Nationalism, Nation-Building, and the Decline of Empires

Nationalism is reappearing on the international scene in acute and aggressive forms, despite decades of economic globalization, the development of a cosmopolitan culture, and supranational integration as in the case of the European Union and other centers of global or regional aggregation on the economic, financial, legal, and institutional levels. It is reappearing also as a reaction to these phenomena and is feeding political forms such as sovereignism and populism in Western democracies. This is leading to exclusionary forces, intolerance, racism, and the search for scapegoats within minority, foreign, and migrant communities. The ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine stems from Russian nationalism in its most extreme and radical forms arising from the collapse of the Soviet Union, heir to the Tsarist imperial system. Ukraine, like so much of Eastern Europe, lies at the crossroads of the decline of the three empires, Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian between the 19th and 20th centuries. The Balkan crisis of the 1990s with its civil wars and ethnic cleansing is part of the same cycle of events that followed the fall of communist regimes. The process of the formation of European nations suggests the usefulness of a comparative analysis of the history of these supranational imperial systems. The conference will seek to provide structural, in-depth understanding of the way wars and the collapse of empires allow for the formation or strengthening of national identities and narratives, as well as the self-recognition of nations emerging from such processes in the global arena."