclusive use of
the majority language in subjects considered significant for the reproduction of national
cultures, such as history and music, have reinforced fears among russian speakers that
majorities intend to erase russian culture from these states.34
still, state-minority relations
remained peaceful, and russophone minority actors continued to pursue claims for
minority integration through electoral politics, relying particularly on strength in local
government in major cities.35
In successor states of the soviet Union, the parallel processes of democratization and
EU integration described in this section unfolded only in the Baltic states. A brief account
of developments in Ukraine helps to highlight how internal divisions over EU membership
and national identity can contribute to a major state crisis in a post-soviet European
successor state where political elites failed to establish credible democratic institutions.
Although the appeal of democratization is strong in Ukrainian society, the idea of EU
membership remains deeply divisive. given Ukraine’s geographic position between the
EU and russia, the ambivalence about European integration has implications beyond
the “Euroskepticism” found in current EU member states. A  significant segment of
Ukraine’s political elite and public favors the pursuit of EU membership, but a sizable
portion of the state’s russian speakers, especially in the eastern region close to the russian
border, is more interested in maintaining close ties with russia. The russian government,
meanwhile, strongly opposes the idea of Ukraine’s incorporation into Western
political and security institutions. The combination of these conditions reinforced
skepticism also among EU leaders about the prospects for Ukraine’s inclusion in the
European integration project. given the large size of the Ukrainian territory and population
in comparison with the Baltic states and the magnitude of Ukraine’s socioeconomic
problems, the prospects for Ukraine’s EU integration remain weak, especially after the
2008 financial crisis. Although Ukraine became part of the EU’s “Eastern Partnership”
initiative,36
this framework provides European institutions with no leverage to influence
policies affecting interethnic relations in a partner state or to shape bilateral relations
between Ukraine and russia.
Ukraine includes a large russian-speaking population with ambivalent attitudes
toward the Ukrainian national identity pursued through policies designed in the state
center. Under such conditions, a significant crisis of trust in the government can lead to
a major state crisis in which even the political borders of the state become contested.37
The evolution of the 2013–2014 Ukrainian state crisis manifests this logic. Ukraine’s
political elites failed to establish credible democratic institutions for the state created
after 1991. President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to violently repress antigovernment
demonstrations, which began in Kiev in November 2013 in response to the government’s
refusal to sign an association agreement with the EU, led to a major state crisis. The
escalation of this crisis—involving the aggressive intrusion of the russian state through
a military annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, followed by secessionist mobilization in
Eastern Ukraine, all in the name of protecting Ukraine’s russian-speaking population—
highlights not only the failure of democratization in Ukraine but also the continued
salience of ethnicity in the politics of sovereignty and legitimacy in the region.
ETHNICITY, NATIONALIsM, AND THE CHALLENgEs 131
russian support for secessionism in Ukraine heightened concerns about state sovereignty
and regional security in the Baltic states, where the integration of large russophone
minorities remained a major challenge of democratic consolidation. Concerns about the
future of the EU—which gained significance in this region after the 2008 “Euro crisis”
and became magnified by the syrian refugee crisis and Brexit in 2015–2016—reinforced
fears among national majority populations that the Putin government would successfully
mobilize russophone “kin” majorities against the states in which they live.38
THE “VELVET DIVORCE” AND ITS AFTERMATH: THE CZECH AND
SLOVAK STATES
In contrast with the violent conflicts over national sovereignty in former Yugoslavia and
the powerful support for independence in the Baltic republics, the independent Czech
republic and slovakia were created after the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia in
1992. some accounts of the separation emphasized cultural differences between Czechs
and slovaks and assigned a significant weight to slovak aspirations for a national state.39
Yet separation was not primarily the outcome of ethnic division between slovaks and
Czechs. rather than the result of large-scale popular mobilization for independence, as
in the Baltic states, the creation of independent Czech and slovak states was an outcome
negotiated among the political leaders of the two parts of the federation with only limited
public support.40
At the same time, each of these states was established democratically, by
elected governing bodies, and in the absence of significant popular opposition.41
As with the separation of the Baltic states, a key reason for the absence of violent
conflict over the dissolution of Czechoslovakia was that no disputes emerged between
Czechs and slovaks over state borders, as the two groups did not initiate mutually exclusive
“national homeland” claims to the same territory. Before the first establishment of
Czechoslovakia in 1918, slovaks had lived within the Hungarian kingdom for ten centuries,
and the old territorial border remained a substate boundary in Czechoslovakia.
After decades of coexistence with the prospect of mobility within a common state—first
in interwar Czechoslovakia and then in communist Czechoslovakia—no sizable Czech
national minority developed in slovak territory or slovak historic minority in the Czech
Lands that would articulate a substate national challenge to either of the new states.
Another important reason why the Czech and slovak divorce lacked significant controversy
was that the Hungarian minority in the slovak part of the state, a historic minority
with competing homeland claims in the southern region of slovakia, did not challenge
the slovaks’ right to independence.
For reasons described earlier in this chapter, at the time of independence, the Czech
republic was one of the least ethnically diverse states in the region (see table 5.2). Czech
political leaders therefore faced few challenges to pursuing a single, dominant culture
in the new state. Of all the ethnicities in the state, the roma continue to constitute the
largest and most distinct cultural group, with a share of the population estimated at
between 2 and 3 percent. Official policies and popular attitudes toward this minority
after the creation of the new state indicated that the national majority had little desire
to accommodate roma culture. Citizenship laws limited the rights of roma to become
132 ZsUZsA CsErgő
naturalized in the new state. On the level of local government, anti-roma efforts included
attempts to segregate swimming pools, construct walls separating roma and Czech
inhabitants, and provide subsidies for roma willing to emigrate. The relatively small size
and fragmentation of the roma population, however, prevented these incidents from
becoming a matter of broader debate about Czech national exclusivism.42
National aspirations found a more complex social context in newly independent
slovakia.43
Before 1993, the primary question of slovak national sovereignty had been
whether an independent slovak state was necessary to fulfill national aspirations. After
the creation of slovakia, the key question became how a slovak “nation-state” could
materialize on a territory that incorporated a relatively large, geographically concentrated,
and politically well-organized historic Hungarian community (see table 5.3). During the
first period of independence, from 1992 to 1998, the slovak political parties in power,
under the leadership of Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar, opted for traditional nationalist
policies.44
In an attempt to suppress minority claims for substate institutional autonomy,
these policies were aimed at establishing slovak majority control over all institutions of
government and cultural reproduction. restrictive language legislation adopted in 1995
was designed to strengthen the status of the slovak literary standard against dialects
and to exclude minority languages from the spheres considered most important for the
reproduction of national cultures: local government, territory markings, the media, and
the educational system. Hungarian minority parties forcefully challenged these policies
and pressed for a pluralist slovak state. Employing the methods of party competition
and parliamentary debate, Hungarian minority political elites asked that slovakia’s historic
Hungarian minority be recognized as a state-constituting entity. To guarantee the
Table 5.2. Ethnic Composition of the Czech Republic (2011 Census)
Nationality Percentage of Population
Czech 64.3
Moravian 5.0
Slovak 1.4
Other or unspecified 29.3
Source: The Czech Statistical Office ( eský statistický ú ad). Czech Demographic
Handbook 2013. Available at:  http://www.czso.cz/csu/2013edicniplan.nsf/engt/
8E001797ED/$File/4032130116.pdf.
Table 5.3. Ethnic Composition of Slovakia (2011 Census)
Nationality Percentage of Population
Slovak 80.7
Hungarian 8.5
Roma 2.0
Czech 0.6
Ruthenian 0.6
Ukrainian 0.1
Other or unspecified 0.5
Source: Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic. 2011 Population and Housing Census.
Available at: http://portal.statistics.sk/files/table-10.pdf.
ETHNICITY, NATIONALIsM, AND THE CHALLENgEs 133
reproduction of Hungarian minority culture in slovakia, they demanded substate forms
of autonomy, at various times emphasizing either the cultural, educational, or territorial
aspects of self-government. Despite internal debates among Hungarian parties about the
best institutional forms, they agreed on the importance of language rights and claimed
the right to use the Hungarian language in the southern region of slovakia in all public
spheres and the educational system.
Majority–minority debates over these questions marked the first decade of democratization
in slovakia. The Mečiar government’s policies of increasing centralized control over
society also created sharp divisions within the slovak majority. Based on their agreement
about the necessity of moving slovakia away from a recentralizing authoritarian regime,
the slovak and Hungarian parties in opposition eventually formed a strategic electoral
alliance that defeated the Mečiar government in the 1998 parliamentary elections. This
slovak-Hungarian electoral alliance was able to form a governing coalition that changed
the course of slovak nationalist policies in the following years. Even though debates about
minority self-government and language equality continued and often reflected vehement
disagreements, the prospect of European integration provided a significant incentive to
both majority and minority moderate parties to negotiate peacefully. They managed
to design policies that, while preserving the predominance of the majority language
throughout the country, gradually included the minority language in ways that satisfied
the main aspirations of minority parties articulated from the beginning of the 1990s. The
return of national exclusivist parties to the government after 2006 raised questions about
the future of minority accommodation in the country. The controversy over the June
2009 amendments to the slovak language law restricting minority language use in official
business reveals the limits of international pressure in the post-EU accession period, when
the conditionality of prospective EU membership can no longer constrain majority policy
makers. still, the prospect of a more minority-friendly approach to nation-building in
the future remains open. The coalition government formed after the 2010 parliamentary
elections included a new Hungarian-slovak party called “Bridge,” which placed particular
emphasis on interethnic reconciliation. This party became part of coalition governments
also after the 2012 and 2016 parliamentary elections. Although these changes in government
had no significant impact on minority policy in slovakia, electoral and party politics
remains the primary form of majority–minority contestation also in slovakia.
Consolidating National States: Nation-State or
Pluralism?
The unitary states of Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and romania continued their existence
within unchanged state borders after the communist collapse. The absence of state
collapse and new state creation, however, did not make nationalist ideology irrelevant in
these countries. Wherever majority national elites chose to define the postcommunist
state as the unitary “nation-state” of the majority national group, and the government
engaged in aggressive policies to create majority dominance over sizable ethnic and
national minority groups, nationalism became a deeply divisive political strategy.
134 ZsUZsA CsErgő
FROM NATIONALIST COMMUNISM TO DEMOCRATIC
NATIONALISM: ROMANIA
As in other multiethnic societies in the region, the legacies of past relations of dominance
and subordination between ethnic groups continued to influence majority and minority
perspectives in romania about what “national sovereignty” should mean. With the end
of World War II, the contested borders of the state were redrawn again, largely along
the same lines created after World War I, and romania fell under the influence of the
soviet Union.45
Despite the ruthlessness of anti-Hungarian policies enacted during the
dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu, members of the Hungarian minority maintained a
strong sense of national identity. Only days after the bloody December 1989 revolution
that toppled perhaps the most repressive communist dictatorship in the region, ethnic
Hungarians formed a political party that commanded the overwhelming majority of the
votes of their population of 1.6 million in every subsequent election, and they became a
significant force in the romanian parliament (see table 5.4).
rather than discarding the nationalist policies of the Ceauşescu period, however,
the government of Ion Iliescu, after 1990, designed a new constitution that defined
the state as a “nation-state” based on the unity of an ethnically determined romanian
nation. The regime based its power on alliances with ultranationalist romanian parties
of the left and right and instituted minority policies that in some ways were more restrictive
than their counterparts during the Ceauşescu dictatorship. The new constitution
Photo  5.3. With the expansion of the European Union, West European tourists have
come in large numbers to places like this Hungarian village in Transylvania. Many buy
“ethnic gifts” at new shops like this one. (Dana Stryk)
ETHNICITY, NATIONALIsM, AND THE CHALLENgEs 135
affirmed romanian as the only official language in romania. Laws adopted on public
administration and public education also severely restricted the use of minority languages
and became sources of intense controversy between the romanian government and the
Hungarian minority party. Like its counterpart in slovakia, the Hungarian minority party
demanded the right to Hungarian-language cultural and educational institutions and to
use that language in local and regional government. The Hungarians pressed for these
demands through bargaining and negotiations with majority parties willing to compromise
on national issues. Although all romanian parties rejected Hungarian claims to
substate autonomy, moderate romanian parties were willing to form an electoral alliance
with the Hungarian party, and—much in keeping with events in slovakia—this strategic
alliance defeated the Iliescu government in 1996, formed a coalition government, and
began to change romanian nation-building policies. Even though the Iliescu government
returned to power in the 2000 elections, the prospect of membership in NATO and the
EU had become significant enough for the regime to expand the rights of language use in
the spheres most important for minority cultural reproduction.46
Although romania was
considered a “laggard” in democratic consolidation and EU accession (admitted together
with Bulgaria in 2007, while eight other Central and East European states had become
EU members in 2004), postaccession romanian governments remained more supportive
of minority-friendly policies (including language policies) than their slovak counterparts.
Hungarians in romania have voted overwhelmingly for the same moderate umbrella
minority party since 1990, which has been part of romanian coalition governments
since 1977, playing a key role in the relative stability of the romanian political system.
The question remains open, however, about the ability of this minority party to sustain
its mobilizational capacity among an increasingly discontented minority electorate.47
The
challenges of minority inclusion remain significant also in romania. The demand for
substate territorial autonomy in a Hungarian-majority region is highly divisive, and the
marginalization of roma minorities remains a significant unresolved issue.
Nation Building across State Borders
Besides cohabitating with a national majority in the same state, most ethnic and national
minorities in this region also have neighboring “kin-states”—that is, states in which
Table 5.4. Ethnic Composition of Romania (2011 est.)
Nationality Percentage of Population
Romanian 83.4
Hungarian 6.1
Roma 3.1
Ukrainian 0.3
German 0.2
Other 0.7
Unspecified 6.1
Source: CIA, The World Factbook 2017. Available at:  https://www.cia.gov/library/
publications/the-world-factbook/docs/profileguide.html.
136 ZsUZsA CsErgő
their ethnic kin compose a titular majority.48
A  growing interest emerged among the
governments in such kin-states to adopt legislation that would grant preferential treatment
to ethnic kin living in other states. The constitutions of several states, such as
Albania, Croatia, Hungary, and Macedonia, contain commitments to care for the wellbeing
of kin living abroad. several governments, such as in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland,
romania, russia, serbia, slovenia, and slovakia, adopted legislation to provide benefits
to ethnic kin living abroad. Although these constitutional clauses and benefit laws differ
in their specific content, ranging from cultural and economic benefits to dual-citizenship
rights, their common characteristic is that they support the preservation of national identity
and aim to contribute to the fostering of relationships between a kin-state and those
outside its borders who define themselves in some sense as conationals.49
HUNGARY AND VIRTUAL NATIONALISM
The Hungarian state’s nation-building strategy after 1990 is the clearest example of
the trans-sovereign type of nationalism in the region. This type of nationalism does
not pursue a traditional nation-state through territorial changes or the repatriation of
ethnic kin within its borders. Instead, it aims to maintain a sense of common cultural
“nationhood” across existing state borders.50
Close to 3 million ethnic Hungarians live in
Hungary’s neighboring states. In an integrated Europe, they compose one of the largest
historical minority groups. After the collapse of communist regimes, Hungarian political
elites were aware that revisionism was an unacceptable proposition if they wanted to join
an integrated Europe. Instead of pressing for border changes, they created a network of
institutions that link Hungarians living in the neighboring countries to Hungary while
encouraging them to remain “in their homeland” and, in effect, withstand assimilation
where they reside. To complement these cross-border institutions, the Hungarian government
expressed support both for EU membership for Hungary and its neighbors
and for Hungarian minority demands for local and institutional autonomy in their
home states. According to the logic of these policies, if Hungary and all of its neighbors
became EU members, and the EU provided a supranational, decentralized structure for
strong regional institutions, then Hungarians could live as though no political borders
separated them.
Although the “virtualization of borders” appeared attractive to many Hungarians,
the idea found little appeal among the majority political parties in neighboring countries.
seven states neighboring Hungary include ethnic Hungarian populations, and five of these
states were newly established after the collapse of communist federations. As discussed
earlier in this chapter, the majority national elites in both newly created and consolidating
national states were highly reluctant to weaken their sovereignty and accommodate multiple
nation-building processes in their territories. Thus, Hungarian efforts unilaterally to
“virtualize” borders in the region triggered tensions between Hungary and its neighbors.
The adoption in June 2001 of the Law Concerning Hungarians Living in Neighboring
Countries (commonly known as the Hungarian status Law)—which defined all ethnic
Hungarians in the region as part of the same cultural nation and on this basis offered a
number of educational, cultural, and even economic benefits to those living in neighboring
ETHNICITY, NATIONALIsM, AND THE CHALLENgEs 137
states—triggered significant attention from policy makers in the region, European institution
officials, and scholars of nationalism.51
The competitive dynamics of nation-building
in the region and its potentially large-scale regional impact made the Hungarian strategy
particularly controversial. The governments of romania and slovakia, the two states with
the largest Hungarian populations, expressed concern that the legislation weakened their
exclusive sovereignty over ethnic Hungarian citizens and discriminated against majority
nationals in neighboring countries. Although these neighboring governments themselves
had adopted similar policies toward their own ethnic kin abroad, controversy over the
Hungarian status Law brought Hungary’s relations with these neighbors to a dangerously
low point. The fact that all of these governments were keenly interested in EU
membership eventually helped them compromise. Hungary signed a bilateral agreement
with romania and altered the language of the law in response to European pressure in
2003. Yet the controversy over the Hungarian status Law foreshadowed the challenges
of reconciling European integration with the continuing power of divergent and competing
national aspirations. The divisiveness of cross-border nationalism became particularly
visible after 2010, when the newly elected Hungarian government began adopting
legislation that made it easier for ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries to
become Hungarian citizens and gain nonresident voting rights. These acts triggered
strong resentment in slovakia and also deepened political divisions in Hungary. The
strong showing of the vehemently xenophobic Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik)
in the 2009 European Parliament elections, together with this party’s increasing success
among the Hungarian electorate—in obtaining parliamentary seats in the 2010 elections
and gaining 20 percent of the votes in the 2014 parliamentary elections—reveals the
salience of exclusivist nationalism despite the earlier successes of democratic consolidation.
The new Hungarian constitution adopted in 2011 is also criticized for provisions
that can indirectly sanction discrimination against Hungary’s large roma minority. The
Fidesz government relied increasingly on nationalist populism to legitimize a shift to
autocratization in Hungary. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán featured himself as a trailblazer
of “illiberal democracy,” understood as a government based on ethnically conceived
nationalism. After 2015, the government successfully instrumentalized the syrian refugee
crisis to brand itself as the defender of the nation and of European Christianity. In the
same spirit, a set of laws was adopted in 2017 to undermine those nongovernmental
organizations and institutions that represent and encourage critical attitudes about ethnic
exclusivism and populist nationalism (e.g., the Central European University of Budapest
and human rights nongovernmental organizations).52
Nationalism and the Fragility of Democracy
Although European organizations uphold the principles of liberal democracy, respect
for ethnic diversity, human rights, and dignity, democratization in the Central and East
European societies that became EU member states did not lead to a broad acceptance of
liberal-individualist understandings of citizenship. Nor did nationalism result in horror
perpetuated in the name of ethnic kin throughout the region. given the dramatic collapse
of states and regimes during the 1990s, the relatively low occurrence of violent conflict
138 ZsUZsA CsErgő
associated with these changes was remarkable. The promise of European integration
altered the conditions under which nationalist interests could be articulated.
The specific goals that nationalist leaders and groups articulated in the 1990s and
2000s, as well as the means by which they pursued those goals, varied across the region.
Most of the former titular groups of multinational federations sought national independence.
Where substate boundaries within the disintegrating multinational federation
had coincided with the territories that titular groups defined as their historic homelands
and secession encountered no significant challenge from other groups, nationalist
state-building unfolded without significant violence. In these cases, the prospects for
integration into Western institutions helped reinforce initial interests in democratization.
Examples of such nonviolent (or relatively nonviolent) state formation include the reestablishment
of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; the secession of slovenia
and Macedonia; and the creation of independent Czech and slovak states.
Where the state-building aspirations of a group encountered forceful challenge by
another group claiming the same territory as a historic homeland within a dissolving
federal state and the dominant political elites opted for unilateralism over sustained
negotiation across ethnic lines, nationalist mobilization led to devastating wars. This was
the situation in the former Yugoslav republics of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the
serbian autonomous province of Kosovo. Competing national elites in these cases opted
for national sovereignty or its violent denial even at the most horrific costs, and future
prospects for European integration did not figure significantly in their calculations—
despite the fact that, before the communist collapse, Yugoslavia had been better
connected to international institutions than soviet bloc countries. European integration
gained primacy in nationalist strategy only in slovenia, where belonging to Europe constituted
a strong element of national identity, and with no significant national minority,
the issue of national sovereignty was most easily resolved.
Lithuania provides an important lesson about the significance of the choices that
majority and minority political elites make in nationalist competition. In the same period
that Croatian and serbian majority and minority elites were fighting a devastating war
in the southeastern part of the continent, the leaders of the Lithuanian national majority
and the Polish minority opted for a consensual resolution of the tension over mutually
claimed homelands. Eager to satisfy European expectations, they engaged in a bilateral
and peaceful negotiation over the issues of autonomy and minority rights.
governments in Bulgaria, romania, and all of the multiethnic successor states of
dissolving federations had to determine whether the democratic state could pursue the
traditional nationalist aim of the political-cultural congruence of the nation or accommodate
minority cultures in a more pluralist state. Excepting Croatia, serbia, and BosniaHerzegovina,
in all of these states, majority and minority political parties remained
committed to democratic means of negotiating their competing notions of sovereignty.
Complicating matters even further, many governments in the region juggle the dual
roles of home state (in relation to their titular nation and national minorities living on
their territory) and kin-state (in relation to ethnic kin populations living outside their
territory). such cases have prompted officials in European institutions to begin designing
a common set of norms to assure minority protection and permit kin-states to build
relations with external minorities while continuing to uphold the principle of state
sovereignty.53
ETHNICITY, NATIONALIsM, AND THE CHALLENgEs 139
Harmonizing the principles of state sovereignty and individualism with the practice
of multiple nation-building within and across state borders will remain a continuing
challenge. In this sense, postcommunist member states are no different from their West
European counterparts, where the strengthening of nationalist sentiment is also revealed
in electoral politics. Concerns about the impact of nationalism on democratic consolidation
are no longer confined to the “new democracies” of Central and Eastern Europe.
rather, this region provides invaluable lessons about the sources of conflict as well as
about the strategies of peaceful democratic contestation.
Study Questions
1. state borders have changed many times in Central and Eastern Europe following the
awakening of national movements in the second half of the nineteenth century. What
were the most significant border changes, and in what ways have they exacerbated the
competitive logic of nationalism and the problem of noncongruence between state and
national boundaries?
2. Explain the “Janus-faced” character of nationalism and the way it has influenced
postcommunist democratic development in Central and East European countries.
In what ways can we say that nation-building policies in this region have been both
forward-looking and at the same time turned to the past?
3. Bearing in mind the significance of preexisting institutions, national composition, and
the choices made by political elites, what seems to set apart the violent ethnic politics
of the former Yugoslavia from the largely peaceful evolution of majority–minority
conflicts in the rest of Central and Eastern Europe?
4. Most ethnic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe have kin-states in the region,
and most governments have enacted legislation to extend various kinds of benefits
to ethnic kin living abroad. Discuss the reasons why kin-state nationalism is controversial
in this region and how it affects the evolution of democratic government and
European integration.
5. The enlargement of the EU to include democratized postcommunist states is
commonly viewed as a source of success in democratic consolidation and interethnic
peacemaking in significant parts of Central and Eastern Europe. At the same time,
the reassertion of russian regional power under Vladimir Putin’s government is viewed
as a factor that weakens the prospects for democratic consolidation and can even
endanger state stability in the successor states of the soviet Union. What is the role of
these processes of regional influence in explaining the successes and failures of nationbuilding
and minority inclusion throughout the postcommunist region?
Suggested Readings
Brubaker, rogers. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Bunce, Valerie. “Peaceful versus Violent state Dismemberment.” Politics and Society 27, no. 2
(1999): 217–37.
140 ZsUZsA CsErgő
Csergo, Zsuzsa. Talk of the Nation:  Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
Csergo, Zsuzsa, and James M. goldgeier. “Nationalist strategies and European Integration.”
Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 1 (2004): 21–37.
gagnon, V. P., Jr. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2004.
gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Hale, Henry. “Explaining Ethnicity.” Comparative Political Studies 37, no. 4 (May 2004): 458–85.
Hroch, Miroslav. “From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation: The Nation-Building
Process in Europe.” New Left Review 198 (1993): 3–20.
Kallas, Kristina, “Claiming the Diaspora: russia’s Compatriot Policy and Its reception by Estonianrussian
Population,” Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 15, no. 3 (2016): 1–25.
Kelley, Judith. Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004.
King, Charles. Extreme Politics: Nationalism,Violence, and the End of Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010.
Kymlicka, Will, and Magda Opalski. Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported? Western Political Theory
and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Laitin, David. Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Livezeanu, Irina. Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic
Struggle, 1918–1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.
roeder, Philip. “The Triumph of Nation-states: Lessons from the Collapse of the soviet Union,
Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.” In After the Collapse of Communism, edited by Michael McFaul
and Kathryn stoner-Weiss, 21–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
schulze, Jennie L. Strategic Frames: Europe, Russia, and Minority Inclusion in Estonia and Latvia.
Pitt series in russian and Eastern European studies. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 2017.
snyder, Jack. From Voting to Violence:  Democratization and Nationalist Conflict. New  York:
W. W. Norton, 2000.
snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
subotic, Jelena. Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2009.
Tesser, Lynn. Ethnic Cleansing and the European Union: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Security,
Memory and Ethnography. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist
Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Waterbury, Myra. Between State and Nation:  Diaspora Politics and Kin-State Nationalism in
Hungary. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Wimmer, Andreas. Ethnic Boundary Making:  Institutions, Power, Networks. New  York:  Oxford
University Press, 2013.
Notes
1. Ernst gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1; and
Andreas Wimmer, Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation, and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern
World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
ETHNICITY, NATIONALIsM, AND THE CHALLENgEs 141
2. Alfred stepan, Juan J. Linz, and Yogendra Yadav, Crafting State-Nations: India and Other
Multinational Democracies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
3. robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (New York: Vintage Books, 1993);
and Mischa glenny, The Balkans 1804–1999 (New York: Viking, 2000).
4. Jack snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: W.
W. Norton, 2000); and roger Petersen, Western Intervention in the Balkans: The Strategic Use of
Emotion in Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
5. Anthony D.  smith, Nationalism and Modernism:  A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of
Nations  and Nationalism (London:  routledge, 1998); rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed:
Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996); and Kanchan Chandra, ed., Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
6. Henry Hale, “Explaining Ethnicity,” Comparative Political Studies 37, no.  4 (May
2004):  458–85; and Andreas Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making:  Institutions, Power, Networks
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
7. Tom Nairn, “The Modern Janus,” in The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism,
ed. Tom Nairn (London: New Left Books, 1977).
8. Taras Kuzio, “The Myth of the Civic state: A Critical survey of Hans Kohn’s Framework
for Understanding Nationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 25, no. 1 (2002): 20–39.
9. For a political self-determination theory of territory, see Margaret Moore, A Political Theory
of Territory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
10. For a historical account, see Hugh L. Agnew, The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian
Crown (stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2004). About nationalism and competition, see
Anthony W. Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003). About resentment as an important motivation for nationalism, see Liah greenfeld,
Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
11. J. samuel Barkin and Bruce Cronin, “The state and the Nation: Changing Norms and
the rules of sovereignty in International relations,” International Organizations 48 (Winter
1994): 107–30. see also stephen Krasner, ed., Problematic Sovereignty: Contested Rules and Political
Possibilities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 1–23.
12. Quoted in Arnold suppan, “Yugoslavism versus serbian, Croatian, and slovene Nationalism,”
in Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, ed. Norman M. Naimark
and Holly Case (stanford, CA: stanford University Press, 2003), 126.
13. Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania:  Regionalism, Nation Building, and
Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
14. see Timothy snyder, Bloodlands:  Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New  York:  Basic
Books, 2010).
15. For accounts of the significance of these processes of ethnic “unmixing” for the postcommunist
political and social development of the region, see rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood
and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and
Lynn Tesser, Ethnic Cleansing and the European Union: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Security,
Memory and Ethnography (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
16. see Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the
State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
17. About national ideology in romania, see Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under
Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s Romania (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1991). For the national question in Czechoslovakia, see sharon Wolchik,
Czechoslovakia in Transition: Politics, Economics, and Society (London: Pinter, 1991).
142 ZsUZsA CsErgő
18. Vojtech Mastny, “The Beneš Thesis: A Design for the Liquidation of National Minorities,
Introduction,” in The Hungarians: A Divided Nation, ed. stephen Borsody (New Haven, CT: Yale
Center for International and Area studies, 1988), 231–43.
19. Bennett Kovrig, “Peacemaking after World War II,” in The Hungarians: A Divided Nation, ed.
stephen Borsody (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Area studies, 1988), 69–88.
20. Peter siani-Davies, The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell
University Press, 2007).
21. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation:  Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in PostCommunist
Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
22. These documents include the Commission on security and Cooperation in Europe’s
(CsCE’s) Copenhagen Document (1990), also known as the European Constitution on Human
rights, which included a chapter on the protection of national minorities; the Council of Europe’s
(CE’s) European Charter on regional and Minority Languages (1992); the United Nations
Declaration on the rights of Persons Belonging to National and Ethnic, religious and Linguistic
Minorities (1992); the CE’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities
(1995), which is commonly considered a major achievement as the first legally binding international
tool for minority protection; and the Organization for security and Co-operation in
Europe’s (OsCE’s) Oslo recommendations regarding the Linguistic rights of National Minorities
(1998).
23. Aleksa Djilas, “Fear Thy Neighbor:  The Breakup of Yugoslavia,” in Nationalism and
Nationalities in the New Europe, ed. Charles Kupchan et al. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1995), 88.
24. Djilas, “Fear Thy Neighbor,” 102.
25. United Nations, The Comprehensive Proposal for Kosovo Status Settlement (New York: United
Nations Office of the special Envoy for Kosovo, March 26, 2007).
26. For different scholarly perspectives on the international consequences of Kosovo’s unilateral
declaration of independence, see the special issue titled “self-Determination after Kosovo,”
published in Europe-Asia Studies 65, no. 5 (July 2013).
27. Zsuzsa Csergo and James M. goldgeier, “Kin-state Activism in Hungary, romania, and
russia: The Politics of Ethnic Demography,” in Divided Nations and European Integration, ed.Tristan
James Mabry, John Mcgarry, Margaret Moore, and Brendan O’Leary (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press2013), 89–126.
28. For soviet language policy, see rasma Karklins, Ethnopolitics and Transition to Democracy
(Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994),
151–52.
29. graham smith et al., Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National
Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 94.
30. Julie Bernier, “Nationalism in Transition:  Nationalizing Impulses and International
Counterweights in Latvia and Estonia,” in Minority Nationalism and the Changing International
Order, ed. Michael Keating and John Mcgarry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 346.
31. rawi Abdelal, National Purpose in the World Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2001); David J. smith, “Minority rights, Multiculturalism and EU Enlargement: The Case of
Estonia,” Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 14, no. 4 (2015): 79–113; and
Zsuzsa Csergő and Ada regelmann, eds., Europeanization and Minority Political Action in Central
and Eastern Europe, special issue published in Problems of Post-Communism, 64, no. 5 (2017).
32. Judith Kelley, Ethnic Politics in Europe:  The Power of Norms and Incentives (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). For a more skeptical view of the power of this leverage, see
Bernd rechel, ed., Minority Rights in Central and Eastern Europe (London: routledge, 2009).
ETHNICITY, NATIONALIsM, AND THE CHALLENgEs 143
33. rasma Karklins, “Ethnic Integration and school Policies in Latvia,” Nationalities Papers 26,
no. 2 (1998): 284.
34. Ojarrs Kalnins, “Latvia:  The Language of Coexistence,” Transitions Online, september
1, 2004, http://www.to.cz/TOL/home; gerli Nimmerfeldt, “Integration of second generation
russians in Estonia: Country report on TIEs survey in Estonia,” Studies of Transition States and
Societies 1, no.  1 (2009):  25–35; and Tatjana Bulajeva and gabrielle Hogan-Brun, “Language
and Education Orientations in Lithuania:  A Cross-Baltic Perspective Post-EU Accession,” in
Multilingualism in Post-Soviet Countries, ed. Aneta Pavlenko (Toronto:  Multilingual Matters,
2008), 122–48.
35. Licia Cianetti, “representing Minorities in the City:  Education Policies and Minority
Incorporation in the Capital Cities of Estonia and Latvia,” Nationalities Papers 42, no.  6
(2014): 981–1001.
36. The Eastern Partnership was established in 2008 as a venue for improving the EU’s relations
with neighboring states.
37. Maria Popova and Oxana shevel, “What Doesn’t Kill Ukraine,” Foreign Policy, March
12, 2014.
38. Jenne L. schulze, Strategic Frames. Europe, Russia, and Minority Inclusion in Estonia and
Latvia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).
39. see gordon Wightman, “Czechoslovakia,” in New Political Parties of Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union, ed. Bogdan szajkowski (Detroit, MI: Longman, 1991), 67; and Jiri Musil, “Czech
and slovak society,” in The End of Czechoslovakia, ed. Jiri Musil (Budapest: Central European
University Press, 1995), 92.
40. sharon Wolchik, “The Politics of Transition and the Break-Up of Czechoslovakia,” in The
End of Czechoslovakia, ed. Jiri Musil (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995), 240–1;
and Abby Innes, “Breakup of Czechoslovakia: The Impact of Party Development on the separation
of the state,” East European Politics and Societies 11, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 393.
41. About negotiated transitions, see Juan J. Linz and Alfred stepan, Problems of Democratic
Transition and Consolidation:  Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 316.
42. Zsuzsa Csergo and Kevin Deegan-Krause, “Liberalism and Cultural Claims in Central and
Eastern Europe,” Nations and Nationalism 17, no. 1 (January 2011): 85–107.
43. Kevin Deegan-Krause, Elected Affinities: Democracy and Party Competition in Slovakia and
the Czech Republic (stanford, CA: stanford University Press, 2006).
44. The primary force behind national exclusivist policies was the slovak National Party, which
exerted pressure on the main governing party, Movement for a Democratic slovakia. see Tim
Haughton, “Vladimír Mečiar and His role in the 1994–1998 slovak Coalition government,”
Europe-Asia Studies 54, no. 8 (2002): 1319–38.
45. For the history of the interwar period, see Joseph rothschild, East Central Europe between
the Two World Wars (seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974).
46. Zsuzsa Csergo, Talk of the Nation: Language and Conflict in Romania and Slovakia (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).
47. Tamás Kiss and István székely, “shifting Linkages in Ethnic Mobilization: The Case of
rMDsZ and the Hungarians in Transylvania.” Nationalities Papers 44, no. 4 (2016): 591–610.
48. Brubaker, Nationalism reframed.
49. szabolcs Pogonyi, Extra-Territorial Ethnic Politics, Discourses and Identities in Hungary
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
50. Zsuzsa Csergo and James M. goldgeier, “Nationalist strategies and European Integration,”
Perspectives on Politics 2 (March 2004): 26.
144 ZsUZsA CsErgő
51. Zoltán Kántor et  al., eds., The Hungarian Status Law:  Nation Building and/or Minority
Protection (sapporo, Japan: slavic research Center, 2004); and Myra Waterbury, Between State
and Nation: Diaspora Politics and Kin-State Nationalism in Hungary (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010).
52. András L. Pap, Democratic Decline in Hungary: Law and Society in an Illiberal Democracy
(Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2017).
53. see Report on the Preferential Treatment of National Minorities by Their Kin-State (adopted
by the Venice Committee at its forty-eighth plenary meeting, Venice, October 19–20, 2001),
http://assembly.coe.int/AsP/Doc/XrefViewHTML.asp?FileID=10094&Language=EN (accessed
August 25, 2014).