The authors of the article show manifestations of homophobia in a range of Eastern European countries. They use the example of Poland to compare the current situation of LGBT people with that in the communist period. The article defends the thesis that homophobia, which goes hand in hand with Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and widespread dislike for any cultural minority, is a cultural compensation for economic disappointment and an expression of the Eastern European opposition to the economic and political expansion of the West. From this perspective, the dominant nationalist orientation requires treating not only LGBT communities, but also their defenders, supporters of a more liberal culture and civic organizations, as representatives of “foreign centers” who intend to meet “the interests of the core European Union (EU) countries.” Thus, messianic nationalism and homophobia are a compensation for economic marginalization and a form of defense moved from the sphere of economic problems to the sphere of identity.

The bases of the political divisions in Macedonia are hard to explain solely through the traditional theoretical approach based on social structures and values. We include the perceptions of the communist past together with the social structures and values; and use survey data to run a multinomial logistic regression with undecided voters as the base category. Results show that perceptions of communism have the strongest influence on political divisions. Diverging perceptions of communism combine with attitudes toward religious values and shape a cultural left-right dimension. On the other hand, there is an absence of a left-right distinction in economic policies. The finding could be a useful explanation for political divisions in other post-communist countries, where there is an absence of distinction in economic policies.

This article explores which metaphors relevant political parties in Slovakia use when they speak about the EU's “finalité politique” by focusing on an analysis of their electoral manifestos prepared for the European Parliament elections in the period 2004–19. Based on the conceptual metaphor theory and a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods of metaphor analysis combining insights from European studies and cognitive linguistics, the analysis subsequently aims to estimate the positions of selected parties on the EU's finality. I show that while there are differences between the parties in their preferred “finalités politiques,” there is a certain mainstream party agreement on the issue.

This article explores the sources of legitimacy of private property in the means of production in Ukraine. The conceptualization of legitimacy of private property was made by analyzing theoretical approaches to the study of the foundations of private property relations in Western countries. The application of these approaches tests economic utilitarian, psychological, and sociocultural explanations of legitimacy of large and small private enterprises and private land in the process of activation of post-communist transition of Ukrainian society. The basic hypothesis was that the process of legitimation of private property in the means of production proceeds by uniting utilitarian and psychological adaptation with sociocultural agreement of ideological attitudes. This hypothesis was verified with the help of created legitimacy indices by comparison of linear regressions and data of the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Ukraine for 2013 and 2017. The results indicate that the hypothesis has been held true only concerning legitimacy of small private enterprises. They have acquired a moderate extent of legitimacy owing to the fact that besides the factors of adaptation, social recognition has increased at the expense of people who support the multiparty system and the liberal and mixed methods of regulation of the economy. In contrast, the existence of large private enterprises and private land has not acquired the corresponding sociocultural foundation.

This is the first comparative article to investigate commonalities in Ukrainian and Irish history, identity, and politics. The article analyzes the broader Ukrainian and Irish experience with Russia/Soviet Union in the first and Britain in the second instance, as well as the regional similarities in conflicts in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine and the six of the nine counties of Ulster that are Northern Ireland. The similarity in the Ukrainian and Irish experiences of treatment under Russian/Soviet and British rule is starker when we take into account the large differences in the sizes of their territories, populations, and economies. The five factors that are used for this comparative study include post-colonialism and the “Other,” religion, history and memory politics, language and identities, and attitudes toward Europe.

According to welfare chauvinism, access to the welfare state should be reserved for the native population, whereas immigrants are seen as a drain on resources. The curious aspect of welfare chauvinism in Europe is that it is more prevalent in the East. Why is this the case? This article uses the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Life in Transition Survey (LITS) in order to locate the most robust individual-level determinants of welfare chauvinism for countries of both Eastern and Western Europe. The results suggest that there is no support for the socioeconomic explanation of welfare chauvinism. There is support for the cultural capital explanation of welfare chauvinism, but only for Western Europe. Finally, there is support for the theory that higher levels of trust lessen the likelihood that a person adopts welfare chauvinism. This finding holds for both Eastern and Western Europe.

Since the introduction of computer technologies and the internet, Russia has been trying to adopt different strategies on maintaining social order in cyberspace. The purpose of this article is, by studying the stages of enacting legislation against cybercrime, to explore the Russian model of cyberspace regulation. In order to get control over the internet and to maintain security and stability in society, the Russian government has implemented new provisions of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and other means. This article demonstrates how criminal law and other measures may be used to fight cybercrime, and how the legislative body reacts on social concern about cybercrime. Russian legislation against cybercrime passed the same phases as cyber law in other countries: first, criminalizing and penalizing particular cybercrime types, and then, developing a complicated system of cyber regulation. The process of cyber regulation was influenced by changing cybercrime characteristics, transformation of enforcement policy, and international treaties ratified by the Russian Federation. Regardless of active efforts in fighting cybercrime, Russian hackers are still a big threat to Russia and, in general, globally. The article concludes that the hacker subculture is one of the main factors producing cybercrime.

Direct actions constitute an important repertoire of action for environmental movements in Western countries. This article differentiates two ideal types of this repertoire of action: the anarchist concept, which understands direct action in terms of values and as a preferred way of doing things; and the liberal concept, which uses direct action in an instrumental way. Based on my empirical research in post-socialist Czech Republic, the article focuses on debates over environmentalism and, to be more precise, on uses of direct actions by environmental organizations. It explains why the liberal concept was very limited and why direct action as a preferred way of doing things has not become a part of the repertoire of collective action. The article argues that the movement was politically moderate due to a combination of reasons: the very specific historical experience of the Czech environmental movement, which inclines it to use dialogue rather than confrontations with power; the fear of political hostility and marginalization by the state; and the internal dynamics of the environmental milieu.

This article focuses on the debate over Crimea's accession. The content analysis relies on data collected during the first and most turbulent year of Crimea's incorporation, which started with the decision to conduct a referendum on the Crimean status and then to declare Crimea's independence in March 2014. The sample consists of 50 entries published on LiveJournal, both posts and commentaries. We have discovered and problematized severe disagreements in bloggers' worldview that give rise to the antinomies of bloggers' linguistic consciousness. By this, we mean the use of words with opposite connotations relating to the same event within the same blog and an inconsistency between bloggers' perception of the event and the affective meanings of lexical items attached to it. Our main point is that Crimea's accession prompts bloggers to reduce this dissonance by “rolling up the semantic rainbow,” that is, by destroying meanings with rigid binary semantic opposition, which thereby further exacerbates deep-rooted divisions within Russian society where patriots and liberals increasingly keep apart.

In the decades since the fall of socialism, political jokes seemed to have lost their significance in Slovenia. In order to confirm and understand this change, we collected a sample of 200 jokes from five of the most popular Slovenian Facebook groups and analyzed the jokes and their targets. The results show that political jokes have indeed largely disappeared from the Slovenian public sphere: only three of the jokes in the sample target politicians. In this article, we argue that this development indicates a different response to the social pressures of the market economy. Whereas during socialism the source of anxiety was more or less apparent (the communist elite) and consequently easier to ridicule, in post-socialist societies, sources of anxiety are more diverse and impersonal, making them more difficult to target in jokes.

Linguistic purism in Croatia has long figured as one of the main elements of Croatian linguistic nationalism. Though it has been tackled in scholarly production, its newest embodiment, the so-called Šreter prizes, has not. The Šreter prizes are an award contest, established by the editorial board of the highly nationalist linguistic journal, Jezik (Serbo-Croatian “language”), in which competitors vie for prizes awarded for the “best new Croatian word,” often referred to as “neo-Croatian.” This article explores the narratives centered around the Šreter prizes, tackling additionally the lexical and morphological features of the newly minted “Croatian” lexemes.