ABSTRACT
In the late communist period, there were merely three nation-states in Central Europe fulfilling all the requirements of the normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state, namely, Bulgaria, Norway, and Poland (Map 31). However, most of the region’s polities strove to meet the strict criteria of this isomorphism as dictated by the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism. In the Soviet bloc the non-national ideology of communism had not be an obstacle to this goal since 1956, when national communism had replaced stalinist internationalism. The subsequent fall of communism and the Soviet bloc allowed for a swift spread of the full normative isomorphism across Central Europe.
