What role does religion play in migration processes? What is the reason behind migration of religious minorities? Is religious affiliation a deciding factor in choosing emigration? Some of these questions have been the focus of The Untold Journey of the Nazarene Emigration from Yugoslavia to North America. As the field of migration history is very broad both chronologically and geographically, Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović focuses on the migration of religious minorities triggered by state repression and the socio-historical context of post-Second World War Yugoslavia. The history and development of the Nazarene communities is analyzed through the lens of religiously motivated persecution and migration from Yugoslavia to North America. The Nazarenes, known as Apostolical Christian Church (Nazarene) in North America, represents a fascinating case study which bring new insights into policies towards minority religions during the communist era, migration patterns, and integration mechanisms in the host country. This book is applicable to contemporary forced migration contexts and to the role of religious communities in supporting the integration of refugees and migrants across the world. The reasons for fleeing, migration paths, and routes, life in the refugee camps and settling into the new society are present in the narratives of present-day refugees and migrants fleeing from conflict or religious intolerance across the globe.

This book examines the relationship between nationalism and the rise and fall of Yugoslavia under the rule of Josip Broz Tito. It deals particularly with the interactions between communist and intellectual elites. The authors analyze elites’ initial enthusiasm about the Yugoslav federation and how, with time, they found themselves unable to suppress the nationalists in Yugoslavia. Other scholars have argued that, in a certain sense, Tito’s Yugoslavia proved to be a “hatchery” for the nations that once constituted Yugoslavia, making them ever closer to “completeness.” However, as the authors highlight in this study, this process was one of conflict. The personal role of Tito as an arbiter was essential, although, for the majority of his time in power, he did not act as a dictator. His departure was strongly felt in the 1980s, when ethnic entrepreneurial activity began to flourish—and when ethnic and political relations had gone out of control. While a significant part of this book follows the chronology of ethnic elite interaction in communist Yugoslavia, the global context of Yugoslavia’s rise and fall is taken into account. The authors also use Yugoslavia as a case study to test the validity of nationalism studies more generally.

Charts the transnational story of Romanian Germans in modern Europe - their migration, their position as a minority, and their memories.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Southeastern Europe became a prime sending region of emigrants to overseas countries, in particular the United States. This massive movement of people ended in 1914 but remained consequential long thereafter, as emigration had created networks, memories, and attitudes that shaped social and political practices in Southeastern Europe long after the emigrants had left. This book’s main concern is to reconstruct the political and socioeconomic impact of emigration on Southeastern Europe. In contrast to migration studies’ traditional focus on immigration, this book concentrates on the sending countries. The author provides a comparative analysis of the socioeconomic causes and consequences of emigration and argues that migrant networks and emulation effects were crucial for the persistence of migration inclinations. It also brings the state back in the emigration story and discusses political responses towards emigration by governments in the region before 1914. Emigration policy became closely aligned with nation-building and social engineering. These stances continued even after emigration had subsided: interwar Yugoslavia, which is studied in detail, tried to create a Yugoslav “diaspora” in America by turning emigrants from its territory into expatriate citizens. Hence, a nationalizing state exploited transnational linkages. The book closes with the emigration policies of communist Yugoslavia until the early 1960s,when experiments and experiences of the government were crucial for its eventual decision to liberalize labor migration to the West (the only communist government to do so). A paramount reason for this was the fact that emigrants, both as a place of memory and a source of remittances, continued to be significant. This book therefore presents emigration as a complex social phenomenon that requires a multifaceted historical approach in order to reveal the effects of migration on different temporal and spatial scales.

In Art Work, Katja Praznik counters the Western understanding of art – as a passion for self-expression and an activity done out of love, without any concern for its financial aspects – and instead builds a case for understanding art as a form of invisible labour. Focusing on the experiences of art workers and the history of labour regulation in the arts in socialist Yugoslavia, Praznik helps elucidate the contradiction at the heart of artistic production and the origins of the mystification of art as labour. This profoundly interdisciplinary book highlights the Yugoslav socialist model of culture as the blueprint for uncovering the interconnected aesthetic and economic mechanisms at work in the exploitation of artistic labour. It also shows the historical trajectory of how policies toward art and artistic labour changed by the end of the 1980s. Calling for a fundamental rethinking of the assumptions behind Western art and exploitative labour practices across the world, Art Work will be of interest to scholars in East European studies, art theory, and cultural policy, as well as to practicing artists.

Why do nations come into conflict? What factors lead to the horrors of ethnic cleansing? This timely book offers clear-eyed answers to these questions by exploring how national identity is shaped by place, focusing especially on Serbia, Hungary, and Romania. Moving beyond studies of nationalism that consider only the economic and geostrategic value of territory, George W. White shows that the very core of national identity is intimately bound to specific places. Indeed, nations define themselves in terms of spaces that have historical, linguistic, and religious meaning, as Serbs have clearly demonstrated in Kosovo. These territories are concrete expressions of a nationAIs identity, both past and present. With his detailed analysis of the places that define national identity in Southeastern Europe, White convincingly shows why territorial disputes so often escalate into war.

After World War II, some 12 million Germans, 3 million Poles and Ukrainians, and tens of thousands of Hungarians were expelled from their homes and forced to migrate to their supposed countries of origin. Using freshly available materials from Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Czechoslovak, German, British, and American archives, the contributors to this book provide a sweeping, detailed account of the turmoil caused by the huge wave of forced migration during the nascent Cold War. The book also documents the deep and lasting political, social, and economic consequences of this traumatic time, raising difficult questions about the effect of forced migration on postwar reconstruction, the rise of Communism, and the growing tensions between Western Europe and the Eastern bloc. Those interested in European Cold-War history will find this book indispensable for understanding the profound--but hitherto little known--upheavals caused by the massive ethnic cleansing that took place from 1944 to 1948.

The political map of Eastern Europe changed dramatically in December 1991 when the leaders of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine huddled together in a Bielavieza Forest retreat and decided to dissolve the 15 union republics, which composed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). One of those republics was the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). A United Nations member since 1945, Belarus has a rich cultural heritage that is seen as a promising base for the development of a solid national identity and for real independence. It is this cultural heritage and sense of history that nourish the ongoing efforts of the nationalist minority, as well as the larger democratic opposition, to resist the regime of President Alaksandr Luka?enka who is bent on restoring ties to Russia. Thus Belarus, with its burdens of the past and potential for the future, finds itself in a struggle that will affect not only its own destiny, but also the international structure of Eastern Europe. The A to Z of Belarus—through its chronology, introductory essays, appendixes, map, bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on important persons, places, events, and institutions and significant political, economic, social, and cultural aspects—traces Belarus' history and provides a compass for the direction the country is heading.

Dark Finance offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of financial expansion and its political impacts in Eastern Europe. Following workers, managers, and investors in the Macedonian construction sector, Fabio Mattioli shows how financialization can empower authoritarian regimes—not by making money accessible to everyone, but by allowing a small group of oligarchs to monopolize access to international credit and promote a cascade of exploitative domestic debt relations. The landscape of failed deals and unrealizable dreams that is captured in this book portrays finance not as a singular, technical process. Instead, Mattioli argues that finance is a set of political and economic relations that entangles citizens, Eurocrats, and workers in tense paradoxes. Mattioli traces the origins of illiquidity in the reorganization of the European project and the postsocialist perversion of socialist financial practices—a dangerous mix that hid the Macedonian regime's weakness behind a façade of urban renewal and, for a decade, made it seem omnipresent and invincible. Dark Finance chronicles how, one bad deal at a time, Macedonia's authoritarian regime rode a wave of financial expansion that deepened its reach into Macedonian society, only to discover that its domination, like all speculative bubbles, was teetering on the verge of collapse.

The Republic of Moldova claims a European lineage reaching back in time long before its 14th century accession to statehood. In the 15th century, it managed against all odds to avoid being conquered by Islam and_albeit an intermittent vassal after 1485_it maintained its autonomy and was never turned into a province of the Ottoman Empire. After this period, however, Moldova would not be so fortunate, as it altered between Russian, Romanian, and Soviet control until it finally gained its independence in 1991 from the Soviet Union. The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Moldova, through its chronology, introduction, appendixes, maps, bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on important persons, places, events, and institutions and significant political, economic, social, and cultural aspects, traces the history of this small, but densely populated country, providing a compass for the direction it is heading.