National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External National Homelands in the New Europe: Notes toward a Relational Analysis

Abstract: Nationalism remains central to politics in and among the new nation-states. Far from "solving" the region's national question, the most recent reconfiguration of political space - the replacement of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia by some twenty would-be nation-states - only recast it in a new form. It is this new phase and form of the national question that I explore in this paper. I begin by outlining a particular relational configuration - the triadic relational nexus between national minorities, nationalizing states, and external national homelands - that is central to the national question in post-Soviet Eurasia. In the second, and most substantial, section of the paper, I argue that each of the "elements" in this relational nexus - minority, nationalizing state, and homeland - should itself be understood in dynamic and relational terms, not as a fixed, given, or analytically irreducible entity but as a field of differentiated positions and an arena of struggles among competing "stances". In a brief concluding section, I return to the relational nexus as a whole, underscoring the dynamically interactive quality of the triadic interplay.;