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This article addresses the contemporary issues and challenges of the international environment, from the perspective of geopolitics, and focuses on understanding how all these elements affect the states' sovereignty. Thereby, the two main research questions are the following: How the geopolitical context changed after the end of the Cold War? and What are the new meanings and dimensions of sovereignty within the international system? We considered analyzing the geopolitical context after the Cold War being given the fact that the aforementioned moment was the last one that changed profoundly the international structure. Also, we assume that the nature of state sovereignty has altered in the post-Cold War period in order to reflect new trends of a changing global society
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A widespread method to obtain information in the activity of the Securitate was censoring the correspondence. The secret censorship of correspondence and postal parcels was conducted by ‘F’ Service of Securitate. The Service had as responsibilities the detailed inspection of the external and internal postal sending (letters, telegrams, parcels, press and prints) with the declared aim to prevent any possibility of using this means of connection by the ‘hostile elements of popular democracy regime’. The mission of censorship was to provide to the operational units materials ‘in connection to the activity of spies and counter-revolutionary elements’, which the censors obtained by reading the letters, to intercept the letters of the people already followed, but also to find out, at certain moments, the mood of various categories of citizens related to some events or decisions taken by the Party, Government, etc. It was completely forbidden the interception of correspondence sent or addressed to members of Coordinating Council of the Romanian Labour Party, Government, representatives of Ministry of National Affairs, Council of ministers, Embassy of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and associates of countries of ‘popular democracy’, Ministry of Home Affairs and offices of the newspapers ‘Scânteia’ and ‘Pentru pace trainică’. The ‘F’ Service had the obligation that, from the analysis resulted after the postal inspection, to draw notes, essays, summary in order to inform both the administration of Securitate and operational directions, as well as to confiscate or to destroy the postal sending, if this was deemed necessary.
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This paper explores the Yugoslav legal transformation and the specialist debate regarding divorce following the Second World War. Yugoslav post-war legal transformations were deeply influenced by the Soviet model, and by placing the issue of divorce at the fore, the paper examines how and which Soviet models were transferred. The focus of the analysis will be two crucial and interconnected problems regarding divorce practice: the enforcement of alimony payments and the panic over rising divorce rates. The paper argues that new post-war legislation was a progressive force that replaced very old legal codes and challenged well-established cultural practices. Resistance to new divorce practice was widespread, while powerlessness in ensuring alimony payments and the protection of dependants was one of the first failures of the Party’s post-war gender project.
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Slobodan Milošević started a wide political campaign in the late fall of 1987 in order to politically eliminate Ivan Stambolić. Even after the Eighth Session Milošević wanted to send a clear message to all of his adversaries – he is the absolute leader of the Serbian communist party and the Serbian nation. To that end he evoked the necessity of the „unity of socialist forces“ in order for the Serbian society to quickly emerge from a political, economic and moral crisis. At the same time, he was creating an image of himself as a man of action that doesn’t hesitate and does not waste time making „useless“ conversations. Through a well organized political action, Ivan Stambolić was removed from the most important state function in Serbia, and by doing so Milošević suffocated every opposition inside the Serbian communist party. As a leader, his offer was similar to Tito’s: egalitarianism, a simplified picture of the world and how it works, a new religion (belonging to a class was replaced by belonging to the nation), and – a vision of a common enemy. Dangerous channel was opened for collective venting of frustrations of the people. First among such enemies were „the forces defeated in the Eighth session“ and Serbian „bureaucrats and officials“, then Albanians and politicians from Vojvodina, then the Croats and Slovenians, and finally wider range of threats within and outside Yugoslavia.
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This article presents, in a synthetic way, the program of book distribution which was a collaborative effort of the US government, the East European diaspora and lovers of books forbidden behind the Iron Curtain. In 1956-1989, about ten million publications were purchased and published from the operation budget for citizens of the Soviet Europe. This paper situates itself in the mainstream of cross-border history. Previous studies of post-war Europe strongly stress the importance of the continent’s division into two parts isolated from one another. The author does not entirely deny this thesis, yet he points to the systematic transmission of Western ideas and values through the Iron Curtain and analyses the consequences of the cultural expansion of the Western world.
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The article is divided into five stories about monuments that were erected or taken down after the fall of socialism in Hungary. These stories offer a means for reflecting on the Hungarian attitude to history, which sometimes involves confrontation and a settling of accounts, and frequently, an escape from them. These monuments and related stories refer to the Treaty of Trianon, communist heroes, the 1956 uprising, the writer Albert Wass, and the German occupation.
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In the aftermath of World War II, the informal association of intellectuals known as Gruppe 47 found itself in a troublesome position in its attempt to rebuild a new political culture in postwar Germany. My analytical approach to the ideological controversies, paradoxes and inconsistencies of the group’s orientation will provide some relevant tools for explanation and put forward confrontational dilemmas for assessing the overall activities of Gruppe 47 members. This type of approach is risky and difficult for two main reasons: i) first, because the membership of the Group was non-permanent and circumstantial and ii) second, because the overall activity of the Group seemed to move indecisively between two main coordinates (i.e., an aesthetic and literary programme on the one hand, and a politics of culture / literature, on the other). Intuitively, I think that the study of literary culture in post-war Germany could function as a strong indicator of the status and transformations of political culture in this country and may be more successful than conventional historiography, political science or institutional theories in explaining what really happened in Germany in the period in question.
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The seat of the Charles de Gaulle Foundation is located in a building which in times past served as headquarters for the RPF, the party created by General de Gaulle. The General’s office with its original furnishing is open to visitors in Paris’s rue de Solférino. But the memory of France’s liberator in World War II who later became the first President of the Fifth Republic is kept alive not only by those premi-ses. On a recent visit to Paris I had the chance to meet Michel Anfrol, President of the Friends of the Charles de Gaulle Foundation, considered by many as “the living memory of Gaullism”. The former journalist, radio and TV presenter knew Charles de Gaulle personally. The stories he relates fascinate not only people interested in history and politics, but also those wishing to discover relationships between past and present. Michel Anfrol came to Hungary to participate at the international de Gaulle conference organised by Századvég Foundation, the Ministry of Justice and the National University of Public Service on 3 March 2016 and I made use of the occasion to interview him.
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The main Nikita Khrushchev achievement in the reforming of Soviet educational system was the introduction of the universal and compulsory education in an eight-year primary school. The school was called an incomplete secondary comprehensive polytechnical vocational school. This resulted in prolongation of the non-obligatory education in a high school to 11 years. This reform was revoked in 1966 by Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet Union returned to a ten-year secondary school. Despite his progressive reforms, Khrushchev continued the Stalinist methods of children and youth upbringing which stated that the labour is the best way to materialize the ideal of the communistic state. After the 1958 reform, practically all adolescents learning in a secondary school were forced to work or had their placements in workshops, plants or factories. This was called the ‘Polytechization’.
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For the Chinese in Malaya as in China itself, the word „bandit“ has a familiar sound, which is why it is not misleading them. For the rest of the world, however, the use of the term "bandit" puts the fighting in Malaya into a wrong perspective and makes it harder to understand the nature of an enemy who has been in the field for three and a half years. It‘s an enemy, who is currrently binding more than a hundred thousand men of the regular and aid police, as well as forty thousand men of the British, Ma-lay, and Gurkha groups - troops which, apart from the five battalions of the Malaysian regiment, could much better be used elsewhere.
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„The state of Israel", an official in Jerusalem recently said, "is not an ordinary melting pot but a high-pressure cooker." Since the state's formation almost four years ago, a colorful and almost overwhel-ming stream of immigrants has entered the country. When the State of Israel was established on May 4, 1948, 651,000 Jews lived here. In the past four years this figure has increased to more than double. The majority of the Jews who had immigrated to Palestine from 1918 to 1939 consisted of convinced Zionists, who, following a pronounced inner impulse, were settling in the country by a hard training for life as colonists. After the last war, the survivors of the European concentration camps and the im-poverished inhabitants of the Middle Eastern and North African ghettoes came to a large extent. This "gathering of the exiles," as the Zionists call it, is the pride of the young state, the moral foundation of its existence, but also its heavy burden and the cause of growing despair.
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