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The Post-Communist Diaspora Laws: Beyond the "Good Civic versus Bad Ethnic" Nationalism Dichotomy

Shevel, O. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:34:24 PST

In the 1990s, a number of post-Communist states adopted diaspora laws that defined the target group ethno-culturally, thus seemingly confirming the continued relevance of Hans Kohn’s distinction between ethnic eastern and civic Western nationalism. This article, however, posits that while Kohn’s dichotomy may be valid, its related implications are often not. The ethnic content of the diaspora laws, and the content of ethnic nationalism behind them, is much more nuanced, and not all ethnically tinted diaspora polices are discriminatory or otherwise contrary to international standards. Using the case of the 2001 Hungarian Status Law and the European organizations’ reaction to it, the first part of the article draws attention to the often neglected fact that international standards do not ban ethnically based policies altogether but allow for some distinctions in treatment based on ethno-cultural criteria. The second part of the article focuses on the case of Ukraine and further challenges the accuracy of the civic-ethnic dichotomy by showing how the politics of the Ukrainian diaspora law was driven not by a clash between civic and ethnic nationalism but by a more complex tension between different variants of ethnic nationalism, a neo-Soviet imperial vision, strategic bargaining, and changes in electoral fortunes for unrelated reasons. The Ukrainian case also shows how, in addition to international norm diffusion, another—and rather counterintuitive—path towards internationally compliant diaspora legislation may be the presence of substantial domestic divisions on the national issue, which forces the elites to compromise on a less ethnic law.

Fascism under Pressure: Influence of Marxist Discourse on the Ideological Redefinition of the Croatian Fascist Movement 1941-1944

Antic, A. — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:34:25 PST

This article analyzes how the ideological discourse of the Croatian fascist movement (the Ustasa) evolved in the course of World War II under pressures of the increasingly popular and powerful communist armed resistance. It explores and interprets the way the regime formulated its ideological responses to the political/ideological challenge of the leftist guerrilla and its propaganda in the period after the proclamation of the Ustasa Independent State of Croatia in 1941 until the end of the war. The author demonstrates that the regime, faced with its own political weakness and inability to maintain authority, shaped its rhetoric and ideological self-definition in a direct dialogue with the Marxist discourse of the communist propaganda, incorporating important Marxist concepts in its theory of state and society and redefining its concepts of national boundaries and racial identity to match the communists’ propaganda of inclusive, civic national Yugoslavism. This massive ideological renegotiation of the movement’s basic tenets and its consequent leftward shift reflected a change in an opposite direction from the one commonly encountered in narratives of other fascisms’ ideological evolution paths (most notably in Italy and Germany): as the movement became a regime, the Ustasa transformed from its initial conservatism, traditionalism (in both sociopolitical and cultural matters), pseudo-feudal worldview of peasant worship and antiurbanism, anti-Semitism, and rigid racialism in relation to nation and state into an ideology of increasingly inclusive, culture-based, and nonethnic nationalism and with an exceptionally strong leftist rhetoric of social welfare, class struggle, and the rights of the working class.

The Italian Role in the Construction of the Concept "Pole-Catholic"

Jurek, L. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:13:19 PDT

In considering the concept of "Pole-Catholic," it might well be asked not if it had real grounds but in what circumstances it was constructed. although the Polish national identity in its current shape was "Catholicized" mostly in the twentieth century, the previous age—the nineteenth century—as a time of constant struggle for political independence has been regarded as having the most formative effect on Polish national imagination. This article discusses an important moment in the construction of the concept "Pole-Catholic." It shows that far before the idea of Roman Dmowski (from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), who claimed that only a Catholic was a good Pole, the strong identification of Polish nationalism with Catholicism had been insistently articulated by Polish conservative groups. The discourse of the Catholic Polish nation appeared in (and even dominated) the debate on the Italian Risorgimento. Between 1848 and 1871, discussing the Italian–papal conflict, the conservatives created their religious programme for Poland and took advantage of the popularity of the Italian national movement among Poles to promote it in their writings. Their equation of Polishness with Catholicism appeared to leave a strong trace in the formation of the Polish identity and continues to inform the way in which Poles are perceived nowadays.