Stalin's World: dictating the Soviet order

community’ have focused on its recent, post-1990s, history, and have utilized the rhetoric of modernization and Europeanization, while attempting to appease various ethnic-based demands and opposition to the latter. Ljupcho S. Risteski and Armanda Kodra Hysa provide a detailed analysis of the processes of redefinition that befell virtually all the key state and national symbols in Macedonia. Their excellent research points to an interesting finding that the public opinion poll data presented comparatively throughout the book do not, in fact, necessarily follow from (divisive) political discourses and (opposing) nationalist narratives promulgated by state elites, and luckily so. Cecilie Endresen concludes the volume with a chapter on Albania, a country with the second-best loyalty score. The state’s separate history and centennial of independent statehood makes the case stand out, though its previous communist regime offers interesting points for comparison with the six former Yugoslav republics or provinces. For students of nationalism, the challenge is to analyse Albania as a separate case due to its greater continuity of statehood in its present form. The concluding chapter, rather surprisingly, sums up three research hypotheses that were not introduced in the opening chapter, explicating how the authors had presumed that successful nation-building process (i.e. loyalty) would depend on (a) successful state-building, (b) level of democracy, and (c) homogeneity of the population. Only the third hypothesis was found to be supported by the survey data: ‘ethnic homogeneity is associated with levels of support more than any other factor’, while religion is importantly shown to be ‘intimately linked to ethnicity’ and not an independent factor (p. 231). Overall, this volumemakes a valuable contribution to the study of symbols, rituals and nationalist narratives in contemporary nation-building processes. It is a comparative project that elucidates how primordial idea(l)s of nationhood, essential for modern ‘invented traditions’ that enable nationalist elites to promulgate one select national identity, inevitably clash when competing nationalisms fight for primacy within the complexity of multiethnic, multiconfessional and multicultural realities of human existence.