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Veliki istoričar religije Žan Delimo koji nas je napustio početkom ove godine zasigurno bi bio fasciniran pandemijom korona virusa koja predstavlja svojevrsni odjek njegovih radova posvećenih epidemijama kuge i kolere. U svojoj knjizi „Strah na Zapadu“, objavljenoj 1978. godine, posvetio je posebnu pažnju društvenim posledicama različitih epidemija. Naravno, treba se kloniti svake sumnjive istorijske paralele („stare slike u novim ramovima uvek izgledaju lošije“, govorio je Tokvil), pa ipak, u ovom slučaju postoji dovoljno materijala za razmišljanje, što nije promaklo ni nekim učesnicima razgovora na društvenim mrežama. Ovde objavljujemo nekoliko odlomaka iz ove sjajne knjige, uz ljubaznu dozvolu izdavačke kuće Fajar (Fayard). Međunaslovi su redakcijski.
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Nakon što ga je pogodila serija trauma, svijet se je našao u nedvojbeno neviđenoj situaciji. Nije pritom toliko riječ o tisućama mrtvih, eksploziji bijede i nestašice (čak i tamo gdje toga već dugonije bilo) – jer na sve je to svijet odavno naviknuo. Jedinstvenost je sadašnje situacije, pojavno, iskazana time što je trenutno gotovo polovina čovječanstva u kućnome pritvoru. Ispod te pojavnosti događa se zbiljski prijelom; dalo bi ga se prispodobiti moralnome šoku s kojim se je, prije više od pola tisućljeća, Amerigo Vespucci susreo na Zelenortskim otocima – sve što je kod nas zabranjeno, kod njih je dopušteno, i obratno (vlasništvo, brak…).
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Between 18 May and 8 June, 2013 the authors have collected data from a representative sample of 1,232 Hungarians from Transylvania with the purpose to examine the political behavior of the aforementioned community within the political spaces of both Hungary and Romania. While closely related to a research project (entitled 'Ethnic parties, voting behavior') carried out within the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, the present research has extended its focus to Transylvanian Hungarians'voting behavior outside Romania. This change of perspective has been necessary because on 26 May 2010 the Hungarian Parliament adopted the amendment to the 1993 Law on Hungarian citizenship by introducing the simplified naturalization procedure, thus enabling Hungarians from the neighboring countries of Hungary to obtain Hungarian citizenship without residency. Moreover, the new Hungarian election law adopted in November 2011 allows Hungarian citizens without residency in Hungary to vote in the Hungarian Parliamentary elections (on candidates from national party lists). As a consequence, the political, or voting behavior of Hungarians from Transylvania needs to be analyzed by taking into account this perspective as well.
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Pitanje ekonomskih posledica pandemije već je uveliko aktuelno. Mnogi se pitaju kako će izgledati svet posle okončanja preduzetih mera, koje su teško pogodile svetsku ekonomiju. Odgovori su različiti, optimističnih projekcija gotovo nema, osim stidljivo izraženih nadanja. Iako su gotovo svi ubeđeni da posle krize povratak na business as usual neće biti moguć, nema baš nikakve garancije da će neminovna promena doneti više solidarnosti i pravedniji sistem od onog koji smo poznavali pre krize. A taj je sistem bio izrazito nepravedan, sve njegove socijalne malformacije ispoljavaju se upravo u ovoj krizi i umnožiće se po njenom okončanju i prestanku neposredne opasnosti od zaraze.
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MIKSER, Dušan Grlja: O jednoj drugoj pandemiji – Ekonomska ideologija nezavisnosti i širenje bolesti zavisnosti; ŠTRAFTA, Aleksandra Sekulić: Oktobrova nesetnica; ZID, Novo doba: Robodoba; VREME SMRTI I RAZONODE, Eboni Stjuart: Volim ponedeljke
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The main topics of the NATO Vilnius Summit held on 11–12 July were deterrence and defense, Ukraine’s future membership of NATO, and deepening relations with partners in the Indo-Pacific. The Alliance is partly returning to the defense planning processes and structures that were in place during the Cold War, but which NATO abandoned in the 1990s. The adoption of three regional defense plans constitutes a structural change in NATO’s approach to collective defense, but will require implementation and funding in the years to come.
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Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to India in February this year was unlike his other foreign trips. This visit was important not only politically but also economically: the German chancellor was accompanied by managers of companies such as Siemens, ThyssenKrupp, Deutsche Post and SAP. This once again proves Germany’s growing interest in building stronger relations with India. In June 2022, Scholz invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a G7 meeting at Schloss Elmau. Only two months earlier, Modi had paid an official visit to Berlin during the sixth bilateral intergovernmental consultations. In February this year, in addition to the chancellor himself, Christian Lindner (FDP) and Annalena Baerbock (Greens) visited India. Their visits were part of meetings of the finance and foreign affairs ministers of the G20 group.
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In late 2020 and early 2021, Israel established official diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain (the Abraham Accords), renewed its relations with Morocco, and took steps towards establishing relations with Sudan, in a series of developments that occurred with extensive US involvement. These were Israel’s first normalisation deals since the agreements with Egypt (1979), the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO, 1993) and Jordan (1994). The following factors paved the way for this process: changes in the region related to the aftermath of the Arab Spring (the desire of Arab regimes to consolidate power, also by countering radical Islam that feeds on the struggle against Israel), the growing Iranian threat, US policy, as well as economic and energy transitions.
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has challenged the security of the countries of NATO's eastern flank on an unprecedented scale. The Baltic states, the Visegrad Group and the Black Sea states are all situated in the neighbourhood of Ukraine or Russia. Due to the invasion, the sense of threat posed by Russia has escalated significantly, although Russia had already been seen as a threat in the region since at least the annexation of Crimea in 2014. All these countries are advocates of strengthening NATO’s collective defence and allied presence on the eastern flank. Most of them are among the top contributors to the political and military support provided to Ukraine. Defence policy and the modernisation of the armed forces have clearly gained priority throughout the region.
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On 24 August 2021 Ukraine was celebrating the beginning of the fourth decade of its independence. Selected units of its Armed Forces paraded through Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s main street. It would never have occurred to the Ukrainian citizens and politicians or foreign guests who gathered on that day in Kyiv that half a year later the same units would face a full-scale invasion, and even more so, that six months after invasion they would still be successfully defending themselves. After six months, war is slowly becoming the new normal. Although Russia is trudging towards the borders of the Donetsk oblast in the east, and Ukraine still lacks sufficient forces to launch a counteroffensive in the south, the series of explosions at military facilities seen in August in Crimea, which has been occupied by Russia since 2014, shows that Kyiv has the potential for offensive actions. The Ukrainian public is getting poorer and increasingly tired, but it still remains resolute in resisting the aggressor and supporting the government’s policies. Only a small minority believe that Ukraine should put an end to the war at the price of political concessions, and the view that territorial concessions should be made remains a marginal one. The economy is also adapting to the wartime conditions. Despite the deep crisis, the decline in exports is abating, and companies are resuming their businesses or moving them to safer areas of the country while looking for new sales channels abroad. However, the state budget is still dependent on financial support from the West, and this will not change in the coming months.
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Recent weeks have brought further displays of Russia’s escalating aggressive rhetoric and actions towards Ukraine, including troop movements near its border, as well as use of energy as leverage. This raises questions about Moscow’s intentions. Both the statements of Russian leaders and the policy of the Russian Federation in recent years indicate that it has not abandoned attempts to achieve one of its main policy objectives: restoring control over Ukraine. This is despite the fact that its actions to date – both limited military aggression and political, economic, and propaganda pressure – have only moved it further away from this goal. In the current conditions, with the stalemate in the Donbas conflict continuing, the Russian Federation is faced with a choice of its future strategy towards Ukraine. It has two main options: to escalate the armed conflict in the Donbas in order to achieve a rapid breakthrough, or to intensify long-term pressure, i.e. to play for Kyiv’s gradual exhaustion. The choice of strategy depends on the Russian perception of the situation, the attitude of Ukraine itself, and the behaviour of key Western actors.
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A year after the end of the second Karabakh war, the situation in the South Caucasus evades simple definition. On the one hand, it seems relatively stable: most of the provisions of the tripartite Statement that gave rise to the end of the fighting are being implemented. Moreover, apart from a defeated and weakened Armenia, all the actors involved in the war have reasons to be satisfied: Azerbaijan has regained control of most of the disputed territories and has proved its strength; Turkey, which supported Baku, has reaffirmed and expanded its influence in the region; Russia has strengthened its position as a regulator of the conflict, as mediator and guarantor of the agreement. On the other hand, however, the region is much more ‘deregulated’ and unstable than it was before the war: the ceasefire on the Karabakh front is based on a document of low formal status, as the real peace process is still frozen; the sense of satisfaction among all the participants (especially Baku and Ankara) is at an unsatisfactorily low level in relation to the ambitions awakened within their societies. Finally, the impression that the entire regional order is being undermined is not waning as the Turkish-Russian rivalry grows and – on the other hand – the role of the West and Iran, which played practically no role during the conflict or the year since its end, is marginalized.
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NATO’s northern flank plays an increasingly important role in the security of the Euro--Atlantic area. Russia’s forces in the Northern Military District pose not only a conventional threat to Norway, but also a nuclear threat to the whole NATO, including the United States and Canada due to submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Russian Federation has been consistently increasing its military presence in the Arctic and its military activity along Norway’s borders. Deterring Russia in the High North, in increasingly close cooperation with the allies, is thus a key task for the Norwegian Armed Forces. Oslo is gradually lifting Cold War restrictions in the defence sphere and intensifying military cooperation with the US, which is stirring up political controversy in the country. From the US perspective, NATO’s northern flank is becoming more vital for containing Moscow. That is why they signed the Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement with Norway, expanding US troop access to military infrastructure there.
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Less than a decade ago, both Russian and Indian analysts would have described the relations between Moscow and New Delhi as problem-free from a political perspective. No other power was as convenient a partner for Russia as India. The first cracks in the relationship between the two countries began to emerge in the mid-2010s as a result of China’s growing power (India is in conflict with China) and its increasingly assertive foreign policy. Other factors included the development of Russian-Chinese cooperation and the ongoing rapprochement between India and the US. At first glance, it may seem that the full-scale war launched by the Russian Federation against Ukraine has served to further strengthen the relationship between Moscow and New Delhi. However, contrary to official rhetoric, the foundations of the Russian-Indian ‘specially privileged strategic partnership’ have been eroding, due to several factors, and this erosion is likely to continue.
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Since the beginning of the 1990s, the West was obliged to deal with several crises in the Balkans and pledged to a complete reconstruction of the post-war situation in the region. During this demanding process, the Western countries however maximised their traditional stereotyped attitudes towards the Balkan countries. Both the European Union and the United States have typecast the Balkan states according to the extent of the internal problems of these states, and according to their own ability to deal with such issues. Despite the good intentions behind the acting of the West, this process resulted in a mixture of shambolic strategies that have made the Western presence in the region very complicated. The West has been gradually loosing its military and managing respect, given its reluctance to pursue the proclaimed objectives. Such disinclination to act has played into the hands of the local bosses, who very soon found out how the system can be abused in order to satisfy both their electorate and the Western custodians. Nowadays, it is clear that such a hesitant attitude of the West towards the Balkans is no longer sustainable. A significant change in the Western strategy towards the Balkan countries is required, should the integration of the Balkans into the Western structures (i.e. NATO, EU) be successful.
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Since the Cold War period the importance of the importance of verifying the treaty obligations, which is one of the main parts of the strengthening of the common trust, has been continuing until the present. At the same time, in the areas of arms-control and international security, the role of nuclear transparency, with the verification of provided data and treaty obligations as its integral part, has been increasing. The necessity of maintaining predictability, mainly between both of the nuclear superpowers (the US and the RF), which possess about 90% of all nuclear weapons in the world, is connected with the need to maintain the arms-control process and an effective verification procedure in cases of other negotiated treaty instruments being concluded. Nuclear disarmament verification procedures should above all take into consideration political and technical challenges connected with the current decreasing numbers of nuclear weapons while taking into account the protection of sensitive data as well. At all relevant security forums, especially at the 10th NPT Review Conference in 2020, the Czech Republic should support the EU initiatives and all other initiatives in favour of maintaining the US-Russia arms-control architecture, especially the proposed extension of the New START Treaty’s validity and verification mechanism in 2021. The possible participation of Czech experts in various verification initiatives would be highly welcomed as well.
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Russia is waging a political war campaign of active measures intended to divide, distract, and dismay European states, not as a prelude to any direct military aggression but as a substitute. The institutions of the European Union have made very patchy and often reluctant responses to this campaign, in part as a result of a lack of consensus among member states, in part because the necessary measures – which often focus on cohesion, legitimacy, and more effective counter-intelligence activity – are controversial, complex, long-term and expensive. A primary issue, though, is the dramatically different strategic cultures and operational codes of the EU and Russia. Moscow subscribes to an essentially confrontation, zero-sum perspective that at best interprets the EU’s more inclusive approach as naive, at worse as a pose, concealing malign intent. The EU and member states need to appreciate and understand the nature, scale and objectives of Russia’s political war, and specifically the lack of any set doctrine or “playbook.” This will require deeper investment in expertise within the institutions of the Commission, as well as broadening European understandings of “security.” Addressing issues of corruption, institutional legitimacy, social cohesion and governance is a crucial security concern. Countries at most risk from the ‘legitimacy gap’ are more vulnerable to Russian interference and subversion. The EU must appreciate that as an alliance, weaknesses in the counter-intelligence capacities of one state is a vulnerability for all. There needs to be greater effort on this, and a consensus on the minimum level of acceptable spending on this. The immediate challenge is to act more decisively and collectively to reduce the effectiveness of the instruments used by Moscow in its political war, especially those not simply operating on direct instructions but “adhocrats” seeking to please Moscow. This requires more detailed intelligence gathering, analysis and sharing, which could fall within the remit of INTCEN.
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The document discusses the complexity of the global security environment and the emergence of hyper-risks due to interconnected anthropogenic systems. It suggests increasing resilience against hyper-risks by dividing existing systems into smaller units and creating circuit breakers to prevent cascading global reactions. The publication explores creative thinking about the future without precise probabilistic predictions, acknowledging the sudden and unexpected nature of significant events in complex systems, famously termed "black swans" by Nassim Taleb. It also examines geopolitical risks, the relative decline of US power, and the potential for a G-zero World scenario. The project's methodology is based on the complexity of the security environment, rejecting precise probabilistic forecasts and instead offering internally consistent hypotheses about future developments to aid in strategic thinking.
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Držíte v rukou závěrečnou studii vznikající v rámci projektu TA ČR Scénáře mezinárodního bezpečnostního prostředí. Uzavírá se jí tříletý cyklus kolektivních spekulací týmu soustředěného v Ústavu mezinárodních vztahů o možnostech vývoje tohoto prostředí. Projekce, které vznikly jako výstupy těchto spekulací, nemají ambici být přesnými předpověďmi. Vysoká komplexita mezinárodního bezpečnostního prostředí jako systému, kde dochází k dynamické interakci množství předem daných skutečností, hybných sil a kritických neznámých, možnost takové předpovědi téměř vylučuje. Naše scénáře sledují jiný cíl: kombinací prediktivního (jaká budoucnost bude) a explorativního (jaká budoucnost může být) přístupu a záměrnou vícečetností podobně pravděpodobných projekcí vývoje v každém sektoru bezpečnostního prostředí být nástroji tvořivého promýšlení možných budoucností, rozšiřování horizontu úvah o tom, jak přispět k naplňování jejich z hlediska české zahraniční politiky nejvýhodnějších variant a zkoušení zažitých předpokladů o tom, co bezpečnostním prostředím, ve kterém se Česká republika nachází, hýbe.
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