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Assessment of totalitarian legacy makes a part of today\'s European identity. In this sense, Europeanization emerges from de-Nazification. In general sense of the term, de-Nazification implies a break-up with totalitarianism, something more sincere and heartfelt than simple denial. In Europe\'s contemporary political culture de-Nazification was a long and painful process of confronting not only the trends that had flooded the cataclysm of the WWII but also their epigones that have emerged instead as social, racist or chauvinist deviations rather than purely ideological and political ones...
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Human Rights Watch Announcement: International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: Trial to Milosevic revealed the role of Belgrade.
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Rapid and wide mass mobilizations characterized the fall of the Communist system in Europe. Mass movements based on nationalism played a major role in this break-up process. Liberalization in the USSR was the main political opportunity for the emergence of such pro-democratic national mass movements as Sąjūdis in Lithuania. This article provides an overview of the sociopolitical and economic situation which pushed M. Gorbachev to start reforms and liberalization in the USSR. At the same time, it must be said that Sąjūdis, and other movements of similar nature, were linked rather directly to the social groups which constituted the Soviet elite – the nomenklatūra and the intelligentsia, both discussed here for the purpose of demonstrating that by the end of the eighties of the last century the situation and the orientation of the two contributed to the mass mobilization in Lithuania. Even though the Soviet state was extremely centralized, the federal principle inscribed in all editions of the Soviet Constitution facilitated the formation of local elites in the Republics. Because of the territorially bound bureaucratic structures linked with national entities, the so-called bureaucratic nationalism developed by favoring the needs of a particular Republic within the centralized distribution system of resources, goods and developmental planning. This is one of the important reasons why some members of the local nomenklatura were nationally minded. The Intelligentsia formed a numerous social group in the USSR. Part of that group belonged to the nomenklatura. It had better access to information about the regime and was not content with the situation; many of its members embraced oppositional views. Various official organizations, for the most part creative unions and gatherings of intellectuals, were used for the purpose of preserving and spreading national and democratic values. At the same time, part of the intelligentsia was engaged in various unobtrusive practices of contention. This common activity created networks of trust and a specific intellectual climate with the result that some members of the elite of the LSSR (Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic) became, when the opportunity presented itself, the initiators and leaders of the pro-democratic national movement Sąjūdis.
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Before the phases of foreign receptivity, China was a magnet for Japan, Korea, and other peoples of eastern Eurasia. It would be fallacy to think that the flow of cultural influence was all unidirectional from the China Mainland eastwards to the Peninsula and the Japanese Islands. Although the contact and exchange were multidirectional, there were periods of intense interaction and periods of relative isolation between these areas. The present essay discusses the early time when Japan was in complex interaction with the Korean Peninsula and China, from where the expert technicians, administrators and religious practitioners have come and got assimilated with the Japanese society. Cultural innovations in the Japanese Islands were integrated with Jomon practices so that the Yayoi culture was a wholesale importation from the Asian continent. Te burial forms expressed a new belief system and social order. Cultural transformation by all means was most apparent in the Kofun period of mounded earth tombs. Te tradition of building such tombs in Japan began in the 3rd century in the Nara Basin (homeland of the Yamato state) and spread westwards. Yamato, the first state to evolve in Japan, was consolidated by the introduction and adaption of the Chinese administration system that is clearly reflected in the burial goods. In order to establish the political relationship, the items of prestige were exchanged among the nobles. An extremely valued possession was the horse with its garment pieces. Crossing from Korea, horse-riding people used to leave their possessions in the tombs by the latter half of the 5th century. Although their own tomb style is the typical 6th-century style of the stone passageway and chamber, until local craftsmen could be trained to build such tombs Koreans at first deposited the trappings in the earlier style tombs with small stone-lined receptacles near the top of the mound. Excavations in Japan provide the hard evidence for horse sacrifice, an act specifically prohibited in the Japanese Chronicle (Nihon Shoki), which states that it was carried out at the owner‘s death. The live burials were proscribed, and the haniwa – clay cylinders and funerary sculptures – were ordered instead. Throughout the Kofun period these low-fired clay sculptures were erected on the tomb surface. Haniwa horses, sometimes placed in an entire line, stood guard on the tombs. They also might have signified a public statement of status, wealth, and privilege. The horse was represented in three different haniwa forms: wearing a full set of decorative garment; without it; and, on rare occasions, carrying a rider. The horse furniture and ornaments are found in many tombs, showing the prevalence of horsemanship in Yamato times. When we look at the haniwa horse, we are struck with the similarity between its trappings and those in present-day use. The saddle and stirrups, the bridle and bit are practically the same nowadays in Japan. Horses came to be used as str
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Straipsnio autorius per Lietuvos istoriją siekia parodyti Alberto Vijūko-Kojalavičiaus pažiūras, lygina jas su kitais dviem to meto jėzuitų autoriais – Adamu Tanneriu ir Martinu Becanu. Autorius gina tezę, kad visiems trims rūpėjo kova su „nuožmia erezija“, tačiau abu nelietuviai tai darė tik polemizuodami, o Kojalavičius pasirinko artimesnį savo pašaukimui metodą – pedagoginį. Lietuvos istorijos autorius visa savo siela buvo mokytojas, jis siekė palaikyti tvarką, kurios pateisinimą užtikrino religinė, politinė ir dorovinė ortodoksija. Kojalavičiaus tekste straipsnio autorius įžvelgia tris lygmenis. Tai istorinis-naratyvinis, aprašantis praeities įvykius, kaip antai karas su totoriais; religinis, iškeliantis krikščionių bažnyčių vienybės idėją, kuri labai svarbi kovojant su musulmonais; galop trečias lygmuo, kur dorovė, religija ir politika susipina vidaus kovoje su gnoseologiniu reliatyvizmu ir moraliniu laisvumu, kylančiais iš kalvinistinės erezijos ir naujojo mokslinio mąstymo. Straipsnio pradžioje autorius polemizuoja su ankstesnėmis Dariaus Kuolio ir Giovannos Brogi Bercoff studijomis apie Kojalavičiaus Lietuvos istoriją: pirmuoju atveju pažymi interpretacijos anachronizmą, o antruoju – pasigenda stipresnio komparatyvistinio pagrindimo. Tačiau šios dvi studijos tampa išeities taškais paties autoriaus svarstymams.
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This article analyzes the most important socio-political changes in Lithuanian public life during the 1990s. It highlights the major stages in the transformation of the society in the 1990s which reveal essential paradigmatic clashes and primary points of societal development. By evoking the most significant examples of building new monuments, rebuilding memorials of the inter war republic, and destroying Soviet monuments in the late 1980s and 1990s, the article explores this period‘s „politics of memory” that signified the most important processes of social change. Cultural elite - intellectuals with critical attitudes, responsible for articulation and institutionalization of social change - became the most significant ideologues and agents of change in the post-Soviet society. It was precisely the cultural elite that hegemonized signifiers of the most important ideological constructs, shaped their content, generated and sustained value systems, as well as social myths. After becoming the main moulder of the „politics of memory,“ the post-Soviet elite was also responsible for changes in the signifying of public spaces, as well as commemoration of monuments, memorials, busts and other artifacts of historical significance. In the juncture of the 1980s and 1990s, building of new monuments, rebuilding of the ones destroyed during the Soviet era, and removal of propaganda monuments left by the occupation became an important task for the post-Soviet elite. Thus, the major changes in the public spaces of that particular time attested a change in power relations and ideology, and resounded the general ideas of the decade.
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This paper deals with texts about the intelligentsia in Soviet Lithuania; the texts were written in 1950–1989 in Lithuania and the USSR. In this period the intelligentsia was considered to be a social stratum specializing in mental work. While used in the Soviet environment the term intelligentsia was often replaced by the terms staff (cadre) and specialists. This tendency reveals an attempt to view the intelligentsia in a manpower context. A great deal of research is reviewed in this article. The texts were written and published by a variety of researchers: historians, economists, demographists, and sociologists, all dealing with the engineering, technical, scientific, medical, artistic, educational, and administrative intelligentsia, both urban and rural. Little of the analysis was original; these studies were supposed to serve as evidence for and to bolster Marxist-Leninist schemes of societal development. Only a few sociologists were capable of producing an “allusive” if semiofficial sociology. The construction of party discourse in late Soviet socialism was secret, classified, and ossified linguistically: some made-up phrases were wandering from one text to another. Humanitarian and sociological discourses were affected by these alterations as well. Statistical data and party resolutions were circulating round and round. Topics of graduation dissertation often were similar, or even analogous to each other, so the illusion of originality was obtained by manipulating statistical data.
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Investigating the period from 1940 to 1990 confronts us with complex problems. It is one thing to do research on a free society, and quite another to investigate a society in which it is dangerous to express one‘s opinion in public. An unanalytical application of criteria appropriate for evaluating democratic societies to totalitarian ones gives an inadequate picture of the latter. In analyzing Lithuania‘s condition during the occupation period and determining (a) the changes in the empire; (b) its ideological prescriptions; (c) who used them and how; i.e., the real possibilities for action; and (d) the distribution of sources (archives, memoirs, their interrelations and dependability), we elucidate the mechanism of the regime‘s functioning and its ideological justification. The inhabitants of Soviet-annexed Lithuania were forced to chose among (A) faithfully serving the regime and expecting to be rewarded; (B) accommodating the regime without particular zeal; (C) looking for legal ways of preserving the national identity; and (D) openly confronting the regime. Groups (A) and (D) made up an absolute minority of Lithuanian subjects. People in (A) and (B) were the safest; those in (D) were in the greatest danger (at any time they risked their freedom or even their life). Intellectuals and technocrats often chose (C). For this reason investigating works of literature, journalism, theater, visual art, and similar phenomena belongs not only to cultural studies, but to the history of political thought as well. In the absence of possibilities for legal political activity the authors of such works in Lithuania consciously (or unconsciously) fostered a national consciousness and an allegiance to Lithuanian statehood. Clandestine publications performed the function of an underground organization. They joined together publishers, authors, distributors, and readers. Since there are few direct sources on this, it is appropriate to devise and use a method of interviewing participants; to distinguish the Aesopian language used by some cultural workers in legally printed texts from ordinary witticisms; and accurately to decipher the former, as the readers and art consumers of those times understood that language perfectly.
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The paper takes a generic approach towards the analysis and comparison of „Kauno Tiesa,“ a daily newspaper during the Soviet period, and its counterpart „Kauno diena“ in post-Soviet Lithuania. The specific generic analysis is performed on three issues ranging from the years 1964, 1986 and up to 2008. All of them appeared at the beginning of May and were dedicated to the Day of Press. The choice of these specific issues allows the author to find a common denominator for the comparison of otherwise hardly comparable issues. The aim of the comparison is to reveal the most general tendencies in the development of post-Soviet Lithuanian dailies. However, the development is caused by a few important factors such as an overall change of times; overwhelming technological shifts due to the application of computers; and a change in the country’s status, i.e. the shift from a totalitarian system towards democracy. The latter ideological change was conceived as crucial for the dramatic change in the form, contents, and function of the dailies under investigation. The generic approach was chosen as the main aspect of research because of its underlying theoretical assumptions. Genre is assumed here as a social action, the basic substance of any culture, therefore it is taken as a conditio sine qua non for any text. Te purity of a genre, the clarity of its status may be questioned but not its existence in general. The present paper presents some methodological insight into the nature of a genre as well as into the problems of its identification in general. Moreover, it compares classifications of genres of periodical literature that prevailed in Western countries and Eastern or Central Europe since generic shift was mainly a matter of the westernization of the daily press. The outcome of generic shift was threefold. It comprised the (dis)appearance of specific genres and radical changes in the existing genres. All ideologically biased materials such as the speeches of CPSU leaders and reports on CPSU congresses were gone as soon as Lithuania regained its independence in 1990. Gradually, after the privatization of the press their place was taken by new macro genres such as advertising and comments. Other genres, especially service information and news items, underwent considerable changes also. The paper concentrates on the most obvious of them, as reflected in the informational structure, style, and language of the texts. The overall tendencies observed in the development of post-Soviet dailies are quite paradoxical. Although a much bigger variety of genres appeared in the last two decades, a clear-cut tendency of less diversity of their textual structure is obvious. The ideology of texts changed from an assumed objective to an imposed subjective approach towards reality. The most striking difference, however, is the shift in the pathos of dailies from false but positive towards true but negative.
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One of the main features of the single-party Communist system was its suppression of any kind of independent political activity whatsoever. No wonder that the situation in Communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) gave rise to discussions about the significance of civil society and its influence on democracy. During the period of Communist rule, civil society manifested itself in the way dissidents opposed to the regime emerged and organized themselves; at the turn of the 1990s, it consisted of active movements that succeeded in ridding themselves of the regime; and in the post-Communist period civil society became the way society structured itself in a democratic state. As the CEE states were freeing themselves from Communist oppression, civil society played an important role; but at the present time the weakness of civil society is one of the features that distinguishes the CEE states not only from Western Europe but also from other countries that had recently started on the road towards democracy after having shed their authoritarian regimes. This distinguishing feature is due to the CEE states’ Communist past. The relative unwillingness of CEE citizens to join organizations may be explained by the social and economic shocks attendant upon the deep political transformations that occurred, as a result of all of which the social status of several different groups of people changed rapidly; relations between them broke off; and mutual trust diminished. An additional factor lies in the circumstance that because of low wages people are forced to work in several jobs, which leaves them with much less free time to engage in civic activities. There is some evidence from research that in CEE states after their entrance into the EU civic activities do tend to diminish.
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This paper deals with a specific initiative consisting of introduction of the Total Quality Management in the B&H Public Administration as a specific area of New Public Management within the program of public administration management reforms, which has been implemented for the last thirty years worldwide. That initiative led to the development of the Total Quality Management within public administration as the special model that should increase the quality of public administration work and providing of better services for the citizens. The paper is analyzing in particular the Bosnian state’s party organization transforming process from single-party socialist system to democratic multi-party one throughout the transition process. Furthermore, the paper provides analyses of public administration condition, political context as the environment in which the process of public administration reforming in B&H takes place. The paper’s fourth part is giving an analysis of the European Principles for Public Administration, and of the Bosnian administration’s complying with European regulations. The core of the paper examines the possibility of introducing the Total Quality Management into the public administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina, analyzes obstacles and possibilities of introducing of such initiative, and in particular, examines the very procedure of the TQM implementing within the public administration, in order to help Bosnia and Herzegovina implementing its reforms faster and better, thus fulfilling the conditions needed for the ascension in the European Union.
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Neglected and denied of its own defining quality within the literary – historical realm of self-defining, the Bosniak literature until recently contained, in works of most prominent authors, an ever obsessive theme of seeking the collective identity that is shaping in various forms of cultural and memory representation in every newly produced text as troublesome self-awareness of a world caught at the crossroads of cultures and worlds, “where surges of history clash”. From that direction, even though peculiarities of Bosniak literature’s poetic identity are important, even in the traditional description of diachronic literary – historical string certainly, however much significant is recognition of cultural and memory loci, formats and figures of literary tradition, confidently recognized in modern literature as the basic cultural foundations and archetypal texture of modern literary discourse. Therefore, we are having today shifting and alongside various critical and literary paradigms by which we always reread again the significance of tradition within the text of our own culture, where recognizing these values and constants possesses great importance within their inter-textual renewal, which transforms the representativeness of literary – historical range into a dynamic, polyphonic and polycentric mosaic of palimpsest recreating esthetically alive potentials of tradition.
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