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The consistent and logical assessment for the so-called “Socialist system” is „state Capitalism“ and all Marxist tenets about Capitalism -- class, class struggle, exploitation, nepotism, comprador bourgeoisie….should be applied to this system. Also the consistent and logical Marxist assessment of the actions of “Czarist Rus-sia" and USSR to Bulgaria would be being imperialistic. But although until 1940 Bulgarian Marxists sharply criticized „Czarist Russia“, Bulgarian Left today find it difficult to make such assessments.The reasons are not theoretical but psychological. As consecutive Marxists, they should come to uncomfortable conclusions about the System and about „Czarist Russia“ and USSR But for biographical reasons they have a deep personal sympathy for them. They believe that their prosperity has behaved to the "System", which in turn is the result of the occupation of Bulgaria from the USSR. And any negative assessment would be for them the attempt to destroy the world they have created and believe that this world was real, and challenging their value system. And often prefer to ignore all facts and logical analyzes, but to maintain their mental balance and to live in their artificial but beautiful world.
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The article discusses the process of strange transformation of Marxists into Putinists and Marxism in Putinism. This process is traced as a transformation of communist utopia and ideology into Orthodox fundamentalism and neo-eurasianism; the transformation of the totalitarian regime into a regime of "rival authoritarianism" and the communist nomenclature in a pseudo-capitalist oligarchy. The conclusion is that post-communism in Russia resembles Nazism rather than former communism.
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In times of exponential technological and communicational progress, the topic of the future of political communication is gaining more and more strength. As a result of the creation of many new means for communication and the evolution of the democratic society, there was born a new instrument of political power – public diplomacy. Many scholars have already developed large scale works on the topic about the role, the meaning, and the future of public diplomacy on the world stage. Here we have at hand the question for the future of Public Diplomacy in Bulgaria. This scientific topic is interrelated with yet another phenomenon – the European Union and the participation of Bulgaria as a member in it. This article reviews the future role of public diplomacy as an instrument of the sovereign assisted by the soft power of the EU and the significance of a strong and unified European Union.
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The accession of post-communist states into the Council of Europe system enlarged greatly the territory of effective protection of human rights in Europe and at the same time compelled the European Court of Human Rights to address the current effects of past violations of human rights by communist regimes. It gave the Court an opportunity to establish a legal standard of how to deal with matters such as the public presence of communist symbols and insignia, de-registration of neo-Communist parties, and the relevance of past membership in the Communist parties for an exercise of electoral rights in a newly democratized state. This opportunity was at the same time a challenge, and the Court was less than successful in meeting this challenge, despite the fact that it had already established the relevant legal standards when deciding about the cases triggered by the Nazi past. Without making it explicit, and without articulating openly the relevant differences, the Court has not established any equivalence between legal treatments of the aftermath of the two types of criminal regimes in the European recent past. The article discusses three recent cases belonging to these categories and concludes that there is a clear contrast between the Court’s treatment of “post-ommunist” cases and the same Court’s earlier treatment of equivalent “post-Nazi” cases; the article offers some explanations for the discrepancy which reflects a broader dualism in European collective memory of the past.
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The political integration of ethnic minorities is one of the most challenging tasks facing the countries of post-communist Europe. The roads to their political representation in the mainstream political process are numerous and diverse. The EU accession of the Central and East European countries has expanded the scope of the political participation of minorities by adding an electoral process at the regional level: the elections for members of the European Parliament. This article presents a comparative study of the ways in which EU-level electoral processes affect the scope and quality of minority representation on the example of the participation of ethnic political parties in Bulgaria and Romania in the 2007 and 2009 electoral cycles of the European Parliament.
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Accounts of the Final Solution in Bulgaria and Romania often stress the differences between the two countries, attributing Bulgaria’s relatively low victimization rate (18 percent) and Romania’s relatively high one (approximately 50 percent) to differing levels of anti-Semitism or local attitudes toward Jews. This article argues that, broken down by region, Bulgaria and Romania were actually quite similar, in that both countries participated in the victimization of Jews in newly acquired territories while protecting those in the “home country.” By investigating the complex negotiations between Nazi Germany and local officials in each of these countries, the author shows that because of their close alliance with Nazi Germany (and not despite this), the governments of Bulgaria and Romania were both able to protect their own Jewish citizens. Both countries essentially traded loyalty in military and economic affairs for concessions, delays, and limitations in the Final Solution. This observation has fascinating moral implications, since it suggests that countries could only protect their own citizens by cooperating with Nazi Germany. It also illustrates that far from being passive subjects of coercion, weak states in imperial relationships can actually bargain to change the terms of their own subjugation. Imperial hegemony is partly a product of negotiation and international contracting, not unmitigated coercion.
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A peculiar phenomenon that characterizes today’s Illiberal governments is that their advent to power is a legitimate process within the democratic rule; particularly, in post-communist countries like Hungary or Poland where constitutions and functional institutions stabilize and promptly certified by the European Union. In this paper, we set the scene for an ongoing theoretical debate developed between authors who stand for the liberal values priority and others who stand for democratic values priority. We think that the widespread eruption of illiberalism ensues from the decoupling of liberalism from democracy. Drawing on existing studies, the paper traces the essence and the unfolding of illiberalism, focusing the discussion towards other non-EU countries like Albania; to explore to what extent the country’s internal developments fit patterns of Hungarian-Polish model. We argue that the best solution to overcome illiberalism must come from within, similar to the Macedonian example.
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The issue of migration has become a paramount political concern. In this context, one can look at the emerging challenges that liberal democracy faces today, especially in Europe. Similar cases of democratic turbulence can be observed in America. Non-democratic countries are in a different situation. They do not have to deal with resistance from public opinion in the same way. Migrations, therefore, impose new realignments in democratic politics and obscure some older political divisions and tensions. This article examines the key political paradigm shifts that drive and open up migration to democratically organized societies in Europe. It starts with the fact that Europe has become the largest refuge for migrants in the world. With migrants comprising 10.4% of its population, the proportion of migrants in Europe is three times higher than the world average of 3.5%. From 1990 to 2017 the figure increased from 6.8% to 10.4%. Every third migrant in the world lives in Europe. The impact of globalization on increasing economic migration is also presented. Since 2010, politics in Europe has abandoned the desirable model of multiculturalism and turned to the concept of inter-culturalism. In this short span of time, political parties that use anti-immigrant views have taken off. The article draws particular attention to the situation in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. The message from citizens is that migration is a serious and highly inflammatory political issue and that anti-immigrant sentiment in European societies has become politically radicalized. Political forces that advocate for more radical solutions have stepped into this space and exploited it. The ‘mainstream’ parties no longer underestimate or ignore the issue of illegal migration. It is increasingly entering the compulsory corpus of their programs.
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Review of: Vladimir Ilić - Jova Bakića Evropska krajnja desnica 1945–2018, Beograd: Clio, 661 str.
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Over twenty-five years since the establishment of the multiparty system in Bosnia and Herzegovina, neither the electoral nor party system has been completed to the extent that it encourages the consolidation of parliamentary democracy. The profiling of the political spectrum is not based on standard or classical political and ideological dichotomies, for example, left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative, libertarian vs. authoritarian, and political parties can hardly be classified into classical political typologies: liberal, populist, conservative, social-democratic, socialist, green, etc. The lack of profiling on the political spectrum is a simultaneous cause and consequence of the lack of ideological pluralization and profiling of the electorate, and as one of the parallel but capital consequences it is also the impossibility of achieving political consensus for managing the development of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which determines the overall democratization process and profile parliamentary democracy. The final outcome is slow, incomplete and dispersive overall democratic processes, so the questioning the lack of political tradition and culture, and the reasons why Bosnian party pluralism has not yet profiled standard political and ideological doctrines shaped by the formed group attitudes of the public, political parties and movements, and the economic expression of these ideologies through economic and social development.
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The paper points to the lack of re-examination of the consequences of the longlasting and continuous nationalist actions of Serbia aimed at expanding and homogenizing the ethnic state, which is still plaguing international relations in the Balkans and Europe today. The long-lasting nationalist paradigm most brutally manifested in the wars of the 1990s continues to operate through tried and tested patterns of subversiveness, incitement propaganda, and irredentism in the areas that Serbia still counts as its political space today. The paper raises the question and seeks to answer whether European diplomacy has the power to curb the political-territorial pretensions of Serbia that it has traditionally manifested towards Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Northern Macedonia and Croatia. Then, is it certain that the European Union is finally transforming the Serbian nationalist state into a civilian democratic state, or will European leaders "moonlight" over the Balkans while Russian hegemonism uses Greater Serbian nationalism to destabilize Europe. How certain it is to succeed in doing so without the assistance of the United States of America, or will it be established that, to put it bluntly, only the US embassies in the Western Balkans have the power to show Balkan nationalist leaders how irrelevant they can be if peace is threatened again.
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2019. je dočekala 30. godišnjicu evropskog 9. 11. – pad Berlinskog zida. Za razliku od 11. 9. koji se desio 12 godina poslije, a koji mnogi sada povezuju sa završetkom angloameričkog dominantnog kapitalizma, za mnoge Evropljane 9. 11. označava kraj hladnog rata. Obaranje zida sa sobom je vrlo brzo donijelo kolaps komunizma – kako nam to zvanična priča veli. Stoga bi to trebao biti datum koji se svake godine proslavlja kao krajnje, zauvijek postojeće otvaranje puta ka univerzalnom trijumfu slobode, globalno rasprostranjenoj ružičastoj budućnosti – jednom riječju: konačnom samoispunjenju ljudske rase. Nasuprot ovome je drugo mišljenje koje slijedi drukčiju tvrdnju. Svi vodeći sociopolitički pokreti, od prosvjetiteljstva, pa sve do kraja 20. stoljeća, nudili su vizije za cijelu ljudsku rasu: univerzalno koncipirane (ili ideologizirane) za sve i svakoga.
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In this paper an author state a hypothesis that political extremism in New Zealand is a permanent phenomena that is present in New Zealand, which derives itself from globalization processes and evolves as the effect of idea’s diffusion. System theory is used as a theoretical perspective and a priori assumption that political extremism deepen state-phobia is made. Research methods such as lexical analysis and comparative analysis are used. During the research main extremist political trends are reveal, such as leftist, rightist, pro-ecological, islamic and postcolonial, and „lone-wolf” extremism. These phenomenon are highlighted in the perspective of potential security threats to the state. Ideological sources of extreme attitudes are revealed and shown in the most current political trends.
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Review of: Patryk Wasiak - Martin Štoll: Television and Totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia. From the First Democratic Republic to the Fall of Communism. Bloomsbury Academic. New York u. a. 2019. XXII, 282 S. ISBN 978-1501324758. ($ 53,99.)
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Review of: Hana Younis - Ehlimana Memišević, Sudovi: komparativna studija, Sarajevo: Centar za napredne studije, 2019, 462 str.
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The paper analyses the notion of alienation in a dual sense: first, as a significant articulation of philosophical and sociological problems in Yugoslav socialist thought and beyond, but also as a very present accentuation of the work conditions detected in industry. This double position builds a partial comparison with and analysis of the context of today’s working conditions in the “cognitariat” sector, but from which detection of alienation is almost completely removed and replaced with terms such as “hopelessness”, “indifference”, “futility”, “self-exploitation”, or “burnout”. The paper interprets the lack of such substitution, since alienation, despite the constantly emphasized abstractness of its meaning, connotes criticism, change and overcoming the current issues. This implies strong effort towards disalienation, which is not the case with the mentioned substitutive terms. For this reason, linguistic analysis and attempts to answer the question on the possibility of speaking and analysing a part of today’s, especially working, conditions in terms of alienation are a dominant part of this paper.
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A conversation with Basil Kerski, director of the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk. Interviewer: Iwona Reichardt
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In 2020 a research project dedicated to understanding the meaning of 1989 conducted a series of talks with intellectuals and scholars in Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania. It collected witness testimony of these events as well as interviewing the post-1989 generation in order to understand their relationship to the history of the transformation. This essay is based on the outcomes of these discussions, focusing primarily on the role and meaning of citizen actions.
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Review of: Kinga Anna Gajda - The Legacy of Division: East and West after 1989. Edited by: Ferenc Laczó and Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič. Publisher: Central European University Press / Eurozine, Budapest/Vienna, 2020.
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