--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
>
> [WS:] I do not think that Western concepts of
> nation-state sovereignty fits
> well the 19th century Eastern European reality.
> None of the people in the
> 19th century Eastern Europe enjoyed sovereignty of
> the territory they
> occupied- at least in today's Western sense of the
> word. Eastern Europe is
> was, and still is, an amazing diversity of
> more-or-less ethnic groups living
> under the imperial rule of the Romanov or Habsburg
> empires,
I have a vague, undeveloped theory that the unconscious imposition of Western European understandings of "nationality" upon Eastern European reality was at the root of some of the contradictions and murkiness in Soviet nationalities policy.
You see something similar nowadays when people from big homogeneous settler countries like the US, Australia and Canada assume that "nationality" is a matter of citizenship.
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com