Nationalism, Eastern Europe.

This guide charts national histories and policies, relevant statistics and chronologies, and the identities, programmes, and activities of the full spectrum of ethnically-based parties and organizations in Central and Eastern Europe.

This collection analyzes the clash of relatively small nationalities with the great empires of the last two hundred years: the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, Germany, and the Soviet Union. In light of events since 1989, the volume considers the many nationalisms, political, civic, ethnic, to which this region of Europe has given rise.

With the upsurge of nationalist sentiment in post-communist societies, the problem of political rights for ethnic minorities became a dangerous flashpoint. The introduction of electoral competition, the rewriting of constitutions, the breakup of federations, the weakness of civic institutions, and the social and economic dislocations associated with marketization have all contributed to the salience of majority-minority relations. This collection systematically analyzes different models of minority politics in Eastern Europe, in an effort to understand why tensions are manageable in some contexts, uncontainable in others. Anchoring the volume are essays by Carlos Flores Juberias on electoral systems, and Janusz Bugajski on national minority parties. Six case studies examine the interaction of different types of institutional arrangements (which structure political participation) and different demographic conditions (ethnic balances and territorial concentrations) in Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, and Romania. Framing these studies are overviews by the editors and by Jack Snyder.

Ethnicity and ethnic parties have often been portrayed as a threat to political stability. This book challenges the notion that the organization of politics in heterogeneous societies should overcome ethnicity. Rather, descriptive representation of ethnic groups has potential to increase regime support and reduce conflict.

This is the first volume in which the fate of democracy is directly related to ethnic diversity. It highlights the crucial episodes in modern European political history, and shows in what sense ethnic diversity was of vital importance.

This volume provides a cross-national analysis of the changing identities of various national and ethnic groups, their new political influence in the emergent democracies and their efforts to revive suppressed cultures. It begins with a theoretical analysis of the concepts of national identity and ethnicity. It features case studies of contemporary Belarussian, Polish and Ukrainian national identities before turning to a study of Eastern Europe's hidden ethnic minorities, like the Finno-Ugric peoples in Russia, the Lemkos in Poland and the Gypsies in Bulgaria.