Nation-State, Nationalism, and the Prospects for Democratization in East Central Europe

* This essay was written while I was a grantee of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Institute of Political Science, University of Hamburg. It was presented as a paper at a conference held in Helsinki. Finland on April 10-11, 1992, under the auspices of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and the UNESCO Commission of the Finnish Ministry of Education. A shortened version has been published in the conference proceedings edited by Jyrki livonen (The Future of the Nution State in Europe, Cambridge: Edward Elgar, 1994), and I would like to express my thanks to the editor for his permission to publish the complete, re-edited text, I would also like to thank the reviewers and editors of Communist and Post-Communist Studies for their help in improving the form and content of the manuscript.