Around the Bloc: Kerry in Moscow to Push for Cooperation in Syrian Conflict
Trip comes as Syrian rebel group denies receiving Russian support.
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Trip comes as Syrian rebel group denies receiving Russian support.
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Outgoing premier says opponents mounted an organized campaign against her.
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Premier Fico threatens lawsuit at European Court of Justice over mandatory quota scheme.
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Top aide says government may let migrants arriving from Croatia pass through its territory.
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Ukraine’s Embassy in Astana demands explanation from Kazakh ministers.
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Moscow says war games are unjustified since Russia has no plans to invade.
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Ukraine arrested man with big weapons cache, but French prosecutor says he was likely just a gunrunner.
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The smallest Balkan country is finding itself caught between a traditional friend and a new ally.
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The Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) won a resounding victory last week in parliamentary elections after an economic downturn in recent years.
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The public perception in Romania regarding the Syrian refugees has dramatically changed within a few months in the sense of rejecting the idea of receiving immigrants on Romanian territory. In August 2015 the polls indicated that Romanians were in favour of accepting the immigrants, while in September 2015 more than half of the respondents declared they were against receiving refugees. What kind of narrative was used by the Romanian politicians to cover the “refugee/migrant crisis”? This study tried to establish the ways in which social media have been changing Romanian perception related to refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. In this research, we have monitored discourses of xenophobia and poisonings that occurred in the Romanian social media. A few Romanian politicians have aggravated the immigrant related debate via their personal social media accounts. The former Romanian President, Traian Băsescu, was one of them. As the EU public debates on whether the refugees’ quotas should be mandatory or volunteer have scaled up, the people's perception was altered immediately after the discourse about rejecting the refugees has intensified in the online environment.
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The aim of this work was to point to some of the more or less visible and subtle mechanisms of production of violence in post-Dayton BIH, referring at the same time at some existing answers and resistance. Although some of existing answers to violence in BIH were exposed to critical lense, the aim was to cross deficiences of existing forms of resistance.
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Democracy and democratic education are interdependent. Individual rights and sovereignty of a state whose citizen individual is are deeply interwoven. Freedom of a state mirrors in its capability to follow goals that have been elected by the power of its citizens‟ will.
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The paper‟s methodological basis deals with the issue of legitimacy and defining the titular sovereignty in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. On that trail, the paper studies the problem of categorizing the concept of "sovereign constituent peoples - could there be "sovereign Serbian", "sovereign Croatian" and "sovereign Bosniak" peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and whether or not these terms are justified. Pursuant to the existing sovereignty theories and their practical application, the paper explicitly concludes that individual ethnic groups cannot bear sovereignty, but only in its totality as a political people of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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The sovereign rights of Bosnia and Herzegovina are being disrupted, i.e. undermined through the attempts of contesting and dividing it. Global developments - from the Načertanije to Memorandum I or II have always facilitated the undermining of the Bosnia and Herzegovina‟s sovereignty. Vicinal irredentist1 projects at the territorial expense of Bosnia and Herzegovina have essentially functioned in a form of alliance or agreement. This paper provides a brief overview of examples how the BH sovereignty has been undermined in certain historical periods. All periods are connected - they form a part of a process with the sole goal of contesting the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina; so the neighbors could disintegrate, carve up and divide the BH territory. The aggressive manipulation of the past for the purpose of achieving political goals receives the paper‟s special attention. Those goals involve making changes in the demographic and land ownership structure. In addition to external factors, the internal factors are also active. The main feature running through all periods has been the constant striving of eastern and western vicinal nationalisms to disintegrate Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a political framework of living, is sovereign from the full social structure‟s annihilation and forming of a new bipolar structure of wealthy and poor individuals, when taking into account all “modern trends” BiH is involved in, regarding the neoliberal ways of seizing a part of or the entire state sovereignty through the contractual parties‟ power. The BH territorial organization follows the principle “three parts make Bosnia complete” (Filandra, 2012:44), i.e. the idea of territorial nationality. The time will prove will anything remain from the BH historical peculiarity as a whole space and multi-ethnic society. However, the international institutions vouch for its completeness.
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This paper problematizes the question of (internal) sovereignty of post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina. The phenomenon of the efforts to construct Bosnia and Herzegovina through peace treaty which transformed the conflict into a peace process, as a post-sovereign non-state on the basis of the sum, or the differentiations of its ethnic-territorialities should be examined in the context of international and geopolitical conditions from the time of Dayton. From the first aspect, the issue of the sovereign in Bosnia and Herzegovina will be problematized, whether it belongs to its institutions, entities or the constituent peoples, while from the second the impact of the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, institutionally and politically presented through OHR, will be analyzed thus demystifying the background of the post-Dayton constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina as an improvised, scenario-state. In this way, the Bosnian interventionist experiment led by the United States is trying to be shown as the cornerstone which established its unipolar, post-Cold War foreign policy, making it a global hegemon, and Bosnia and Herzegovina as an experimental area of the international community led by the United States.
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Taking into regard the crucial facts in the acquisition and development of Bosnia and Herzegovina through the turbulent course of its history, one can rightly conclude that it is about a country with too little geography and too much history, a country placed at the crossroads of the worlds and constantly affected by big powers, the country that has been since the beginning of time influenced by cultural, political and religious waves, and taken by conquerors of different races, religions and ideologies. In such political environment, in relations of political influence in the acquisition, development, lost, recovery, as well as erosion of the state sovereignty, there are elements of the overall national, cultural, religious and any other constituents of the Bosnian being in such polychromic metamorphosis. In this sense, at the debate on the subject ” The Sovereignty of the State of Bosnia and Herzegovina” of 25 February 2016, organized by the “Pregled” Journal‟s Board of Editor to mark the occasion of 24th anniversary of the Referendum on independence and sovereign Bosnia and Herzegovina, I tried to give my contribution by focusing and emphasizing on the forms of Bosnian statehood that in different time periods and forms of political authority had qualitatively different forms of sovereignty and identity. One question was permeating throughout this long way of development, both in periods of full and limited the sovereignty of foreign rule, “To whom Bosnia belongs?” Of course, that question was raised without taking into regard BH personal sovereignty, integrity and its nation(s). In this sense, the paper attempts to focus on certain milestones and reminiscences of Bosnian sovereignty and identity, as well as its attempts to deny, endanger, perfidiously and brutally dilute it, as it was done in the Dayton Peace Accords and continuing to divide Bosnia and Herzegovina in a perfidious manner.
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The issue of sovereignty always actualizes the commitment and pointing to the actual holders of real power and authority in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which takes controversial views and interpretations of the constitutional reality and political situation in our country. Sovereignty as a theoretical concept, is defined as the exclusive quality of a holder in the typical modern state, the category different to Bosnia and Herzegovina, according it‟s state organization, political system, and functioning of the state institutions. Pathological functioning of anatomically unique state organization, is leading to persistent tendencies of changes in legal supremacy as a main determinant of internal sovereignty in favor of the final interpreter of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the owner of so called Bonn powers, adopted in 1997. The basis of the forthcoming analysis, which entails a number of issues, is a comparison of decision-making process in Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the action of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1997. until today, especially taking into account that the legal supremacy should be exclusive right of one subject to create and implement its own legal norms. The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina in Annexes 4 and 10, supplemented by the so called Bonn powers in 1997, accords two possible entities for creating law in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and introduces complex legal discussion in context of indivisibility of sovereign , as a mostly unknown fact in theory of constitutional law. It‟s undoubtedly shown that the Institution of the High Representative in period 1997 until 2007, along with the decisions of the constitutional interpreter, the institution of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is the main factor of creating law and legislative contribution of factual changing the Constitution, as well as factor of improving determined competencies of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The empirical analysis in this paper also indicates a change in focus and direction in the creation of law in Bosnia and Herzegovina, when institution of the High Representative since 2008 until 2011 partially, and since 2011, completely, is entering a phase and the role of pure supervision of the implementation of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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The text gives a short analysis of grounding the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina on UN Charter in combination with the Washington Agreement. The paper subsequently lists the UN Charter‟s peace provisions and Higher Representative‟s legal position in regard the peace preservation in B&H. The peace observing as a sine qua non of both BH and regional stability must be enhanced by amending the Constitutions of BiH, FbiH and RS. This goal can be achieved by achieved by harmonizing the a) BH Constitution (Annex IV respectively) with the general and particular international standards of UN, Council of Europe, European Union in accordance with the Bosnia and Herzegovina‟s continuity in international relations; b) the Constitutions of FBiH and RS with the BiH Constitution by abolishing the majority of first generation provisions on human rights and fundamental freedoms, and certain provisions regarding the administrative and legal order of BiH and two entities, and c) changes to the BH Constitution, the Constitutions of FBiH and RS through decisions rendered by constituent and legislative authority. The opening of a discussion relating to the reform of BH legal order in international EU organizations with whom BiH has entered into international legal relations is presented instead of conclusion in the end of the paper.
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