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ABSTRACT. The article examines the effects of job competition on ethnic relations within a multinational state. It argues that demographic increase leads to competition for blue‐collar jobs while an increase in the number of graduates from higher education leads to competition over elite jobs. In the first case, people risk unemployment, in the second, blocked career opportunities. Mass‐level unemployment may lead to anger‐driven mass riots, while an intelligentsia will formulate more rational strategies to eliminate threatening competitors from the labour market. One such strategy is to insist that the state ought to be a national state, in which the national elites will be in control. While questions of identity no doubt also may have an enormously mobilising power in times of national resurgence, identity issues are normally intimately intertwined with interest politics. These mechanisms are traced in the history of ethnic mobilisation in the Soviet Union and the post‐Soviet states during and after perestroika.

The article examines the effects of job competition on ethnic relations within a multinational state. It argues that demographic increase leads to competition for blue-collar jobs while an increase in the number of graduates from higher education leads to competition over elite jobs. In the first case, people risk unemployment, in the second, blocked career opportunities. Mass-level unemployment may lead to anger-driven mass riots, while an intelligentsia will formulate more rational strategies to eliminate threatening competitors from the labour market. One such strategy is to insist that the state ought to be a national state, in which the national elites will be in control. While questions of identity no doubt also may have an enormously mobilising power in times of national resurgence, identity issues are normally intimately intertwined with interest politics. These mechanisms are traced in the history of ethnic mobilisation in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet states during and after perestroika. (Nations and Nationalism)

In many ethnic conflicts and civil wars in the 20th century the cultural differences between the warring groups were very small. The bloody conflicts between Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnians during the breakup of Yugoslavia are a case in point. This observation has led some commentators to conclude that a lack of objective cultural markers between groups may itself be conducive to violence: When the members of two groups are difficult to tell apart, violence is inserted in order to create identity boundaries between them. One particular version of this theory goes under the name ?narcissism of minor differences?. This expression goes back to Sigmund Freud, who applied it both to individual psychology and in his philosophy of culture. The notion has been largely ignored by practicing psychotherapists, but over the last decades, however, it has been discovered by journalists and social scientists and applied to cases of collective rather than individual violence. The present article examines some of the articles and books that expound the ?the narcissism of minor differences?-concept in order to assess the explanatory strength and weaknesses of this theory. .

The study of quasi-states has been marred by an unfortunate terminological confusion. Sometimes, this term is taken to mean recognized states that fail to develop the necessary state structures to function as fully fledged, 'real' states. At other times, 'quasi-states' is a designation given to regions that secede from another state, gain de facto control over the territory they lay claim to, but fail to achieve international recognition. The author proposes that, in order to clear up this confusion, recognized but ineffectual states ought to be referred as 'failed states', while the term 'quasi-states' ought to be reserved for unrecognized, de facto states. Since quasi-states are not supported by international recognition, they must be sustained by something else. In contrast to researchers who maintain that the majority of these quasi-states are quite strong, this article argues that their modal tendency is weak economy and weak state structures. The main reasons why these states nevertheless have not collapsed seem to be that they have managed to build up internal support from the local population through propaganda and identity-building; channel a disproportionately large part of their meager resources into military defense; enjoy the support of a strong patron; and, in most cases, have seceded from a state that is itself very weak.

As Pål Kolstø explores in this article, attitudes towards Lev Tolstoi's religious teaching differed wildly among Russian Orthodox believers at the turn of the last century. Some felt that his philosophical notions were remarkably congenial to church doctrine, while others saw Tolstoianism as the radical negation of everything the church stood for. An image often conjured up was Tolstoi as the Antichrist. To some, it was precisely the features that made others see Tolstoi as an Orthodox double that led them to this conclusion: The Antichrist will manage to lead the faithful astray precisely because he will seem to imitate Christ himself. This was the point where the most extreme positions in the Orthodox debate on Tolstoi and Tolstoianism converged. All told, some 85 books and booklets and 260 articles on Tolstoi were published by professed Orthodox authors, many of them laymen. Taken together, they bear witness to the breadth and vitality of Orthodox public opinion.