After the conflagration of Tito’s Yugoslavia a medley of new and not-so-new states rose from the ashes. Some of the Yugoslav successor states have joined, or are about to enter, the European Union, while others are still struggling to define their national borders, symbols, and relationships with neighbouring states. Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe expands upon the existing body of nationalism studies and explores how successful these nation-building strategies have been in the last two decades. Relying on new quantitative research results, the contributors offer interdisciplinary analyses of symbolic nation-building in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia to show that whereas the citizens of some states have reached a consensus about the nation-building project other states remain fragmented and uncertain of when the process will end. A must-read not only for scholars of the region but policy makers and others interested in understanding the complex interplay of history, symbolic politics, and post-conflict transition.

The volume focuses on politics of symbolization across Central and Eastern Europe understood as complex spaces of semiosis. Politics of symbolization affects the semantics of identities and power relations between various subjects, and encompasses the changing meanings of social spaces, times, as well as modalities of collective memory.

The book is the result of the National Science Centre’s project entitled ‘Social engineering. Projects of nation-state building and their representation in historiography and historical memory: Croatia, Germany, Poland and Ukraine in the twentieth century’. The project was conducted at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). The aim of the participants in the project, developed jointly by the Department of German Studies and the Department of History of Eastern Territories, was to provide a broad perspective on nation-building processes in Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to determine the place of projects on population policy (social engineering) in these processes. The authors also analyse the role of the memory of these projects in developing nation states in this region of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century and contemporary times. The subjects analysed cover a broad spectrum of issues related to the emergence of modern states, demography, eugenics, racial hygiene, statistics, geography and specific policies – from supporting the birth of preferred groups to genocide. The book concerns both the development of modern societies and the problems of nationalism, racial ideology and the idea of ‘the body of the nation’.

What shapes the cultural, political and ideological values of young people living in Southeastern Europe? Which identities matter to them? How are their values changing, and how can they be changed? Who is changing them? Europe’s periphery is the testing ground for the success of European values and identities. The future stability and political coherence of the Union will be determined in large measure by identity issues in this region. This book examines the ways in which ethnic and national values and identities have been surpassed as the overriding focus in the lives of the region’s youth. Employing bottom-up, ethnographic, and interview-based approaches, it explores when and where ethnic and national identification processes become salient. Using intra-national and international comparisons of youth populations of Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia, contributors uncover the mechanisms by which ethnic identities are evoked, reproduced and challenged. In addition to exploring political, regional cultural generational and class identities, the contributors examine wider questions of European unity. This volume offers a corrective to previous thinking about youth ethnic identities and will prove useful to scholars in political science and sociology studying issues of ethnic and national identities and nationalism, as well as youth cultures and identities.

The book elaborates the political role of selected South Eastern European Diasporas in contemporary processes of nation building. The diasporic communities of former Yugoslavia are in the author's focus.

This edited volume examines how metaphors and related phenomena (metonymies, symbols, cultural models, stereotypes) lead to the discursive construal of a common element that brings the nation together. The central idea is that metaphor use must be questioned to lay bare the processes and the discursive power behind them. The chapters examine a range of contemporary and historical, monomodal and multimodal discourses, including politicians’ discourse, presidential speeches, newspapers, TV series, Catholic homilies, colonialist discourse, and various online sources. The approaches taken include political science, international relations, cultural studies, and linguistics. All contributions feature discursive constructivist views of metaphor, with clear sociocultural grounding, and the notion of metaphor as a framing device in constructing various aspects of nations and national identity. The volume will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, metaphor studies, media studies, nationalism studies, and political science.