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This article rethinks 1989 – the year commonly treated as a milestone of regime change. As contrary to this narrow view, and with the aim of laying out the conceptual foundations of possible future research projects, we give a short overview of the way Hungary became incorporated into the capitalist world system and of the key global, economic, and geopolitical factors that influenced its dependent development. For this we present a historically sensitive, global political economic narrative within which we pay special attention to the way public debt had been accumulated and how this, in turn, shaped Hungary’s position within the world system. After our analysis of the regime change we continue with an overview of the main structural dynamics of the last two decades. Finally, through two short case studies, we show how our perspective can throw new light on the political ideologies and economic policies of the era. The accumulation of state debt was not a Hungarian specificity: instead, we argue that it was rather a result of the global restructuring process and of its concomitant effect of decreasing national state-sovereignty. In the following manner, we also argue that the emergence of debates (which were central in evaluating the regime change, revolving around issues like „democracy” vs. „dictatorship” or „planning” vs. „market”) can be better understood within our global, historical, and political economic analytical framework. In the long run we identify two economic development strategies – namely, the strategy of liberalization and the strategy of protectionism – both structured around the, nonetheless entirely unfulfilled, hope of overcoming Hungary’s semi-peripheral position by „catching up” to its Western neighbors. These strategies then can be analyzed on the base of how they relate to global cycles of accumulation; how their shifts were influenced by changes in the world system; and, in turn, how these strategies organized both various elite projects shaped by global cyclical dynamics and the interpretations about our historically unfolding dependent position.
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The countries that were part of the Soviet Union were forced to start on their own the democratic process after the disintegration of the communist bloc. These countries had to enter the new world order that had been unknown to them. Two ways were developed in order to achieve their development as newly independent states. Firstly, the new independence countries have opened up to the European Community in the 90s. And secondly, the countries that remained linked to Russia in order to achieve the stability of those first moments. In the case of Ukraine, its path as an independent country began on 24 August 1991, and since that year its main task has been to strengthen its position as a state. Ukraine initially remained linked to Russia somehow through different policies. However, there was a change due to Ukraine's need for assistance in different areas: from social and political to economic. From this moment the institutions of the European Union came into play in Ukraine to promote its modernization and democratization. It is necessary to know which were these means and how they have served to advance these relations until the entry into force of the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement in 1998. In order to carry out this analysis we will address with specialized monographs and articles related to these subjects, as well as the extensive documentation provided by the European institutions.
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The main subject of interest of this paper is the current situation and the trend of international terrorism in the European Union, explained through security analysis of the committed terrorist attacks and their influence on the European security and stability. Also, it will be shown the measures and the activities of the anti and contrary terroristic fight against the risks and the threats from the terrorism as a result of the recent terroristic attacks. Even though on international level there isn’t a common definition of the terrorism as a criminal act, the European Union and the Council of Europe through their most important documents set the concept for terrorism which has helped in the process of creating national security systems for fight against the terrorism. This paper will go through the circumstances of terrorist attacks (failed, foiled and completed) in the European Union Member States, as well as the conditions of the criminal acts through analysis of the statistical data about the court proceedings and the verdicts.
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Human rights defenders and environmentalists can be found in media content depending on the context which is influenced by different factors. We analyze 4 newspapers, oriented in different directions and showing different attitude towards the problems. Their implications may be hidden or more obvious and the role of the journalist in this field is of great importance. The final aim of the research is to find out if presenting of the problems is in public interest or it is influenced by different reasons.
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Тhe decade of 1944-1954 marked a prominent rise of the mass-song, which became a major ideological genre. It is a genre-product that performs the ideological, state and public order of the Communist Party in tune with cultural engineering. It embodies the economy of socialist production of culture: provision with contractions at all levels, realization through sponsored state chambers, secured by contractions with state institutions in a hierarchical state order. The mass-song is created in the system of state socialized art of socialism designed by the civil engineering of socialism. Still, something prevents it from growing into commercial art - it hinders its ideological, adaptive, traumatic nature, offsetting anger and fears. Its disharmonious duality is the cause of its crisis after a decade of generously sponsored development. In the party papers officially published by the Union of Composers in 1954 and then (1956, 1958) instead of a succession of successes and conquests of a broad audience, in the mass-song, a collapse, poor performance, a crisis. In the 1970s, this led to its encapsulation.
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This article consists of five major parts. It includes the analysis of politics and international cooperation on climate change and the legal environmental scenario and implementation, trends and litigation concerns faced by climate change. The Paris Agreement of Climate Change (2015) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nation are the two main players at the global level to target greenhouse gas emissions as a voluntary framework. These guiding principles relating to the environment for sustainable development are evolving over time and did not shape as customary law. The ultimate solution lies in understanding the problem intensity through growing scientific facts about the impacts of climate change.
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The US faces many dilemmas in facing an XXI century China. The recent crisis that has occurred in the South China Sea and issues related to the trade war between the two global powers have significantly divided the positions of both states in world affairs. The US policy of engagement and coercion, forcing China into the US liberal order has shown slow progress. Therefore, it is critical to re-evaluate the US foreign policy strategy in facing an XXI century China, which shows discontent towards the values that are promoted by the US. This paper critically analyzes the US foreign policy approach to China, provides key elements of its success, and concludes the major issues faced throughout the process of interacting with the modern global superpower known as China.
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Democracy begins and ends with the media – according to this worldly recognized sentence, every ordinary Balkan could estimate the democratic perspective of its own country. That is why the effect of the new media (social networks), deserves continuous scientific and research attention, also done in this paper basically through comparative and statistic methods, with specific analysis of the Macedonian case. The media revolution produced largely positive changes in everyday life. But negative effects could not be abstracted: Internet - populism, loss of confidence in the media, fake news and hate speech. Perhaps the first solution that comes to mind is law regulation. But knowing that clear basal of the network services is freedom of speech and expression, any attempt of regulation (objectively or not) is legitimately considered censorship. This paper attempts to answer the question: is it possible journalism to fight fake news through a direct media battle?
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The aspirations of post-colonial political elites in Africa can be summed up as the quest for development. This quest since independence, involves, in part, the pursuit of a common citizenship, shared nationality and common interests and values, the evolution of which provide the bedrock for mutual co-existence and the commitment of all to the common good. It also involves the establishment of institutions that will guarantee peace, justice, and fairness. However, the process of realizing these goals of broadening the scope of socio-political interactions have been vitiated by our colonial experiences and consequently unleashed certain centrifugal forces that have made the quest for community development in most African states a daunting task.The divisive tendencies of the colonialists created communal identities, which provided a new symbolic and ethnocentric focus for each group where none existed and thus complicated the task of welding diverse elements in each colony into a coherent whole. This became the source of the proliferation of many life threatening conflicts which has impeded the process of community development in Africa. But why has these conflicts persist in spite of the several attempts to meet them? This paper argues that the above account fails because it ignores the values Africans place on human worth given expression in their communal context. The attempt here is to explore South Africa`s indigenous unifying social ethic of Ubuntu in arriving at a humane society that has a participatory value; founded on co-operation, charity, reconciliation and justice rather than the individualism of the West. This paper will, therefore, employ the analytic descriptive method to examine the above in a manner many scholars have ignored in an attempt to develop a viable sense of community in Africa. Hence, it is expected that this paper will initiate a perspective that will challenge extant interpretation of this discourse.
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This article analyses the process of choosing different strategies of identification by Bulgarians in Ukraine. The present state of ‘identification processes’ against the background of ‘war of memory’ and ‘invented traditions’ places them among the priority problems of science and politics. The subject of analysis is the specifics of the formation of collective memory, which is at the root of the choice of identification strategy: commemorative practices, mechanisms for the memorialization of the past, the correlation between the local history of the group and the national strategies of Bulgaria and Ukraine. The conclusion is that the choice of identification behaviour is influenced by the efficiency of social adaptation under specific historical circumstances. The social resources at the disposal of the group in any particular moment influence the choice of vectors of collective memory and predetermine the formation of defensive practices aimed at preserving the group.
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This text is based on an ethnographic study on the protests and civic initiatives that initially took place in 2013 but then continued with varying intensity throughout the following years. While applying the method of participant observation during the Gazi events’ and conducting interviews with individuals who had taken part in the protests, a main goal of this study is to grasp the transformation in the identification, articulation and presentation of important and secondary topics and problems that had been brought forward throughout the public discussions. The initial motivation of this study is the idea that after the first demonstrations and clashes, the interpretation of the political projects’ turbulence, of the reinvention of urban spaces, of the success or failure of diverse protest and resistance practices, gradually modifies the way the aforementioned events and ongoing processes are being thought and talked about. The research questions the respondents’ participation in protests, the constitution and disintegration of communities, the ‘diagnosis’, ‘prognosis’ and ‘rationale’ elements in respondents’ and informants’ micro-discourses and their acts in relation to diverse initiatives. The text attempts to systematize the observation data and the collected ‘narrative fragments’ within four ‘modes of articulation’: transformative, subjective, argumentative, and topological.
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Conference report on the International science conference '(Re)thinking socialism: knowledge, memory and oblivion of the socialist past'
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During the Cold War Turkey had excellent relations with the United States of America. Both countries needed each other and saw the Soviet Union as their main rival. Strategic Partnership was established between the two nations and USA provided military assistance to Turkey in order to contain the Soviet Union. With the assistance of the USA, Turkey managed to neutralize Soviet threat and integrate into NATO. Turkey became a close ally of the West. After the Cold War, American - Turkish relations have gradually cooled and deteriorated significantly over the last years. The aim of this article is to analyze those factors that have caused the deterioration of American – Turkish relations.
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Communication research has systematically pointed to the disparities in news coverage of political candidates from women and minority groups. These differences may hurt the chances of these candidates at being elected. Recently more migrants are entering the political arenas in their adopted Western countries. Migrants have become the center of debates over the rights and wrongs of multiculturalism. In particular, Muslim women, in liberal democracies have been turned into an allegory for undesirable cultural difference. The November 2018 US Congressional race saw an unprecedented number of women especially minority women run for office. Ilhan Omar (representing Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (representing Michigan) are the first Muslim women elected to Congress. Both Omar and Tlaib won by large margins. This study examines if local news coverage of Omar and Tlaib’s candidacy was congruent to prevalent schemas in representations of Muslim women and minorities in American media.
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The objective of the present article is to discuss and explore relevant indicators for assessing the possibilities for the realisation of the concept of “smart cities”. Therefore, as a characteristic of primary importance regarding the potential and the expected benefits from the realisation of the “smart cities” concept, we have highlighted the level of urbanization. Supplied and analysed is data about the urban population within the European Union, by country, as well as data about the regions around Bulgaria. As a second most significant indicator is singled out the access to financial resources, which are measured by GDP per capita of the population, as well as employment rates. Thirdly we have singled out a group of indicators which assess the level of technological advancement of a population.
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Audiovisual media services providers play informational, educational, social, cultural roles and therefore it is of extreme importance all parts of their programmes to be easy of reach for every consumer. At high level that is to be obligatory for people with specific difficulties of usage of the media, such as the visually and hearing impaired persons/blind or deaf –TV media content should be naturally accessible via various tools and no extra charge. At high extend the legislation in Bulgaria is appropriate and well prescribed but in practice that presentation is out of time and humiliatingly small in quantity and access tools.The media providers should deliver to that specific part of the audience full access to their programmes by using different approaches – the sign-language translation, audiodescriptions and audiosubtitles, subtitles in multiplex platforms, as well as news scrolls as an alternative tool. That is a mark of the democratic society – not to exclude that part of the public but on the contrary – the visually and hearing impaired persons should get media content at ease anytime and anywhere.
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The diplomacy of Japan towards its Asian neighbours has always been a complex issue. Throughout the years, the foreign policy of Japan has witnessed severe alterations specifically after the Second World War. Since then, new challenges and opportunities have risen which have formed a new, adapted Japanese diplomacy, albeit not disconnected from its traditional aspects and its past. The current purpose of the paper is to highlight these evolutions and challenges of the post WWII Japanese diplomacy. The focus will be on the two main neighbours and traditional partners of Japan, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Korea. There will be an effort to highlight the challenges that Japan experiences with the aforementioned countries, its diplomatic approaches and how these could be evolved in the near future.
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The expectations of the Western Balkans (WB) on the EU membership perspective could have been ‘undermined’ with the halt in the EU enlargement process as declared by the former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in 2014. In the meantime, even though the WB countries were part of the EU’s regional approach through the mechanism of Stabilization and Association Process (SAP) working on the implementation of the Acquis Communautaire, the slowing down of the integration process could have economic and political consequences and threaten the regional stability. This paper shows how the Berlin Process (2014) was the proper intergovernmental initiative taken by some EU Member States to keep alive the EU integration perspective of the WB, thus refocusing the EU attention on the challenges the WB was facing on the way towards EU integration.
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This article describes the competition between China and the USA for global hegemony. Both states have hegemonic ambitions and compete with each other over the domination of Asia. The rise of China has transformed global politics, as well as the balance of the global economy. As China’s economic and military power increases steadily, its geopolitical ambitions are also constantly growing. Some experts do not exclude the possibility of conflict between China and the USA in the future. There are many potential hot spots in East Asia where conflict could erupt at any time in the future between the USA and China. Many experts doubt whether the USA and China can escape Thucydides’ Trap in the future.
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