This paper examines the Albanian state–nation constellation in the Balkans in the light of the European Union (EU) integration process with a focus on citizenship configurations in Kosovo and Albania. It addresses an important puzzle: why legal norms of citizenship do not follow the emerging practice of stronger trans-border co-operation in the Albanian ethnic and cultural space. The study shows that the process of EU integration is the key to understanding and explaining this puzzle, for it provides an opportunity for ‘constructive ambiguity’ around which both ethnic and statist brands of Albanian na-tionalism, as well as various elite fractions, can coalesce and coexist. In a wider context, Albanian citizenship configurations are shaped by the ever-evolving complex relationship between nation, state and Europe.

In the article, the author presents the basic relations between a nation state and a multicultural society. According to the author, the attitude of the nation state and the dominant nation in the state to the phenomenon of cultural diversity of society is a key phenomenon in the theory and practice of multiculturalism. Namely, the nation state is characterized by two strategies defining the attitude to the cultural diversity of society. It is a strategy of cultural homogenization and a pluralistic. The emergence of a pluralistic strategy begins with the occurrence and eventual growth of phenomena and processes referred to as multiculturalism and multicultural society.

The article is devoted to the late Zygmunt Bauman (d. January 2017), a scholar who made an enormous impact on world humanities at the turn of the twentieth century. It briefly presents Bauman’s life and a number of the best known concepts from his works. The author first discusses Bauman’s attitude toward Marxist theory and explains his revision of it. He then introduces the main ideas of Bauman work Modernity and the Holocaust. The article ends with a review of Bauman’s reflections on globalisation and a discussion of his thesis concerning the crisis of the nation state.

Recent years have witnessed the publication of a number of research papers and books seeking to assess threats of electoral victories of anti-establishment politicians and political parties, described as authoritarian populists. This essay focuses on three books directly addressing the origins and threats of authoritarian populism to democracy. It consists of six sections and the conclusion. The first section presents findings (Norris and Inglehart) based on surveys of values of voters of various age cohorts concluding that authoritarian populism is a temporary backlash provoked by the post-materialist perspective. The second section examines the contention, spelled out in Levitsky and Ziblatt, that increase in openness of American political system produced, unintentionally, a degradation of the American political system. The third section continues brief presentations focusing on to the causes and implications of “illiberal democracy,” and “undemocratic liberalism” (Mounk). The fourth section examines developments in the quality of democracy in the world showing that despite the decline in Democracy Indices, overall there was no slide towards non-democratic forms of government in 2006–2019. The next two sections deal with dimensions missing in reviewed books; the notion of nation-state, international environment, civic culture and, in particular, dangers of radical egalitarianism to democracy. The last section concludes with regrets that the authors ignored rich literature on fragility of democracy and failed to incorporate in their analyses deeper structural factors eroding democracy: by the same token, return to the pre-populist shock trajectory is unlikely to assure survival of liberal democracy.