ABSTRACT
From Cuba to Korea, all communist parties attempted to gain national legitimacy. Germany and Romania still appeared as singular cases until the mid-1990s, when a broader picture started to form, with the emergence of a growing body of work on the construction of national communist identity. There are two popular myths concerning the relationship between communism and nationalism. The first is that nationalism and communism are wholly antagonistic and mutually exclusive. The second is the assertion that in communist Eastern Europe nationalism was oppressed before 1989, to emerge triumphant after the Berlin Wall came down. Karl Marx and Engels presented an embryonic concept of communist nationhood. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the communist movement gradually abolished the taboo on state patriotism. As most communist countries and parties in the world attempted to gain national legitimacy at some stage or other, delimitation would be a problem no matter what selection were to be presented.
