Abstract
The aim of the scientific symposium was to examine from different angles and time perspectives one of the most essential phenomenon in forming the modern nations in both the post-Soviet space and the region of the South-Eastern Europe, which is a tension and competition between the narrowly (national) and widely (national integration or regional) defined concepts. The organizing team considers this phenomenon strikingly important and extremely variable for forming of modern identities in those examined areas.
In today perspective some integration ideas or notions about regional belonging across the ethnic borders can be viewed as only a matter of the past, or ideologically and politically conditioned artificial constructs. One of the general questions of the symposium should be whether actually represented stalemate of development or offered one of the possible, however, with regard to the historical circumstances non-implemented way of solution of the national question.
In last decades the accentuated role in transformations of the national consciousness in the Eastern and South-Eastern Europe is played by the remarkable factor, which is the confrontation with neighbouring environments in the sphere of language, culture and confession. The above mentioned process being intensely in progress and contributing to the dominance of ethnically exclusivist models at the expense of integrating concepts deserves without question critical and unbiased assessment.
The fact that a strong impulse to the national emancipation can be determination towards the neighbouring national entity disrupts our established notions about the process of emergence of modern nations in our area. The result of all suggested phenomenon became an extraordinary colourful ethnic map of both geographical-historical areas.