In 2018, David Laitin and Pål Kolstø engaged in a discussion at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Nationalities held at Columbia University, New York. The panel was a 20-year retrospective on Identity in Formation: the Russian-speaking populations in the Near Abroad (Laitin 1998).

By examining social media interactions, the analysis that is presented in this article reveals how hashtags are adeptly used to reframe the lithium mining issue, embedding it within wider narratives. The article investigates narratives surrounding lithium mining protests in Serbia, using digital ethnography and narrative analysis to study the discourse of ecology activists on the social platform X (formerly known as Twitter). It illuminates the fluid, rhizomatic, and puzzle-like nature of hashtags that helps to achieve online visibility, mobilize audiences for street protests, and appear as narrative building blocks. Hashtags operate as algorithmic signifiers that create additional layers of meaning and fine-tune narratives toward either the left or right side of the political spectrum. This article focuses on how activists use hashtags not just as tools for categorizing content but also as essential components in shaping their narratives. This approach reveals the dynamic engagement of a broad political spectrum in the lithium mining debate, forging connections between different actors. The analysis demonstrates how interconnected hashtags modulate the narratives so that they can transgress from the right to the left side of the political spectrum, indicating that lithium mining is a global rather than a local problem.

This article deals with the confiscation of property from the German-speaking inhabitants of Czechoslovakia and its redistribution to the new settlers of the Czech borderlands. It shows how the social revolution—that is, the emergence of an egalitarian postwar society—was made possible by the national revolution—that is, the expulsion of the German-speaking inhabitants of Central Europe. Using the example of the industrial center of Liberec in northern Bohemia, the author shows how the Czech administration that was established after the Second World War applied the dichotomy of the Czech–German conflict to an ethnically complex postwar society and how, despite the ideology of distributing property to the “Slavs,” non-Czech minorities were discriminated against with respect to redistribution. Eventually, she analyzes how postwar Czechoslovak society was shaped, with an emphasis on the material demands of workers and collectives, even as individuals sought to achieve a middle-class lifestyle through participation in property distribution.

This article analyzes the key factors behind the securitization of Ukraine’s small ethnic Hungarian minority in recent years and how they affect local interethnic as well as interstate relations. It draws on elite interviews conducted in the Ukrainian-Hungarian borderland, and other sources including speech acts. Four underlying factors were identified. The first two are Hungary’s kin-state aid and dual citizenship law, which have empowered Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarians, with the community appearing larger and potentially more threatening in the eyes of the majority population than its mere size justifies. The other two factors are Ukraine’s language policy and Transcarpathia’s future being subject of conspiracy theories in light of Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine, which have negatively affected interethnic ties, although somewhat less in the borderland than between Hungary and Ukraine at large. In Transcarpathia, our different informants had diverging perceptions of who is stirring tensions but agreed that actors from outside their region were to blame. Overall, what has emerged is a clash of Hungary’s kin-state politics and Ukraine’s nation-state-building efforts. The article ends with more general implications for kin- and host-state relations in times of conflict.

The aim of the article is to analyse, in a diachronic perspective, the street names in today’s Berlin whose bases are geographical names referring to places in contemporary Poland. The analysis reveals a purposeful city-text that supports the nation-building narrative: either by mapping the state’s actual geography at the moment of the name’s bestowal, or by including the territories claimed (literally or metaphorically), beyond the current borders at the time of the naming. However, the degree to which these street names and the intention behind them are decipherable today remains questionable. Once meaningful for their original creators, today they are partly or completely semantically oblique to the general public, as evidenced by their contemporary reception.

This article examines the unexpected revival of Rodina (Motherland), a nationalist party that had been suppressed in 2006 for its embrace of “orangist,” anti-Putin politics. Five years later, Rodina was relaunched in response to the crisis of the Medvedev–Putin “tandemocracy.” This article shows that Rodina played a central role in the Kremlin’s “managed nationalism,” which sought to direct the energies of Russian nationalists into loyalist channels. In particular, it illuminates three ways that Rodina facilitated collaboration between nationalists and the regime. First, it helped to integrate nationalists into the All-Russia Popular Front, the umbrella structure that was created as a vehicle for Putin’s return to the presidency. Second, it served as a counterrevolutionary force by drawing nationalists from the “white ribbon” protest movement into two Kremlin-supported initiatives: the “conservative turn” and a media campaign against non-Slavic immigration. And third, it acted as a proxy for the Russian state during the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in southeast Ukraine, recruiting nationalists to serve as separatists and cultivating the support of European radical nationalists. In these three ways, Rodina contributed both to Russia’s autocratization and to the growing influence of nationalist ideas in public discourse.

Our article describes the lifecycle of Lithuania’s Electoral Action of Poles–Christian Families Alliance (LLRA-KŠS) party that has been a part of country’s political landscape for near 30 years. Despite its seemingly ethnic program, the party has a poor track record for delivering on its electoral promises. Yet, it has been continuously supported by the majority of Polish-speakers in Lithuania. The background of the nationalizing state, which encourages the party elites to conflate substantive representation with the signposting of ethnic identity in party politics, offers one of the reasons for the LLRA-KŠS’s electoral success. Although the party effectively consolidated its regional electorate, it came to control service delivery to their ethnic constituency by engaging in pork barrel politics. Poor performance in recent national and municipal elections put this strategy to bond with its voters into question, casting doubt on the LLRA-KŠS’s ability to survive as an ethnic party in the long term.

This article focuses on the use of banal nationalism outside of the realm of formal politics. I examine several cases of major airports renaming in the Balkans, aiming to uncover distinctive logic behind the state introduction of nationalism in the ostensibly non-political domain. Based on the intended audience (domestic/international) and the chosen commemorative name (accepted/contested), I uncover two paths to banal nationalism: (1) internationally-oriented nation branding and (2) domestically-oriented memorialization. The analysis shows that the same action of renaming the airport can be normalized and taken for granted as assumed by the banal nationalism literature, or it can remain highly visible and disputed, leading to high-profile “hot” nationalism, indicating the failure of banalization. This article calls for more investigation of nationalism in everyday spaces that are not part of formal state domain and politics.

Following Max Weber’s emphasis on a fundamental change in ethical values behind the modern capitalistic economy, this paper offers an ideational explanation for China’s economic modernization since 1978. It argues that China’s economic reform, which first and foremost changed the official rhetoric about profit-making, endowed the economic preoccupations of ordinary people with a special dignity. Since then, the Chinese masses have been allowed to proudly connect their personal prosperity with China’s national wealth and international status. This dignifying connection, in turn, led them to invest in sustaining the growth of their personal prosperity and national wealth. In other words, it converted the Chinese masses to economic nationalism that prioritized economic development as the chief means for the achievement of China’s glory. The conversion of the Chinese masses to economic nationalism marked the Chinese society’s reorientation to “the spirit of capitalism,” hence China’s economic modernization.

Slovak national communism as a specific approach to the problem of Czech-Slovak relations gained a significant position within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia soon after its establishment in 1921. This article analyzes the foundations of this phenomenon and the evolving attitudes of the first generation of Slovak communist intellectuals and Party functionaries. The article’s primary focus is on the Slovak communists’ views regarding the official state doctrine of a unified Czechoslovak nation, Czech-Slovak relations, and the issue of Slovak autonomy. The study highlights the significant external influences, particularly the directives of the Communist International and the pre-existing national stereotypes, that shaped the worldview and nationalist tendencies of Slovak communists.

In the Spanish region of Galicia, immediately north of Portugal, the Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG) has achieved unprecedented electoral success, emerging as a prominent nationalist force within the Spanish political landscape. This study analyzes the discursive and performative repertoires employed by Galician nationalism and explores how the prevalent dual national identity in the region shapes these strategies. Reversing Brubaker’s theoretical framework and using framing and visual analysis, we compare the BNG’s strategies during two different institutional settings: its time in government (2005–2009) and its role leading the opposition (2020–2023). The findings reveal the failure of Galician nationalism to nationalize identity when in power, as policies aimed at promoting Galician identity generated a backlash and, ultimately, produced frame dealignment between the nationalists and the Galician people. The new BNG presents a social project based on the defense of Galician interests and the moderation of the nationalist discourse. It successfully accomplishes frame alignment by adapting to the non-conflictive, dual national identity shared by most Galicians while proposing an inclusive political style.

Based on the discursive analysis of 28 semidirected interviews conducted in the small industrial town of Martfű, this article reflects on the role played by nationalism in the construction of political and cultural hegemony by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling party since 2010. The ten themes mobilised by the respondents to express their vision of the Hungarian nation (identification, belonging, commitment, transmission, territory, uniqueness/fragility, heterogeneity/homogeneity, unity/division, east/west, and insubordination) and the issues attached to them (relationship to Hungarian minorities of neighbouring countries, relationship to the European Union, immigration, etc.) are paralleled with Fidesz’s discourse. On those subjects, Orbán’s party’s nationalism positions itself in a “central” way, managing to incarnate heterogeneous conceptions of the nation that are shared among this research’s respondents by Fidesz as well as non-Fidesz voters.