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Abstract
The author of the presented article analyzes the peculiarities of histories of frontier peripheral European nationalism in the second half of the 20th century. The purpose of the research is a comparative study of histories of Asturian and Moldavian nationalism as factors of creating nations as imaginate communities, and also of social and political modernizations as invention of traditions. The main provisions of the article are as follows: 1) Asturian and Moldavian nationalism arose historically on the territories of frontier regions, causing their subsequent marginality; 2) social and political practices of Asturian and Moldavian nationalism are based on strategies of social constructivism, which turned Asturians and Moldavians into imagined communities, and their identities – into invented traditions; 3) construction of language and invention of history became universal intellectual forms of political and social modernizations, which Asturian and Moldavian nationalists used in their attempts to invent nations. The article concludes with the following theses: 1) negative social dynamics led to the absence of complete social structures in the Moldovan and Asturian societies; 2) the political and social rates of development of Moldovan and Asturian nationalism lagged significantly in comparison with the rates of political modernization processes in the neighbouring communities; 3) the main participants of the frontier nation building were nationalists represented in Asturia by intellectuals, and in Moldova by intellectuals and also by political elites; 4) Asturian and Moldovan nationalism did not lead to the complete institutionalization of the new imaginate communities, which actualizes estimation of nationalism limitations as a political resource formally recognized for universal.
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