Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Epilogue
316 Frances Pine has also been a region where borders of empires have been fiercely fought over and jealously guarded. In terms of Slovakia specifically, the picture most non Slovaks have of the country is likely to contain images of the poor and backward half of the nation of Czechoslovakia during the communist period. Since the early 1990s, the country has been better known as the site of deeply problematic interethnic conflicts between Roma and non-Roma and the resultant Roma migrations to the United Kingdom and Canada which drew the attention of the international community of human rights specialists, journalists and social scientists. This is clearly a partial and distorted picture which fails to take account of a far more complex and cosmopolitan past. This intricate mosaic of past and present, comprising extremes of power and powerlessness and poverty and grandeur, is not just the stuff of popular dreams and lay images of eastern and central Europe; rather, it also forms the backdrop against which many social scientists work and most of the chapters in this volume have been written. Further, the chapters reflect both the current focus in applied social science on issues such as ethnic conflict, human rights, and transnational migration, and the linked but more theoretical emphasis on issues such as structure and agency, loss and trauma, place, space and emotion, and trust. For the anthropology of postsocialism, as indeed for the postsocialist world itself, these problems and preoccupations which dominated the writings of social scientists in the last decade of the millennium had particular pertinence. As the central European countries extricated themselves from the Soviet sphere of power and influence, simultaneously facing the unravelling of boundaries and institutions ensured by the apparatus of the strong centralised state, the vexed questions of identity, borders and nation took on new significance. At some times and in some places these conflicts were more symbolic; at other times, in other places, quite terribly real. Where the great theorists of nationalism in the 1980s and early 90s, such as Gellner and Hobsbawm, had confidently anticipated the decline of European nationalism by the end of
