Culture, Memory, Context: Reenactments of Traumatic Histories in Europe and Eurasia

In this article, I discuss what I term “Jewface” minstrelsy performance and “Jewfaçade” display in three contemporary contexts with highly divergent historical backgrounds: East-Central Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Jewish Autonomous Republic, a fictitious-sounding but real colony established by Stalin in far eastern Russia near China and still extant today. Jewface encompasses music, dance, theater, and extra-theatrical modes of performance, in which non-Jews dress up and act like “Jews,” as historically imagined; Jewfaçade encompasses museum-type installations, as well as architectural and decorative constructions, depicting imagined “Jewish” life. These “Diaspora Disneys” vary from the education- and tolerance-oriented to the crassly exploitative and commercial to the bizarrely confused. None have much to do with actual Jews, but all convey a tremendous amount regarding dominant “host” cultures’ anxieties over not only their roles in past persecution and genocide but also their own present cultures, politics, and positions in the wider world today. Further, they present a wide array of models of memoriological projection and desire, in what I explicate as spectra of “plethoric” to “voidic” memoriological scenarios and “negotiatory” to “constitutory” memoriological strategies.     

The environment,security and regional cooperation in Central Asia

Environmental challenges, resulting from either a scarcity of natural resources or environmental degradation, may contribute to security risks in Central Asia. An encouraging sign is the recent attention of the governments of Central Asia, civil society groups and international organizations to these environmental security issues. Their efforts indicate that by working together to prevent conflicts caused by environmental problems, cooperation among the countries of Central Asia may expand. Both short and long-term obstacles must be overcome if these groups are to ensure that environmental stresses do not lead to security concerns.     

National and regional technology policies in the USA,Japan and Western Europe

State Policies and Techno‐Industrial Innovation. Edited by Ulrich Hilpert. Routledge, 1991. Pp. 372. £40 hb.

Regional Innovation and Decentralisation: high tech industry and government policy. Edited by Ulrich Hilpert. Routledge, 1991. Pp. 331. £40 hb.     

Russia,Europe and the Ontological Security Dilemma: Narrating the Emerging Eurasian Space

Abstract

The aim of this essay is twofold. First, it seeks to examine how Russia and the European Union understand the emerging Eurasian space. We will do this by looking at how the two narrate the space, the use of power and each other. Second, we want to argue that the narratives at the heart of the conceptual and normative maps that guide their actions and behaviour create an essentially ontological security dilemma; that is, behaviour aimed primarily at enhancing confidence in the identity and continuity of a political community threatens the ontological security of other actors.     

Montenegro,NATO and the divided society

In this paper we are investigating the political and social effects of Montenegro joining NATO. This issue is highly controversial and follows the political divisions in Montenegro, which motivated us to apply social cleavage theory. As method, we applied logistic regression clustered for standard error. We found that besides socio-demographic variables (ethnic division between Montenegrins and Serbs), the main line of the cleavage indicated by support of, or opposition to NATO membership falls along the issues of the independence of Montenegro, its relationship with the EU vs. Russia, as well as the attitude toward political power and party identification.     

Introduction to the special section: minority politics and the territoriality principle in Europe

Territorial arrangements for managing inter-ethnic relations within states are far from consensual. Although self-governance for minorities is commonly advocated, international documents are ambiguously formulated. Conflicting pairs of principles, territoriality vs. personality, and self-determination vs. territorial integrity, along with diverging state interests account for this gap. Together, the articles in this special section address the territoriality principle and its hardly operative practice on the ground, with particular attention to European cases. An additional theme reveals itself in the articles: the ambiguity of minority recognition politics. This introductory article briefly presents these two common themes, followed by an outline of three recent proposals discussed especially in Eastern Europe that seek to bypass the controversial territorial autonomy model: cultural rights in municipalities with a “substantial” proportion of minority members; the cultural autonomy model; and European regionalism and multi-level governance.     

Striking the federal bargain in Russia: comparative regional government strategies

The central research goals of this article are to classify and explain the positions of the 89 state “governors” of Russia with regard to the most desirable federal division of power. The state governors are classified along a 5-item autonomy index based on events data and content analysis of their speeches, declarations, petitions, threats and actions from 1991–1995 as reported in two regional sources. Theoretical propositions derived from four schools of thought (essentialism, instrumentalism, relative deprivation and resource mobilization) are tested to discover which, if any, provide useful insights into the preferences and behavior of regional elites in Russia. In the end, a combined model that synthesizes elements of the above is shown to be most useful in explaining variation in elite positions.