Between Détente and Differentiation: Nixon’s visit to Bucharest in August 1969

President Nixon’s decision to visit Romania in the summer of 1969 demarcated a symbolic turning point in the relations of Washington with Bucharest and the Eastern European communist states in general. This article examines the policies of both sides leading to this historical event and its respective outcomes. It places the opening of Romania to the United States and the latter’s embrace of such a prospect within the broader Cold War context of the time; the policy of differentiation and the imminent détente. Just a year after the invasion in Czechoslovakia, Nixon and Kissinger sought to explore the compatibility of their policy towards the rest of the socialist states with their grand design of the superpower détente with the USSR. Ceausescu’s independent profile within the Soviet bloc constituted Romania a textbook example for such an endeavour.     

The modernity of nations. A tribute to Walker Connor

To fully appreciate Walker Connor's contribution to the foundation of the contemporary study of nationalism, two main factors must be taken into account. First, the context of positivist behavioural political science within which in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he articulated his critique of the concept of nation‐building. In this context, Connor emerged as a critic of the limitations and the naivité of positivist modernization theory. His dissenting voice called for critical rethinking and revision of the central concepts of the theory of political development, some of which enjoyed almost doctrinal status. Second, despite his criticism of modernization theory, Connor retained a strong conviction that nations and national sentiment were the products of modernity; indeed, in his judgement, they formed the primary content of modernity. This too was a critical stance within the rising tide of nationalism studies since 1989–1990, when ideology and wishful thinking influenced to a considerable extent the interpretation of nationalism. Walker Connor's intellectual legacy should thus be understood as a heritage of critical thought that is informed by a noteworthy awareness of the moral responsibilities of scholarly analysis.     

‘Balkan Mentality’: History,Legend, Imagination

Abstract. In this article I attempt to do two things. First I consider in what sense it could be reasonable to talk of a ‘Balkan mentality’, shared across national divisions by all peoples in Southeastern Europe. I argue among other things that nationalism and its impact on culture and scholarship has been a major stumbling block for the conceptualisation of a shared ‘Balkan mentality’. Secondly, I go on to examine one possible context in which a shared mentality could be said to have existed among the Orthodox Christians in the Balkans. I suggest that such a context could be located in the pre-nationalist Balkan society of the eighteenth century, a period in which the region was politically united by Ottoman rule. To illustrate the content of the mental outlook shared by the Balkan Orthodox in the eighteenth century I examine the autobiographical writings of three major authors, one writing in Greek (Caisarios Depontes), one in Bulgarian (Sofroni Vra?anski) and one in Serbian (Matija Nenadovi?). I identify the shared mental elements reflected in their texts and point out how the transition to a national self-conception taking place at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Balkans, marked the end of this shared ‘Balkan mentality’. The study is thus an exploration in the ‘prehistory’, as it were, of nationalism in the Balkans, an exploration which also looks at the symbolic origins nationalism in the region as reflected in the texts of two of the three authors.