Magdalena Dembinska

Compared to What? Assessing Brazil’s Political Institutions

A rich and plausible academic literature has delineated reasons to believe Brazil’s democratic political institutions—including electoral rules, the political party system, federalism, and the rules of legislative procedure—are suboptimal from the viewpoints of democratic representativeness and policy-making effectiveness. The authors concur that specific peculiarities of Brazilian political institutions likely complicate the process of solving societal collective action dilemmas. Nonetheless, Brazil’s economic and social track record since redemocratization in the mid-1980s has been reasonably good in comparative regional perspective. Perhaps Brazil’s informal political negotiating mechanisms, or even other less obvious institutional structures, provide sufficient countervailing influences to allow “governance” to proceed relatively smoothly despite the appearance of chaos and political dysfunction.

The Making of an Empty Moldovan Category within a Multiethnic Transnistrian Nation

To legitimize separation from Moldova, Transnistrian elites have been constructing a civic Transnistrian nation, subsuming local ethnic Russian, Ukrainian, and Moldovan identities. This article first identifies changes to the Transnistrian nation-building strategy: from an emphasis on Moldovan nationhood in the early 1990s to oppose “Romanianization” in Chisinau, to Transnistrian nationhood mainly after Moldovanism was adopted in Chisinau in 2001. It then shows how this multiethnic nation is being constructed, with a particular emphasis on the place of Transnistrian Moldovans. While the Moldovan identity category is being institutionalized as a part of the Transnistrian civic nation, its ecological niches are being emptied of Romanian/Bessarabian attributes and invested with Russianness. As a result, “Moldovan” now seems an empty identity category in Transnistria.

Building Trust: Managing Common Past and Symbolic Public Spaces in Divided Societies

State- and nation-building historical policies clash with the perspectives of minorities. Negative group stereotypes affect the trust required for multicultural societies to function. How do groups mediate differences and cope with hate-prone interpretations of history? Linking the often separate literature on social capital, identity, ethnic conflicts and resolution, and on symbolic politics and historical reconciliation, this article develops a framework for intercommunity trust-building research. Observing controversies surrounding collective memories and memorials in Eastern Europe, it argues that integrative processes occur ‘from below’: when groups build mutual horizontal trust through common management of their shared past and landscapes; when the state participates, and does not impose.

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.

The imagined ‘other’ and its shifts: politics and identifications in Turkish Cyprus

ABSTRACT This article addresses the puzzling case of shifting identity constructions in northern Cyprus, from ethnic to civic–territorial in 2003 and back to ethnic in 2009. It is argued that these shifts occurred when external factors (EU and Turkey) opened/closed windows of opportunity for internal elites’ reconfigurations. It then explains societal responsiveness to these nation-building changes sustaining that, over time, a process transforming the perception of the ‘other’ took place from below and a civic–territorial identity layer (Cypriotness) developed along the ethnic-Turkish layer. These coexist and fluctuate depending on the given context of choice.

Ethnopolitical Mobilization without Groups: Nation-Building in Upper Silesia

Ethnolinguistic political mobilization has spread throughout the post-communist area. However, it is unclear whether it has been accompanied by a strengthening of group boundaries. This paper examines the nation-building process of unrecognized Silesians in Poland. It explores the mobilization strategies used by Silesian ethnopolitical entrepreneurs in their quest for regional autonomy and recognition of their language and group. I argue that the increase in the number of self-declared Silesians and the successful institutionalization of a Silesian national category have not led to mass national consciousness. Due to structural transformations and transnational processes, Silesians display multidimensional fluctuating identifications, which suggest the absence of a sense of national groupness.