Twice in this century, Central and Eastern Europe have undergone a massive and concentrated reconfiguration of political space along national lines. In the first phase of this reconfiguration (which actually began in the nineteenth century), the crumbling of the great “traditional” multinational land empires – the prolonged decay of the Ottoman Empire and the sudden collapse, in the First World War, of the Habsburg and Romanov empires – left in its wake a broad north-south belt of new states in East Central Europe, stretching from the Baltic littoral to the Balkan peninsula. In the second phase, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia and the emergence of some twenty new states in their stead have resulted in the nationalization of political space on a much vaster scale, extending from Central and Eastern Europe eastward across the entire breadth of Eurasia. Like the nationalizing settlement that followed the First World War, the most recent reconfiguration of political space along ostensibly national lines has conspicuously failed to “solve” the region's longrefractory national question. Yet while nationalist tensions have not been resolved, they have been restructured. This chapter addresses this new phase and form of the national question, focusing on the triadic nexus linking national minorities, nationalizing states, and external national “homelands,” and illustrating its dynamically interactive quality with a discussion of the breakup of Yugoslavia.
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