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In 1900, 2 percent of Bulgaria's population could be described as Greek, whether by nationality, language, or religion. The complex identities of the population became entangled in the growing national tensions between Bulgaria and Greece during the first half of the twentieth century. This book explores the shifting allegiances of this Greek minority in Bulgaria. Diverse social groups contested the meaning of the nation, shaping and reshaping what it meant to be Greek and Bulgarian during the slow transition from empire to nation-states in the Balkans. In these decades, the region was racked by a series of upheavals (the Balkan Wars, World War I, interwar population exchanges, World War II, and Communist revolutions). The Bulgarian Greeks were caught between the competing agendas of two states increasingly bent on establishing national homogeneity. Based on extensive research in the archives of Bulgaria and Greece, as well as fieldwork in the two countries, the book shows that the Greek population did not blindly follow Greek nationalist leaders but was torn between identification with the land of their birth and loyalty to the Greek cause. Many emigrated to Greece in response to nationalist pressures; others sought to maintain their Greek identity and traditions within Bulgaria; some even switched sides when it suited their personal interests. National loyalties remained fluid despite state efforts to fix ethnic and political borders. The lessons of a case such as this continue to reverberate wherever and whenever states try to adjust national borders in regions long inhabited by mixed populations.

Scholarship examining the governments in the Middle East and North Africa rarely focuses on opposition movements, since those countries tend to be ruled by a centralized, often authoritarian government. However, even in an oppressive state, there are civil society and oppositional forces at work. The chapters in this book reveal how such forces emerge and are manifested in nondemocratic states across the region. In most cases, the chapters offer a comparative perspective, highlighting similarities across political borders. Providing historical context for current events, they examine the sociopolitical situations in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Algeria and analyze the role of Islam in Arab states' governments and in the opposition movements to them. They also demonstrate that not all opposition forces propose the overthrow of authority and point out the various forms opposition takes in societies that leave little room for political activism. Challenging the assertion that state–society relations are limited to coercive top-down arrangements in authoritarian regimes, the book aims to inspire debate on the topic of contentious political participation within the region, as well as in similar settings throughout the world.

Jerusalem’s formal political borders reveal neither the dynamics of power in the city nor the underlying factors that make an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians so difficult. The lines delineating Israeli are frequently different from those delineating segregated housing or areas of uneven service provision or parallel national electoral districts of competing educational jurisdictions. In particular, the city’s large number of holy sites and restricted religious compounds create enclaves that continually threaten to undermine the Israeli states control over the city. This lack of congruity between political control and the actual spatial organization and everyday use of the city leaves many areas of occupied East Jerusalem in a kind of twilight zone where citizenship, property rights, and the enforcement of the rule of law are ambiguously applied. This book plots a history of Jerusalem that examines this intersecting and multileveled matrix and, in so doing, is able to portray the constraints on Israeli control over the city and the resilience of Palestinian enclaves after forty-five years of Israeli occupation. Adding to this complex mix is the role of numerous external influences—religious, political, financial, and cultural—so that the city is also a crucible for broader contestation. While the Palestinians may not return to their previous preeminence in the city, neither will Israel be able to assert a total and irreversible dominance. The book’s conclusion is that the city will not only have to be shared but that the sharing will be based upon these many borders and the interplay between history, geography, and religion.

The patterns of unity and division that define Europe as a historical region have been discussed in some important works, but this complex set of questions merits a more sustained debate. The disappearance of the Cold War regimes reinforced visions of European unity, but it also brought older historical divisions back into focus. The enlargement of the European Union has posed new problems of integration across cultural and political borders rooted in historical experiences. At the same time, the core countries of the union have confronted issues that reveal the enduring importance of identities and divergences which antedate the project of integration. The progress of historical sociology has led to more active interest in the identities, structures, and boundaries of historical formations, geocultural as well as geopolitical. The main emphasis of this book is on the multiple but interrelated divisions that have shaped the course of European history and crystallised in different patterns during successive phases. The question of European unity is discussed extensively in the first section, and later chapters include references to the perceptions and interpretations of unity that have developed in different parts of a divided Europe. The book lays particular stress on one region, Central or East Central Europe, and the debates that have developed around it. This part of Europe has not only been the topic of the most intensive discussion of regional identity, and is also the source of the general theme of the book: the unity and the divisions of European history.