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This article aims at analysing the post-election political structure in Stargard Szczecinski in the years 2002—2014. The author presents the theoretical considerationson the subject together with the results of Stargard local government elections in the firstpart of the paper. She particularly emphasises the existing political configurations as well as analyses the intertwining of the political and administrative spheres at the localgovernment level.
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In this work, the author will deal with the nature of the political regime of Bosnia andHerzegovina. Attention will be given to institutional arrangements and their evolution in post-Dayton period, in order to answer the following questions: 1) what is the nature of the political regime; 2) what conditions it; 3) where can we see the limitations of the democratic potential of the political regime, and how to overcome these limitations. The work will be based on the following hypotheses. First, Bosnia and Herzegovina is defined as a democratic country by its constitution, but the model of democracy is based on the competitive-elitist democracy, in the form of consociation, which does not create the opportunities for effective participation of citizens in decision-making processes. Democracy,based on the struggle of national political elites, remains strictly indirect and political. Other spheres of life, such as the economy, are not democratized in the least. The author will analyze the possibility of enriching democracy in the political sphere (direct democracy).The second hypothesis will concern the institutional system of Bosnia and Herzegovina,which is structured so that the political institutions serve as a place of negotiation of the national political elites. While such nature of political institutions is largely conditioned by the nature of society and the historical and political circumstances at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, there was a partial evolution of the institutional system since 2000, although its nature is essentially not changed. The merger of national and civil in the functioning of the political institutions has not been achieved, although this would be the optimal solution.
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This paper discusses the process of accession of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the European Union and the Euro-Atlantic security system at a time when Bosnia and Herzegovina’s state structure is regulated under the Dayton Agreement, according to which the main pillar of the political order is the rule of three ethnic groups instead of citizens, which therefore instead of democracy introduced the rule of ethnocracy. The consequence is that even 20 years after Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina is still not a functional state, because the entities created byethnicity (Serbs in the Republika Srpska, Bosniaks and Croats in the Federation of BiH) have become self-sufficient (entitocracy) and disinterested in the creation of a single state policy. Therefore, BiH has no strategy of socio-economic development and lags behind in meetingthe requirements for joining the European Union, for which two-thirds majority of its citizens have voted. This paper offers proposals whose adoption would achieve at least some assumptions to accelerate the process of transition of Bosnia and Herzegovina from Dayton (chainedwith ethnicities and entities) into Brussels (dynamic-civil) phase of its EU accession.
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This paper elaborates the genesis of the establishment and development of political pluralismin Bosnia and Herzegovina starting from the hypothesis that the power of the ruling ethnicparties did not allow the building of consensus in the adoption of laws necessary for the development of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the post-Dayton period. Three ethnic parties: SDA, HDZ and SDS, after winning the first multiparty elections in1990, based the exercise of authority by the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s on the principle of partnership, and not on the democratic principle of establishing a coalition political agenda for the exercise of power in the won mandate. The partnership between the parties in government took place on matters where there was mutual consent. In the first post-war elections, held in September 1996, the same three ethnic parties won again: SDA, HDZ BiH and SDS, with 86% of votes of the electorate. Ethnic parties thus again after thewar gained the dominant power in the entity parliaments and the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to which the constitutional structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina defined in Dayton also contributed. In Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina they applied thispower in the form of partnership in government. What lacked was the determination of the coalition agreement and the political program of the coalition as the indispensable basis forconsensus in the adoption of laws. As a result, in the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia andHerzegovina there was no consensus between the ruling parties on the most important issuesfor the development of the state of BiH. It was not possible to strengthen the power of the Parliament and to develop parliamentary democracy. Laws promulgated by the OHR enabled major reforms in the process of integration of Bosnia and Herzegovina into the European Union. Instead of the power of the Parliament, we see the power of party elites. Instead of parliamentary democracy, we see partitocracy.
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Civil society and its consciousness must have their economic and social basis. There mustbe what is called “the middle class”. There is no middle class in Bosnia and Herzegovina, society is socially divided between the narrow circle of the tycoon-political oligarchy and the vast majority of impoverished people, without jobs and living at minimum of existence. Inequalities – financial and social – in Bosnia and Herzegovina are vast, and the factor thatenlarges them is the present discrimination (territorial, status, marginalized groups, etc.). The absence of the middle class is one of the reasons for the lack of democracy in our country.These are not economic and social conditions that allow the development of civil society. This on the other hand are the conditions for ideological and political manipulation of national or civic identity. For important, positive changes in BiH, development of civil society is an important prerequisite, especially the awareness that government serves the citizens, and not that they “need”the government just to maintain. The best way to achieve this is to learn the lessons, change the approach, first of all through support to policies to strengthen the real private sector and the permeation of civil and national identity. This is a good recipe against nationalism and“production” of national conflicts. Regardless of – in principle – good intentions, support to the development of civil society by international organizations gave very weak results.This “glass is nearly empty.” One of the main reasons are focusing on non-governmental organizations, with the neglect of other important “sectors” of civil society – unions, religious communities, academia, etc. It seems that these have been left to the party influences and manipulations.
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The Dayton Peace Agreement ended the war, ended human casualties and material destruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But everything else about it, including the documents adopted based on it, is a great burden for Bosnia and Herzegovina as a European society and a European country. Among these, usually the most prominent is Annex 4, the Constitution of BiH, reasons for which are more than obvious. Solutions in this Annex, in fact, today are the basis for the continuation of politic – or policies – that brought the war in the first place.Burden to European changes, however, does not lie only in Annex 4, but also in parts of the others, because they did not anticipate the instruments that would ensure their implementationin real life. Therefore, the most serious question arises: where and how to proceed? Futureof BiH in fact faces – and is offered – two scenarios. One is the defence and the elevation tothe status of a cult of the existing Dayton solutions – and this scenario is, without a doubt,a guarantee to the continuity of the processes that characterize Bosnia and Herzegovina for the last decade. The second is a review of the Dayton solutions and their upgrade with those that can ensure the process of European transformation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, both as a society and as a country. Forms of upgrades and interventions in existing solutions can bevaried, but all have in common the existence of a broad social consensus on the need, and the direction of interventions, or, if the same is not present, the pressure of the world centres of power that would result in this type of urgent system solutions.
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Post-war state-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina was largely encouraged and framed through the actions of the international community. One of the segments of this process in which the international actors took the coordinating, but not a proactive role, was education. By reducing its activities to coordination, it ignored the obstructive potential which an ethnically segmented school system can have on the state-building process. This has created the ground for the formation of students as subjects that will perpetuate the geopolitical visions of Bosnia and Herzegovina which the ethno-political establishment exploits to the end of ethno-mobilization. In this article, through our own and existing analyses of textbooks from the so-called national group of subjects, we intend to show patterns of forming students as real geopolitical subjects. Through a system of education structured in this way, structural violence against the Other became the norm within which imaginative geographies and narratives of the country were developed according to the dominant view of the majority.
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United States of America have imposed on Bosnia and Herzegovina a legal-political construct which is beyond its centuries-old history. It is not predominantly the result of an ethical imperative to stop the violence in the belly of Europe, but the spirit of pragmatism that, “insisting on design, not to make sense, insists on the creation instead of evolution” because “the desire of providing a safe haven is the main cause of defects in the old systems.” Pragmatism interpolates the political doctrine based on “lack of history” without much concern into the area of “surplus of history”. This, the United States as a striking example of the culture witha “lack of history”, imposed on Bosnia and Herzegovina, as an important cultural area witha “surplus of history”, a peace agreement without internal Bosnian-Herzegovinian historical sense, asking all relevant parties in the Bosnian political game to accept the meeting of ahistory (the new Bosnia and Herzegovina made of entities) and history (unambiguous evidenceof the legal-statehood existence of Bosnia and Herzegovina through time) in a possible contact point (which, in order to be plausible, was set in the plane of a history), which would,supposedly, enable BiH to survive as a political subjectivity. Such an approach, according to the pragmatic postulate that “recognizes as truth that which ispractically useful,” should not surprise us, and we should treat it as intentionally anti-Bosnian,or intentionally pro-Bosnian. It is simply an imperial approach that has been transformed into a multilateral approach through the work of one particular geo-political figure – the international community. Is the international community in Dayton-made Bosnia and Herzegovinaan acceptable linguistic construct that conceals the domination of the United States, or has the international community as an operational instrument of international policy relativized and degraded the key influence of the United States in a country which, from the standpoint of security management, is one of the biggest foreign policy successes of the US administration at the end of the twentieth century?
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The article describes political careers of members of local authorities in the context of leadership. The starting point of this report is the research's results of the municipalities in Rzeszów, which identified the leaders who came along there in 1990—2002. The context of the analysis is the four- dimensional leadership: psychological, legal-institutional, systemic-party, cultural and social. The aim of the article is to analyze the direction and the path of political careers of these leaders and to identify the determination of their careers.
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The aim of the article was to present origins and activity of city movements, such as smart city in Podkarpacie. Their initiators, both in Rzeszów and Mielec were local politicians, members of Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej (Democratic Left Alliance), and the newly created part}' assumed cross-party profile, associating first and foremost young people. The main aim of Rzeszów Smart City as well as Mielec Smart City was to stimulate active citizenship, intelligent development, and in case of Rzeszów, it was also political activity. It was indicated not only by coining on Facebook the flagship slogan 'We will not hand over the city to PiS', but also the public declaration of Konrad Fiolekas the candidate for the post of the Mayor of Rzeszów in pre-term elections'. The analysis was done with regards to non-party political players and it was evaluated whether the newly-formed city movements comprise a modern social initiative, or rather party activity under changed name.
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Since 2002 in Poland the mayors of towns there have been elected in direct elections. In 17 towns with county rights the same persons were chosen for the four times (elections of the years 2002, 2006, 2010,2014). They are so called "everlasting mayors" (multi-term mayors, incumbents). Their successes are the starting point to determine and generalize the indicators that can define their political position on the local politicalscenes.
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Two-Tailed Dog Party is among the few willing to challenge the status quo ahead of the referendum.
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The main aim of the article is a theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of the European Union on the democratization process in the countries of Eastern Europe. In its foreign policy the European Union, regarded as a normative power, has a strategic interest in stabilizing neighbouring countries through the export of democratic values in order to ensure its own security. It is claimed, however, that the European Union’s ability to influence the outside world is limited. The effectiveness of the EU’s conditionality policy is mainly related to the perceived benefits by third countries – in case of Eastern European countries a membership offer as the main incentive is not yet taken into account. Of great importance there is also a lack of common EU position towards Russia, which regards a European export of democratic values to countries of the post-Soviet area as a challenge to its position on the international arena. A European-Russian rivalry on the post-Soviet area can be then described using realist theory of international relations. The article ends with recommendations for the European Union.
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The aim of this article is to show the evolution of the model of power in the former Soviet states on the example of Belarus, Azerbaijan and Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan). The research task of this article is to answer the following questions: Why in the post- Soviet states the most attractive and the most effective is the quasi-authoritarian system? Which factors influenced on deep-rooted authoritarianism in analyzed counties? Why the post-Soviet republics society accepts such a model? And finally, are any chances of the regime’s transition towards the classical democratic system? The role of the referendum in increasing the power of the president will be explored, too.
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The Ukraine conflict escalated in early 2014 and resulted in Russia’s annexation of Crimea. This illustrates a troublesome pattern in the region. The author claims that this most recent political crisis is in fact emblematic of Russian’s narrative for some time, as exemplified by the Russia-Georgian War, or Putin’s support of Moldavian separatists. The article attempts to conceptualize Russian “mingling” in the region in light of several relevant events such as the recent creation of the Eurasian Economic Union as well as the annexation of Crimea as a deliberate strategy that reflects a much larger pattern of potential destabilization and expansionism, which begun more than a decade ago. The argument will be analyzed through the prism of two theoretical perspectives, the redefined domino theory and Kohr’s power theory of social misery. Moreover, the article will place a particular emphasis on the increasing influence of the concept of Eurasianism on Russian geopolitics in recent years. The increasing regional vulnerabilities in light of Russia’s antagonistic policy of Realpolitik, stresses the need for a protracted dialogue about other potential security threats that could further destabilize the region. The article discusses recent events in Ukraine as an emblematic example of Russian geopolitical strategy as a potential warning for other sovereign States in the post-Soviet “near-abroad”.
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This text deals with the issues of the financing of the political parties in Slovakia. We are coming out of the assumption that the Slovak system of the political party funding is based on the multi-funding, but the contributions from the government budget will form the most dominant source of the income. This system negatively affects the stability of the political parties and the party system because it does not equally contribute to building a party structure at the regional and local levels. Except earnings, we are also paying our attention to the questions that are connected with the expenditure of the political parties. Our consideration is based on the assumption that the well – institutionalized political parties spend a significant part of their budget for the financing of their organizational structures, i. e. they use their funds for the personnel costs and administrative costs. Regarding the nature of the income that is concentrated at the party in public office (or at party in central office), the majority of the party costs will be spent on the promoting of the party elite (during the election campaign), not on the building of the party structures.
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The low interest in the political questions of European integration in Central and Eastern European countries, which has sometimes lead to apathy, and in some cases to increasing Euroscepticism among the citizens, can perhaps be partially explained by the lack of expertise and interest among politicians. This article analyses data on the level of knowledge and position towards the European Union among Czech political elites in the Czech Republic. Using party manifestos and secondary literature, the authors present a conceptual map of the Czech debate among Czech political parties and party politicians on the EU. First, the main currents of the debate are shown, as well as, and especially, the superficial, vague and ideological nature of that debate. The key narratives are divided according to positive and negative attitudes toward the EU and European integration in general, as well as according to domestic or imported sources of a party’s view on integration. In the second part of this article, the broader views of Czech political elites who focus on EU politics are presented and discussed. Original data from the expert survey are presented. The authors show that the debate of “European” politics by the expert elite is much better structured and less ideological than among the politicians, although it is not quite as consensual as expected. The political narratives are present among the elites of European politics in the Czech Republic as well, which can hamper the necessary communication between politicians and the experts and, as a consequence, rather naïve and superficial features of the Czech political debate on integration tend to persevere.
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The piracy off the Somali coast was at its peak between 2009 and 2011, however, it still deserves attention considering the fact that Somalia is still being ranked as a collapsed state in various failed states indexes. The article examines the Somali piracy as a result of the collapse of state institutions and the strengthening of non-state actors, especially the armed forces and Islamist groups. The activities of the various pirate groups operating in the region and international mechanisms that have been adopted to combat and protect vessels off the Somali coast are evaluated. The main result of the article is that piracy emerged due to weakening and consequent collapse of the state institutions during the Somali civil war and is the result of the attempts to create alternative social and economic structures Therefore, its causes must be sought within the state, and therefore international mechanisms for combating piracy may not be successful without effective restoration of the state institutions based on traditional Somali social structures.
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German SPD is at present a democratic “catch all” party, which unites the people with various religious, ideological or economic courses, and which manifests peace, liberty, solidarity, justice, equality of the men and women, and the protection of the environment. However, in present, there is an opinion in the German party and political system that SPD goes through the deepest crisis since the beginning of the 21st century. Presented article deals with the analysis of the position and the activity of Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany in the German political system in the 21st century and focuses on the issues connected with this social-political crisis of the social democracy in the Germany. The aim is to inspect closer the issues of SPD and through the exhaustive analysis provide the answers on the questions whether the party faces the deep crisis, and how is this situation reflected and what steps are needed for the solution. The article has used predominantly the method of historical analysis, partly comparative method and theoretical method. The results are showing, that the main reason of the SPD misery is the loss of its own fundamental value oriented political identity caused by the concept of so called Third Way, demotivation and alienation from the member base, the absence of the charismatic leader. SPD has the long-lasting problem with the image and it needs to accomplish the analysis of its problems. The party needs to decide, what direction it wants to go in relation to the Agenda 2010 and the concept of the New Center, what conviction and idea it wants to represent to address the new electorate.
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