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Since the elections in Belarus on August 9th 2020, both the image of this country once portrayed as “the most severe dictatorship in Europe” and its people have significantly changed. International audiences can now see that every weekend – sometimes even on weekdays – large crowds come to the streets of Belarusian cities to express their discontent with the forged election results. The people have been demanding freedom and fair elections, thereby showing their attachment to common European values. Citizens in Belarus have finally awakened and are working towards change.
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The focus of this paper is on the concept of poverty and its implementation into regulations, policies and practices for the protection of the poor during the period in which socialism was the official doctrine in Yugoslavia (1945-1991). The introductory part of the paper is followed by the Marxist explanations of poverty and their adaptation in socialist Yugoslavia. The description and analysis of poverty during the socialist period in Yugoslavia, as well as its ideological and administrative constructions and reconstructions in and through the social welfare system are put forward in the central part of the paper. The objective of the paper is to present the way that the concept of poverty was framed in the policy field, how it was interpreted, as well as how thesepolicies were implemented with a view to guaranteeing “freedom from necessity” in the society of post-war Yugoslavia. The methodological approach deployed is the qualitative analysis.
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Reflecting on the May 2019 European Parliament elections, the EU democratic institutions are in need of efficiently responding to the discrepancies between public agendas and policy-making (as shown in the Macedonia naming dispute), and the threatening dynamics of authoritarian populism, as well as to unpredictable reactions from diverse groups and citizens, especially from the neglected, excluded and marginal ones. These citizens cannot handle complexity and react by voting for protest candidates/movements and supporting radical, yet oversimplified and inadequate, solutions to complex problems. Given the potentiality of crisis cascades and that an over-standardized “one size fits all” approach does not work anymore, the EU policy-making experts should arguably turn their analytic attention to existing drivers of political destabilisation by adopting new knowledge bases and sources. This pertains to a fresh theoretical understanding of nonlinear sociopolitical phenomena (from populist reactions of any kind to social media behaviours), that is, a deeper, complexity-friendly approach drawn from new scientific advancements and coupled with innovative policy designs, aimed to rebalance the system and to defend the European project against further failures.
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Given the current pandemic coronavirus, the paper analyzes the state’s response to the disease caused by the virus (COVID-19) from the standpoint of two neighbouring countries i.e. the Republic of Croatia and the Republic of Serbia. Special attention was paid to the states’ response to the pandemic from human rights perspective. The research ws conducted into the patterns of their “struggle”, especially as regards the human rights restrictions they had opted for within their constitutional framework. The starting point of the paper was that human rights often are the victims of the crises and that they are easily restricted for a longer periods. In this respect, the author deals with possible answers to the questions about the quality and content of human rights, and how the protection of human rights was ensured in these exceptional circumstances. This legal framework was linked to current statistics on the number of COVID-19 cases. Having analyzed the response of the two states, it could be noted that both states have constitutional provisions governing the state of emergency, allowing them the rule of law in these exceptional circumstances. Both constitutions recognize a list of human rights that may be derogated in state of emergency. However, in Croatia, the state of emergency was not introduced, and the human rights were restricted in accordance with the given epidemiological situation. In Serbia, the struggle against COVID-19 took place in state of emergency and was marked by an extremely restrictive regime of human rights, which was partly in conflict with the constitutional order. The constitutional concept of absolute protection of human rights, in their broadest sense, had proved unsustainable in practice.
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Polki i Polacy doświadczają głębokiej zbiorowej przemiany, jaką przeżywają też inne nowoczesne zbiorowości. Sytuacja w Polsce jest lokalnym symptomem kryzysu interregnum i wyczerpania modelu cywilizacyjnego. Tych procesów społecznych doświadczamy w Polsce, czyli wszędzie.
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The regional government of the autonomous region of Catalonia and the central government of Spain have started a public conflict in recent years. The situation, originally domestic, has spread internationally in an effort of the regional government to attract external support to their political claims. The EU has become the object of desire of both contenders seeking international legitimacy for their actions. The current research aims to clarify the three-way relations and tries to establish the truth about the different positions held in this conflict.
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In the 2017 German election, the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) did exceptionally well among workers. AfD’s electoral success can be attributed to their new focus on social policy, which is inconsistent with the neoliberal programme of the party. They combine social issues with nationalism and advocate privileges for Germans in the distribution of social benefits. This study investigates AfD’s new interest in social issues and the programmatic contradictions which accrue from it. It was found that AfD with its ideological incoherence conforms to Luke March’s definition for social populist parties. AfD turned to social populism because it makes them more attractive to workers, not because of their genuine interest in social issues. The party now has adopted a strategy of ambivalence, representing neoliberal and social populist positions at the same time; and it can be expected that they will play with this ambiguity in the future.
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Throughout the history of the world, one of the attitudes that individuals have been subjected to, and perhaps the most important one, has been discrimination. Discrimination is the prejudice treatment of a person or group due to some of their characteristics. This behavior can be positive or negative. However, discrimination is generally a concept that has a negative tune. Discriminatory thoughts and practices are present in the background of all threats and violations against fundamental human rights. Discrimination in matters such as religion, language, race and gender causes violations of human rights. God defines man as a being that he breathed from His own soul. Regardless of individual’s race, language, color and gender, God gave human beings great values, deemed worthy in the Quran. Everyone who believes or does not believe is equal before the law. In this study, based on the equality in question, it will be tried to mention the discrimination against women in Iran's legal system.
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This article investigates voter behavior in the 2019 Lithuanian presidential elections. Even though they appear as first-order (citizens elect an executive that enjoys considerable powers), Lithuanian academic literature has rather neglected this topic in the recent decades. In this article, I employ data from a post-electoral survey conducted after the most recent presidential elections and investigate what kinds of voters and motives were hiding beneath the results of the first and second round in the 2019 presidential elections. Results show that the cleavages that are relevant in the Seimas elections (ethnic and evaluations of Soviet times) also influence the vote choice in the presidential elections. Analysis shows that a ideological cleavage related to social liberalism may becoming important in Lithuania. Lastly, there are signs of retrospective voting, as the voters that evaluate the economy better were more inclined to vote for the presidential candidate of the governing coalition. However, the overall effect is not strong.
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This paper considers the issue of the influence of social media on politics in Russia. Having emerged in the late 1990s as a tool for informal communication, social media became an important part of Russian socio-political life by the end of the 2010s. The past two decades are a sufficient period of time to draw some intermediate conclusions of the impact of social media on the political development of the country. To do this is the main goal of the paper. Its main body consists of three parts. The first chapter gives a general characterization of Russian social media, its significance in terms of influencing the formation of public opinion, public debate, and the socio-political agenda in the country. The second chapter examines the use of social media by the Russian opposition and protest movements. The third chapter analyses the use of social media by the Russian authorities.
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Interview with Yves Mény by Dominykas Kaminskas
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Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán nearly ship-wrecked the EU’s summit in December 2020. A new state-of-law mechanism, to be introduced in early 2021, had triggered a veto threat by Hungary and Poland, the two most “illiberal” members of the EU. The right-wing populist governments in Budapest and Warsaw framed the state-of-law mechanism as an infringement of their national sovereignty. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as the leader of the member-state presiding over the rotating European Council at the time, succeeded to forge a difficult compromise with Orbán. This contribution examines the sovereignty concept brought up in the argumentation and discourses of the Orbán government. It turns out that Orbán and his strategists heavily rely on the theoretical concepts of the controversial German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. It seems that the autocratic rule of the Orbán government, rhetorically justified by a Schmittian sovereignty claim, only serves one purpose: to rob the country and to enrich his family and a small number of crony capitalists, created by him and dependent on him.
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The Veterans’ Federation (later: Federation of Veterans’ Associations) of the People’s Liberation War of Yugoslavia was founded in 1947 as a socio-political organisation of People’s Liberation War veterans and active participants of the People’s Liberation Movement, with committees formed according to the territorial principle—from the Federal, through republican and provincial, to municipal and local committees. It was characterised by a well-developed system of operation focused on the systematisation of veterans’ care and all forms of material, social, and health care for members as well as preserving and evoking public memory of the war. Combativeness and vigilance became high priorities of its socio-political work, especially from the mid-1960s and early 1970s, when members of the Veterans’ Federation became politicised in the wake of important socio-political changes. Simultaneous reorganisation-related changes and the activation of new municipal committees contributed to the intensification of the work of local veterans’ organisations, which manifested as the establishment of some new commissions and, in the following years, an influx of new members and a closer cooperation with other social and socio-political factors in the municipalities. This paper first describes the founding of the Veterans’ Federation of Yugoslavia, its structure and most important fields of activity, and then the formation, structure, and activities of the Municipal Committee of the Federation of Veterans’ Associations in Labin, which, together with other municipal veterans’ committees in the Socialist Republic of Croatia, represented the focus of veterans’ activities regarding quality of life improvements of its members and preserving the memory of the People’s Liberation War in the local community. This paper examines the most important changes in the Federation of Veterans’ Associations’ mode of operation, describes the local strategies of ideological work and work on creating a culture of memory related to the wartime and revolutionary past, and the ways in which the veterans’ organisation resolved the material and social-health issues of its members, and therefore influenced their quality of life. The research was based on materials of the Republican Committee of the Federation of Veterans’ Associations of the Socialist Republic of Croatia and the documentation of the Municipal Committee of the Federation of Veterans’ Associations in Labin, which has been mostly preserved for the late socialist period.
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In this work, the author underlines the importance of the Association “Napredak” in the cultural enlightenment and advancement of Croatian national conscience among the population of Gospić. This association enabled the education of youth in Lika, one of the poorest regions of Croatia. The preamble of its charter explains how the association was formed during Austro-Hungarian times. After the introduction of King Alexander Karadjordjević’s dictatorship, the chapter of Napredak in Gospić was dissolved (1932). The chapter was revived in 1935, and successfully continued to reduce illiteracy, increase its own literary publications and organize cultural life. Because of the outbreak of World War II, the work of the association slowed down, and after the war, Napredak was outlawed.
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The article characterizes the most important changes in the school system undertaken in 2015—2019 and the political context of these changes. The author analyzes the increase in compulsory education age and the assumptions of the education system reform as a result of which junior high schools were closed. The next part presents the public opinion about the Polish school and its implemented change. The final issue taken up in the study is the results of the PISA 2018.
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This article deals with the role of the Croatian Union {HZ) in the political life of Slavonia and Western Srijem in a relative short, but dynamic period. On the basis of archival sources, party papers, and literature the establishing of party organizations, as well as the growth of its influence in cities and market towns and the penetration into rural centers is being researched. Data about the location and role of the HZ in local elections and the achieved results are presented.
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The author publishes eight letters of the Croatian politician and publicist Andrija Torkvat Brlić to his teacher Ivan Filipović from the period 1848-1863. They contain some important information about the history of Croatian political movement in 1848 and the basis of Brlić's understanding of the revolution in 1848 in the Danube region, the relationship towards ban Jelačić, German nationalism and Catholicism in the period of reaction in the 50-s of the XIX century. Letters from the 60-s are important for how Brlić understands Croatian politics at the time of the session of the Ban conference at the end of 1860 and for Croatian-Serbian relationships and their acceptance of the Karadžić thesis of common identity of the Serbs and the "štokavian" dialect community.
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Review of: Zdenka Baždar - ZLATKO VIRC, HRVATSKI SOKOL U SJEVEROISTOČNOJ HRVATSKOJ, Slavonska naklada "Privlačica", Vinkovci 1998., 203 str.
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