Around the bloc: More Physical, Legal Barriers for Migrants
Migrants clashed with police on Macedonia’s southern border over the weekend.
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Migrants clashed with police on Macedonia’s southern border over the weekend.
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Last week the Czech Republic witnessed the emergence of Bohuslav Sobotka as a major new political player.
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Decrepit old structures must go, but plans for their replacements are classified, official claims.
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For several months in 2013-2014, thousands of Ukrainians and Bulgarians participated in anti-government protests. However, the outcomes could not be more different. The Bulgarian government politically survived #DANSwithme, while Euromaidan precipitated President Yanukovych’s fl ight from Ukraine in late February 2014. Why did #DANSwithme gradually dissipate, while Euromaidan escalated into the worst episode of political violence since Ukraine’s independence? We know that medium levels of repression applied inconsistently during protests can lead to radicalization and violence. But we do not know whether the judiciary’s behaviour before and during the protests could affect the likelihood of an escalation towards violence. This article proposes a complementary explanation of protest radicalization, which posits that recent, unambiguous, and effective use of a pliable judiciary by political incumbents to punish and undermine the opposition raises the odds that both sides will engage in violence. Politicized selective justice raises the stakes ofvictory both for the government and for the protesters, and reduces the possibility of a compromise. In Bulgaria, where the judiciary, albeit politicized, has not been effectively used to undermine political opponents, protesters perceived the government’s attempts to engage in legal persecution as a hassle and the chances of imprisonment as remote. Neither should the Oresharski government have expected to be prosecuted in the event of losing offi ce. In Ukraine, by contrast, the judiciary had a clear recent track record of politicized selective justice both against protest participants and high-level politicians. Former PM Yuliya Tymoshenko and another Orange Revolution main actor and former minister of interior, Yuriy Lutsenko, served lengthy prison sentences. Consequently, both the leaders of the opposition and Yanukovych and his coterie probably expected that imprisonment would be inevitable if they did not come out as winners of the Euromaidan standoff.
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The reform of Chinese banking system was undertaken by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. During this structural change, the central bank of the People’s Republic of China departed the ministry and became a separate entity. The People’s Bank of China was formally established as the central bank in 1983 by the State Council. As a result of the reforms of Deng Xiaoping China underwent a change of monobank system to two-tier banking system. Moreover, the function of the People’s Bank of China as a central bank was formally confirmed in 1995 when the third Plenum of the National People’s Congress adopted The Law of the People’s Republic of China on the People’s Bank of China. The China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) is the supervisor of the financial institutions in the People’s Republic of China. The central government established this institution in March 2003. The State Council is the leadership of the CBRC. The main functions of the China Banking Regulatory Commission is the formulation of supervisory rules and regulations concerning the Chinese banking institutions, the authorization of the establishment, changes of the financial institutions and also the compilation and publishing of the statistics and reports of the banking industry.
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The author analyzes four key factors of the state built upon principles of the Latin civilization; these factors include morality (the uprightness of citizens), science, production and army. He accentuates that all the actions based on revolutionary methods and assumptions must be removed from the social life of Europe and Poland because of their harmfulness and dangerous practices. Politics, when realized according to the above-selected principles, allows recovering and strengthening the pillars of Western culture. These pillars include: A) Family based on the undissolvable and unsolicited marriage of a man and a woman, which fosters love between them and for all the others, which enables the actual equality of a man and a woman in their rights and duties, which founds private property and the opportunity of getting matured during the lifetime of parents. B) The administration of justice in all areas of human life through the public authority which while giving back what is due to each other contributes in establishing a genuine interpersonal peace along with its various fruits. C) The respect for human work which enables an essential development of any human goods, as well as the eradication of any form of slavery. D) The independence of religious life from political and temporal factors, which ultimately serves the priority of the human spirit over all the finite and the means for human life.
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Yalta-Potsdam system emerged from World War II turned Poland into the orbit of the Soviet Union. It was economically dependent (CMEA) and the military-political (the Warsaw Pact) from the eastern neighbor. Taken attempts too independent to strengthen Polish security (Rapacki Plan, Gomulka Plan, Polish-German Agreement of December 1970) ended in failure. Martial law in 1981, the international isolation deepened in Polish and also became addicted to from Moscow. Moving away from confrontation between East and West at the end of the years 80. resulted in the signing of the border treaty with Germany (1990) and the reorientation of the Polish on the cooperation with the Western World.
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The paper discusses basic income in the context of feminist political ecology using the concepts of reproductive labour, both performed by people and by nature. In the first part we will elaborate on the Wages for Housework campaign as a forerunner of the idea of basic income. This campaign inscribed the concept of income into an intersectional relation between patriarchy and capitalism which was a key element of its revolutionary dimension. In the second part we analyse three different social struggles in order to create a ground for further reflections over the legitimacy of such tools (and resolutions) such as basic income. On the one hand the paper highlights some elements of the crisis of social reproduction, brought about and further deepened by neoliberal reforms in Poland over the past 25 years. On the other hand, it alludes to the issues of ecological crisis which needs to be taken into account in every anti-capitalist theory or strategy. Thus, the article aims to investigate as to whether the wage demands for both reproductive and productive labour are still relevant in the era of neoliberal capitalism.
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After embracing his Jewish heritage, former far-right party leader is focused on fighting anti-Semitism.
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Concerns about the U.S. presidential candidate’s health emerged after a man from Moravia filmed a faint Clinton on 11 September.
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In the past few years there have been considerable and positive developments in important issues for the Muslim communities in Greece. The paper focuses on a number of initiatives and policies that have been taken by the Greek state in the last years, aiming at the improvement of Muslim education structures and the strengthening of the religious identity of the Muslim minority of Thrace; it also focuses on recent decisions and initiatives aiming at the improvement of the religious structures of Muslim immigrants in the metropolitan area of Athens. The paper shows the reasons behind these developments, namely the role of the European Union financial and symbolic resources, the changes in the priorities and the mentality of Greek governments since 1990 and especially in the very recent years.
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Albanians and Romanians represent the second and first immigrant group in Italy. Both groups have been subjected to phenomena of xenophobia during the 1990s and 2000s, respectively. The research project, to which this paper refers, explores the social relationships between Albanians, Italians and Romanians, focusing on mixed partnerships/marriages within a context of integration, which is interpreted as a way of boundary-making and through the perspective of mixedness. In particular, this paper tries to organise quantitative data retrieved from official sources and qualitative inputs drawn from the reference literature, through the framework proposed by Kalmijn (1998)1, who has specifically approached intermarriage as a combination of structural constraints, personal preferences and third party interference. In this way data on the Albanian and Romanian immigrant groups are thus framed in order to prepare the groundwork for a qualitative study specifically on Albanian-Italian/Romanian mixed marriages in Italy.
More...Interview with Henning Meyer
The interview focuses on Henning Meyer’s view on technology and digitalisation in the terms of jobs and social security. It deals with insecurity of the technology age where the people are not capable of comprehending the fast development. While discussing the topic, Henning Meyer presents his view on the possible solutions to the insecurity in the meaning of job or activity guarantee. The interview also addresses issues of education in the technology era. At the same time, it focuses on the recent crises in Europe – including refugee crisis, the Brexit and ‘Eurozone’ crisis with the focus on the role of social democracy in these crises.
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The notion of a clan of the first secretary in the soviet Lithuania or, in contrast, speaking about the consolidated titular nomenklatura enables to penetrate deeply into the governing of a soviet republic. The key questions here are: what kind of networks? Could the sort of networks and trust help us explain political dynamics in the soviet Lithuania and reasons why exactly Soviet Lithuanian Communist party became the first one in the Soviet Union that break with CPSU in 1989? What kind of circumstances and political context made possible the horizontal links among nomenklatura members and made nomenklatura likely to be a more consolidated network than the personal clan of the first secretary in such a centralized soviet system? Seeking to draw a difference between the clan and the consolidated titular nomenklatura, useful is the concept of krugavaya poruka presenting the Lithuanian nomenklatura as a cycle of functionaries bounded with interpersonal ties and collective responsibility against Moscow to drain out the political forms of nationalism in society. This article focuses on the personal network of Petras Griškevičius, the first secretary of the Communist party of Lithuania (1974–1987), revealing the importance of his networking in controlling the soviet Lithuanian nomenklatura. Griškevičius’ leadership network consisted of professionals and technocrats (functional nomenklatura), on the one hand, and the functionaries loyal to Griškevičius personally (Griškevičius’ personal clan) on the other. Tensions between members of functional nomenklatura and representatives of his personal clan appeared in many sectors of political, economic and social life of the republic. The article investigates cases of intelligentsia and technocracy in order to show how Griškevičius had used the competition between the functional nomenklatura and members of his personal clan aiming to gain more power. While the first secretary succeed in keeping balance among nomenklatura members, his power was limited by political circumstances. There were at least three factors that made possible the distinguished situation in the soviet Lithuania: 1) high expression of nationalism in society, 2) low status of the first secretary of the republic’s Communist party, 3) the role of the second secretary of the Communist party sent by Moscow into republic’s leadership. The obligation against Moscow to drain out political forms of nationalism in the republic led to functionalism in its nomenklatura leadership. Threat and political responsibility for the expression of nationalism demanded functional skills from party and soviet managers able to deal with political, social, and economic problems in the republic. For this reason, Griškevičius could not behave in the nepotism way by recruiting only trusted and personally loyal to him functionaries into leadership; he needed professionals. Secondly, in contrast to the “masters” in other republics, the first secretary of the soviet Lithuania had a comparatively low status in all-Union institutions. Both the first and second secretaries were only a member and a candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU. This low status of the first secretary in all-Union bureaucracy ranking made an impact on the behavior of the local nomenklatura, because it got a room for the personal play between the first and the second secretaries.
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Two years after the EuroMaidan Revolution, Ukraine’s reform path is shaping up, but the political context remains eerily similar to the country we knew before. Viktor Yanukovych, who let his family and cronies challenge the oligarchs’ wealth and the freedom of Ukrainians, is gone. The power of the Donbas lobby, which made the Donetsk rules possible, is fading away, though in a manner that may cost Ukraine more than the price of war.
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The paper is analyzing causes and character of irredentist activities of Hungarian governments in relation to Czechoslovakia during the monitored period. Principal aim of irredenta was to establish an alternative to the direct annexation of Slovakia, or at least of part of the Slovak territory inhabited by the Hungarian minority. The goal of irredenta, besides other, was also to reinforce ethnic awareness of the Hungarian population in Slovakia, to cultivate a historic legacy of Hungary and to eliminate integral processes, which could weaken connections of members of the Hungarian community toward their kin country. Parallel with the increase of political instability during the second half of thirties, intensify also irredentist activities among ethnic Hungarians. The status of majority of Hungarians living in Slovakia was dramatically changed after the annexation of the majority of Hungarians to Hungary.
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The study describes the last years of Vojtech Tuka, one of the representatives of the Slovak State (1939-1945). This period was significantly affected by his ill health, which was the official reason for his withdrawal from politics in the years 1943-1944. At the end of the war he moved to western Austria, which became the French occupying zone. French military police arrested him in August 1945 in Kitzbühel and interned him in Innsbruck. Because of the very poor state of his health it was an urgent and speedy hearing. He was transported to Prague in December 1945 and was heard to supply information for the Nuremberg trials. Further questioning took place in May 1946 due to its own process at the National court. Investigators were interested in the circumstances of the Slovak State, his activity during the period of autonomy, his contacts with the Nazis in the 1920s, events of March 1939 and the riots in Bratislava, the Treaty of protection with Germany, the war against Poland and the Soviet Union, economic and military linkage to Germany, meeting in Salzburg and the Jewish question. On the questions of the period of his “first political activity” in 1929 he answered only with the intentions of his request for mercy from 1935. The process ended with sentencing and execution of Vojtech Tuka in August 1946.
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During the IGU Congress in 1934 held in Warsaw there was presented the project of new international scientific organization, namely Joachim Lelewel Society, which was to deal with history and philosophy of geography. Unfortunaltely this decision was not carried into effect because of incoming global conflict and World War II that disabled the necesary friendly contacts between potential members. Joachim Lelewel (1786-1861) was one of the most important founders of history of geography. This field was his inspiration and source of research interests. Lelewel understood that the condition of geography's development is both the increase in theoretical concepts necessary to comprehend and describe the Earth surface, and the extension of geographical horizon due to exploration. According to his views, the pure description and map making is not sufficient to be called geography. This is because geography is a special kind of knowledge which embraces all the terrestial phenomena, and this could be substantiate on the basis of history of geographical ideas. Moreover, an exact recognition of geography's development is the best basis for future research. Lelevel has expressed his philosophy of the field mainly in his works concerning the development of ancient and medieval geography. Those works gave him respect of such known persons like Karl Ritter, Hermann Wagner or Lucien Gallois. The purpose of this short paper is to show the Lelevel's main ideas and concepts concerning the essence of geography. This is necessary since this XIXth century scholar, who became the patron of the international scientific society, remains rather not known among contemporary scientists. The additional aim is to show, that his original ideas could be useful from the point of view of contemporary geographical problems and interests.
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This is a review of Florin Abraham's book, Romania since theSecond World War: A Political, Socialand Economic History, BloomsburyAcademic, Londra-New York, 2016,360 p.
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In a short note, the author outlines a series of Hans Kelsen’s studies dedicated to Ancient political thought, esp. his The Philosophy of Aristotle and Hellenic-Macedonian Policy. He believes that these relatively neglected minor studies of the famous philosopher of law could still be of interest to contemporary classicists and historians of philosophy.
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