At the beginning of his political career, Count Kuno Klebelsberg, the remarkable future Hungarian Minister of Culture and Education of the 1920s, prepared a statement on emigration from Hungary for Prime Minister Kálmán Széll in 1902. “[W]e must correct a great and general mistake, that might unfortunately lead to disappointment,” Klebelsberg warned the PM. “Unwilling to make a distinction among people from the point of view of nationality, we call everybody residing in Hungary a Hungarian. This is how it became fashionable to speak of 'the emigration of Hungarians' when emigration was discussed, giving the general public, unaccustomed to making distinctions, the mistaken belief that we are talking about the emigration of Hungarians who speak the native tongue. This is why the return of the emigrants and corresponding official arrangements are demanded. The case is different, however. The two largest contingents contributing to the [“Hungarian”] emigration are Slovaks and Ruthenes.”

Economic nationalism was an important element of political conflict between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia. As the Czechs developed their own (avowedly national) industrial and financial base, they not only competed with the Germans in an economic sense, but they also challenged German Bohemians' prominence in business associations and in local and provincial government. While the Czechs embraced an “optimism of work,” German Bohemians felt a need to defend their economic superiority.

The study of politics is popular in Russian history; the examination of Russian politics in its regions is not, at least, not yet. The spectrum of interpretations about autocratic politics includes the parading of litanies of imperial arbitrariness and/or manipulation of interest groups against each other, incidents of ministerial incapacity to restrain the autocrat, examples of the inordinate power of favorites, the failure to establish regularizing institutions that would restrain autocrats, and a series of interesting categories including such wonderfully suggestive terms as “free floaters” proposed in Alfred Rieber's important article on the subject. Whether one is wedded to the notion that tsars decided all in the nineteenth century, or advocate some scheme that emphasizes the plurality of conflicting interests at play in decisionmaking, however, the pattern of scholarly production suggests that regional politics has been of secondary importance, and that in any event documentation often is lacking; in short, such approaches are not seen as ideal lines of inquiry. This article seeks to make a contribution to the debate about the politics of autocrats by examining a localized question where documentation is rather complete and where ministerial/bureaucratic lines may be traced fairly closely, in an attempt to shed added light on Russia's leadership in a time of great crisis, specifically the aftermath of the humiliating defeat in the Crimean War and the tension surrounding the preparations and implementation of the Emancipation and other reforms. To be specific as well as anticipatory, it is argued that there are regional questions of great national, indeed international, importance to autocrats, that the Caucasus was so recognized in the post-Crimean War period, and that those involved in the region affected policy decisions in ways that rivaled, as well as displaced, senior officials in the capital.

In 1919, Polish nationalist forces led by Josef Pilsudski succeeded in re-establishing an independent Polish state. Poland had disappeared from the map of Europe in 1794 following the third partition. It had been devoured by its traditional enemies; Prussia, Austria and Russia. Historically, Poland had been a state without fixed borders, and via a combination of changing dynastic alliances and a pattern of eastward migration, from the twelfth century formerly Slav areas east of the rivers Oder and Neisse became progressively germanicized. By 1921, following the end of World War I, several peace conferences, and after a series of referenda in disputed (former) German areas and a series of wars with all of its neighbors, including an especially successfully prosecuted war against the embryonic Soviet Union, the new state had managed to become a state which incorporated virtually all ethnic Poles. However, in addition to incorporating the overwhelming majority of ethnic Poles, the borders of the new Polish state also included huge numbers of other ethnic, religious and national groups.

In a famous article during the Soviet period, Walker Connor once asked, rhetorically:

A direct consequence of World War I was the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the establishment of new states in its place. This has had far-reaching consequences for both regional and world politics. The existing balance of power as well as social, economic and political problems within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, including the nationality conflicts, led to this result. In spite of the unavoidable collapse, the successors, the new states, were not the result of a natural evolution, but were the creations of the major powers—France, Great Britain, the United States and Italy—who through the creation of their new post-war order ignored the long-term interests of the region and the actual ethnic composition of the land.

Die Geschichte der deutsch-ukrainischen Beziehungen seit dem Ersten Weltkrieg ist nicht unkompliziert. Mit der deutschen Unkenntnis über die Ukraine paarten sich vom Militär und dem Auswärtigen Amt vertretene Ausbeutungsabsichten, die nur wenig verstellt eine Kolonisierung der Ukraine anstrebten. Ihnen standen bei denselben Instanzen Pläne zur Revolutionierung (und Ausschaltung) des Russischen Reiches zur Seite. Politische Kreise hofften auf eine Mithilfe der “Randvölker” dabei und gewannen deren Nationalisten als Verbündete. Aber ebensowenig wie Alfred Rosenberg im Zweiten Weltkrieg von altruistischen Erwägungen geleitet war, wurde hier auch nur für einen Augenblick der Primat des Eigennutzes außer acht gelassen. Mit den Parteigängern der ukrainischen Selbständigkeit kämpfte zudem auch die “russische Schule” des Otto Hoetzsch, die gemeinsame Interessen der starken Großmächte Rußland und Deutschland postulierte.

Through scientific inquiry, applied technology, and hard work, the peoples of Europe and North America made the nineteenth century, as Asa Briggs has so aptly indicated, an “age of improvement.” In politics they simultaneously promoted what Alexis de Tocqueville then perspicaciously described as “the inexorable advance of democracy.” Moreover, an unprecedented rapid increase in wealth, knowledge, and speed of travel facilitated a rebirth of national consciousness and the formation of national political communities among the smaller and heretofore oppressed peoples of Europe.

Jindřich (Heinrich) Fügner played a significant role in the evolution of Czech national culture in the nineteenth century. As the first President, or starosta, of the Sokol (Falcon), the Czech gymnastic club that was modeled on the older German Turnverein movement, he worked together with the club's Gymnastic Director, Miroslav Tyrš, to build the foundations of the most successful Czech nationalist organization of the nineteenth century. A prominent and respected figure in the society of mid-century Prague, he was also somewhat of an anomaly, a German businessman who abandoned the status that his wealth and national origin conferred to cross-over to a Czech identity. Although such conversions evoke images of “national promiscuity” or “national transvestitism” in the modern world, where national identity is viewed as inevitable, they were not uncommon in nineteenth-century Prague, and Fügner's choice was unusual only because it was not motivated by a desire for social advancement or economic opportunity. Rather, in a world where political expression was limited, it appears as a statement of personal values and ideological conviction whose motives must be sought not in material concerns, rather in the more abstract regions of the soul.

The Sovietization of East Central Europe between 1945 and 1948 led to a complete reformulation of the “nationalities question” on the basis of Marxist-Leninist theory and the practical experience of the USSR. The changed political and ideological context provided the expanded camp of peoples' democracies with new guidelines for the treatment of their minorities. From this time onward, the ethnic/national minorities of these states were guaranteed an existence which was “national in form,” but “socialist in content.”

The first disagreements between Russia's Provisional Government and the Ukrainian Central Rada emerged in the spring and summer of 1917, right after the proclamation of the Rada's First Universal and the formation of the Ukrainian executive body, the General Secretariat. The arrival in Kiev in July 1917 of the Russian governmental delegation, consisting of Alexander Kerensky, Irakly Tsereteli and Mikhail Tereshchenko, and the attempts to work out a compromise—which found their embodiment in the Second Universal—led, in fact, to the political crisis in Petrograd. The majority of the Kadet ministers refused to approve the results of the negotiations in Kiev and tendered their resignations.

In the wake of the 1989 revolutions in East Central Europe, two parallel developments took place in rapid succession. On the one hand, strong national sentiments accompanied by a desire to set up independent nation states emerged in the countries neighboring Hungary. At the same time, the ethnic Magyar minorities, long excluded from participation in the political life of those countries, gained the ability to establish their political movements, to enter candidates in local and national elections, and to elect their own deputies in the national parliaments and local governments. On the other hand, the fate of the Magyar minorities and the guaranteeing of their rights became one of the central elements of Hungary's foreign policy in bilateral relations with its neighbors. Budapest also embarked on a major effort to make the minority problem an international issue and to achieve some form of international legal codification for minority rights. These simultaneous and, in part, contradictory developments and goals placed several dilemmas before Hungarian policy-makers that, three years later, have yet to be resolved.

Since achieving independence in December 1991, Kazakhstan has made cautious progress in assuring political rights and freedoms for all its citizens by stressing, among other things, the equality of the different ethnic groups in society, and the equality of individuals before the law. However, an observable outflow of the non-Kazakh population2 from the territory of Kazakhstan has caused a certain hesitation about this. It has received a fairly consistent international response in the scholarly literature and press.3 In almost all cases, the emphasis is on emerging Kazakh nationalism as the most obvious reason for the emigration of the non-native population. It has also been suggested that the Kazakhs would have little to gain from it, given the allegedly dominant economic role of Russians, in particular, within the country, and given also their external dependence on Russia.

In the late 1920s, the New York Public Library received as gifts and on exchange a large collection of books, pamphlets and periodicals in the minority languages of the Soviet Union. These materials remained in storage in the Library's Annex—uncataloged, but not unclassified, albeit superficially—until the spring of 1994. These acquisitions also included materials in the languages of neighboring countries, as well as books for the well-established immigrant population in the Soviet Union speaking Estonian, Latvian, German, and Polish.

On 22 December 1918 Tomáš G. Masaryk delivered his first political message as president of the fledgling Czechoslovakia. Addressing the Constituent Assembly at Hradčany in Prague, he vowed that the frontier districts of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, which contained a predominantly German-speaking population (and which German nationalists eventually designated collectively as the Sudetenland) would remain in the new Republic. Inimical toward and unwilling to live in a state dedicated to the sovereignty of Czechs and Slovaks, virtually all German leaders at the time of Masaryk's address were working to separate German districts from Czechoslovakia and link them with Austria.

The question of the national minorities of East Central Europe has again become a major topic of debate, as it was at the Paris Peace Conference 75 years ago. In 1994 and 1995, as the Horn government has attempted to hammer out bilateral treaties with Slovakia and Romania, the Hungarian minority populations have been a subject of public debate. The debate takes place in two forums. The interstate debate revolves around the same problems discussed in Paris; the question of the legal protection of minority rights in states in which the nation was declared to belong to the majority, and the further question of whether rights should be protected on an individual or collective basis. The second forum is that of the larger Hungarian community and concerns the nature and cohesion of the fifteen million Hungarians throughout the world. The implicit question is who actually belongs to the Hungarian community and what should be the relationship between so-called “minority” Hungarians and the Hungarian state.

The southern counties along the Danube, Sava, Tisa (Tisza) and Tamis (Temes) rivers, including Srem (Szerém, Sirmium) had been the richest, most developed and purely Hungarian inhabited part of the Hungarian Kingdom in the Middle Ages. The Ottoman conquest brought about a dramatic population shift between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Hungarians were either massacred or forced to flee the area. The demographic vacuum was filled by Serbian immigration. The Serbs acquired a privileged status as frontier guards of the Habsburg realm, with full territorial, religious and cultural autonomy up to the middle of the eighteenth century.

For over 700 years Czechs and Germans lived together in those lands which in this century would be consolidated as Czechoslovakia. It was not always a harmonious existence, but a kind of symbiosis did develop which sustained the relationship to the point where one group was unthinkable without the other. All of that changed in the twentieth century in an age characterized by awakening, intolerant ethnic nationalism and total war. Indeed, by the end of the Thirty Years' War of this century, the long Czech-German relationship in Bohemia came to a bitter, and seemingly permanent, end through the expulsion of the Germans of Czechoslovakia.