ABSTRACT
The extensive migratory period in eastern Europe was largely over by the tenth century, when new kingdoms and chiefdoms became territorially stabilized. Older European empires became overstretched, internally weakened, and eventually disintegrated when subjected to sustained external pressures. Nationalism developed in western Europe as an essentially bourgeois conception for promoting national integration; it thereby preceded the birth and expansion of nationalist sentiments throughout eastern Europe. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the initially democratic administrations of eastern Europe descended into authoritarian quasi-dictatorships, whether of the political, military, or royalist varieties, which sometimes bordered on fascism. The collapse of the artificial Soviet bloc alliance at the end of the 1980s, liberated all the east European states and released various ethno-nationalist aspirations. Minority nationalism may be a critical ingredient of domestic politics, as well as a tool of foreign policy manipulated by hostile governments. The unravelling of the Soviet bloc and the disintegration of Communist controls has released previously submerged national ambitions.
