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Plus, bitter Albanian political rivalry immobilizes election commission and Putin grants Gerard Depardieu Russian citizenship. Around the Bloc is TOL's daily digest of the important, the trivial, the tragic, the weird, and the sober from its coverage region.
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Abstract: During the Yugoslav Wars of succession as many as three million people were displaced in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina by "ethnic cleansing" – a systematic policy of forced population transfer, based on the identification of target groups by ethnic, national, and religious characteristics. In some cases, "ethnic cleansing" was aimed at the physical destruction of an ethnic community (for instance, in Srebrenica), and yet, "ethnic cleansing" does not constitute in and of itself a genocidal act. Until today, causes and interpretations of "ethnic cleansing", as well as the total number of victims remain highly controversial and politically charged.
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Abstract: In the context of this article, political culture consists of the prevalent elite social representations of the political order and the norms derived from them. The article discusses the legacy of economic underdevelopment and the unfinished process of modernization of the Romanian society as the major determinants of contemporary Romanian political culture. A look at the evolution of the most important social representations held by intellectuals throughout the 20th century may provide some clues about the internal reasons for the failure of modernization.
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Abstract: The paper addresses three separate questions: the consequence of policies to manage the Kosovo question since September 1991; current alternatives and prospects in the definition of status, and recommendations for a policy of post-status transition. The current Proposal for a Kosovo Status Settlement is based on a set of compromises that could make the situation even more uncertain and make a solution difficult to reach. The article argues that there is a deep and inescapable tension in the most recent steps on status which needs to be recognized to escape the new stalemate that is being created.
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Abstract: Our research suggests continuing difficulties faced by the ICTY in establishing its legitimacy in the states over which it exercises oversight. Only some of these problems derive from pre-existing political orientations in support of the parties which organized and carried out violations of international humanitarian law. Other problems are more closely related to the ICTY's own procedures, to a lack of clarity regarding the purposes of the ICTY, and to the issue of communication between the ICTY and its local publics.
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Aktuelna pitanja daljeg razvoja našeg društveno-političkog sistema koncentrišu se danas oko izgrađivanja dosljedno samoupravnog metoda ostvarivanja uloge društveno-politlčkih organizacija kao integralnih dijelova tog sistema.
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Plus, oil majors compete for Croatian oil and gas tenders; Latvia’s controversial Ask.fm teen site relocates to Ireland. Around the Bloc is TOL's daily digest of the important, the trivial, the tragic, the weird, and the sober from its coverage region.
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Plus, SOCAR’s purchase of Greek company comes under scrutiny, and an aged Romanian accused of murdering dissidents says he was only following orders. Around the Bloc is TOL's daily digest of the important, the trivial, the tragic, the weird, and the sober from its coverage region.
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Plus, the Azerbaijani opposition holds a new anti-Aliev demonstration, and Poland’s Sikorski survives a no-confidence vote. Around the Bloc is TOL's daily digest of the important, the trivial, the tragic, the weird, and the sober from its coverage region.
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Plus, a Bosnian court strikes down the ‘two schools under one roof’ policy, and Washington ups the ante in its high-stakes influence game with Budapest. Around the Bloc is TOL's daily digest of the important, the trivial, the tragic, the weird, and the sober from its coverage region.
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Plus, Belarus expels a rights activist over traffic violations and a right-wing Polish politician says his case proves the ubiquity of police brutality. Around the Bloc is TOL's daily digest of the important, the trivial, the tragic, the weird, and the sober from its coverage region.
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A tale of two songs that brought East and West together through the ambiguity of metaphor.
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The year 1989 rendered a significant change for Denmark. For more than one century the country had to pursue a very passive foreign policy and its position was determined first by Germany (after the defeat in the Prussian-Austrian War in 1864) and later by the USSR (during the Cold War). The end of the Cold War brought about a new impulse for Copenhagen.
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The Republic of Lithuania won its independence again in 1990 after the dissolution of the bipolar world. The young state had to form its own foreign and security policy, which needed to correspond with new international security environment.This article uses the Copenhagen school security concept as the framework for analysis, which makes possible to study non-military aspects of Lithuanian security policy, various reference objects and securitizing actors. We study economical threats like the lack of strategic resources, environmental threats like the possibility of accident in the Lithuanian power plant Ignalina or in Russian North-Western power plants and social-cultural threats like organized crime. Finally, we analyze the Copenhagen security concept and its usefulness as an analyzing framework.
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Is the American unilateralism after 9/11 fueled by a realization of America’s unequalled military might in the world, or is it an expression of America’s cultural identity? The former explanation tends to describe the current American policy as “realist”, the latter describes it as “idealist”. This article argues that these two explanations may complement each other if we conceive of current American discourse as a combination of the “vulgar realism of force” and the “substantive idealism of good”. This synthesis of realism and idealism gravitates towards the idealistic pole since it is motivated by a profoundly idealistic desire to flee from “the autonomy of the political”, defended by classical realists from Machiavelli to Nietzsche and from Schmitt to Morgenthau and Kissinger.
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The Faludy Park near Toronto’s university district is named after the poet George Faludy. The author of My Happy Days in Hell survived terrorists and tyrants in various parts of the world before spending the last 22 years of his exile in an apartment overlooking the small patch of grass that now bears his name. Such literary gestures allow the neighbourhood dogs to pay their respects to poetry while doing their business. Toronto is a practical city.
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On 2 March 1949 a law was adopted under which all estates of fifty hectares or more and all model farms were nationalised. The deportation of the nobility and wealthy farmers in the early morning of 3 March 1949 was no small operation for the Romanian Communist Party. The militia and the Securitate had been set up only a few weeks previously. In those days the Party, helped into the saddle by the Soviets, needed above all a loyal assault division to get its regime of terror, torture and intimidation up and running. The deportation of large landowners was only the second major operation by the militia and the Securitate. It was important for it to go well.
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Once upon a time there was a country. With a MOO COW and a BUNNY living in it. Happily and unhappily by turns. This way one day, that way the next. The sun would rise, run its course, then sink behind the horizon. This is how this country was. Neither MOO COW nor BUNNY would really try to cast their own occasional happiness into words. Whenever they did feel that way, each would try to live life rather than to explain his or her special brand of happiness. This despite the fact that they did have reason to feel happy once in a while, although not in so much abundance as many surmised. This was a country complete with all its miseries. A country where the skies were broad, the heat of the sun scorching, and the wind cold as the leading edge of a razor; a country where you could stretch out on a warm sandy beach and easily freeze to death when the snow was more than knee-deep. You could wander across the plains, climb the mountains, plough the sky with your gaze, but also get dragged down in a grimy quagmire. It was a complete country. Peace to her ashes!
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I have lived in Pest County for the last 16 years. For 10 of them, I lived to the west of the Danube, but then felt compelled to move, due to the subtle yet unavoidable racism. Now, I am in my seventh year of living here in the eastern part of the county, where anti-Roma racist slurs are open and widespread – at the hairdresser, the market, in the stores, on the train, in the doctor’s waiting room – in short, anywhere there are people. And since most people do not know that I belong to that group, they speak their slurs in my presence – even in my home, or in my car, as when my wife asked me to drive someone home from the market in a neighbouring town.
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How can we explain the failure of Hungarian liberalism in a country that was expected to be a model of liberalisation? That is the basic question which Umut Korkut, the noted political scientist at Glasgow’s Caledonian University, discusses in his recent book on Hungarian politics. Liberalization Challenges in Hungary: Elitism, Progressivism and Populism, published in 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan, is based on extensive personal researches conducted in Budapest. As a former student of the Central European University, Korkut is well acquainted with Hungary and speaks Hungarian well. It is an asset few foreign researchers can claim and it should command the attention of those Hungarian intellectuals interested in how a perceptive foreign observer evaluates the recent history of our country.
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