International audience ; The arrangements offered by international community as solutions to Yugoslav dissolution process have significantly affected the development of the Kosovo conflict. These policies failed to produce consensus between the parties in conflict, instead, as the paper demonstrate, they played the role of a catalyst in the initiation of the conflict. This paper, by offering a detailed reconstruction of the process by which the international community tried to settle the Kosovo case, demonstrates how the dynamics of the conflict interacted dynamically with international community attitudes and policies towards the case. The paper discusses the attitudes and policies of international community toward the Kosovo case underlining its attachment to traditional prerequisites of international order instead of inherited causes of conflict. There are three important events that underline the interference of international community in the case of Kosovo before the war: the Conference on Yugoslavia that followed up the creation of the Badinter Committee, the Dayton Agreement and the Rambouillet Talks. These events are explained in details in three separate sections since they have immediate implications for the situation in Kosovo and consequently for the development of the conflict. We first discuss the contribution of existing normative framework to models of international community behavior and their effects in the case of Kosovo conflict following with the reaction of the conflicting parties towards offered arrangements. Both moments are assumed to be of importance in providing a larger picture in the understanding of the outgrowth of Kosovo conflict.
International audience ; The arrangements offered by international community as solutions to Yugoslav dissolution process have significantly affected the development of the Kosovo conflict. These policies failed to produce consensus between the parties in conflict, instead, as the paper demonstrate, they played the role of a catalyst in the initiation of the conflict. This paper, by offering a detailed reconstruction of the process by which the international community tried to settle the Kosovo case, demonstrates how the dynamics of the conflict interacted dynamically with international community attitudes and policies towards the case. The paper discusses the attitudes and policies of international community toward the Kosovo case underlining its attachment to traditional prerequisites of international order instead of inherited causes of conflict. There are three important events that underline the interference of international community in the case of Kosovo before the war: the Conference on Yugoslavia that followed up the creation of the Badinter Committee, the Dayton Agreement and the Rambouillet Talks. These events are explained in details in three separate sections since they have immediate implications for the situation in Kosovo and consequently for the development of the conflict. We first discuss the contribution of existing normative framework to models of international community behavior and their effects in the case of Kosovo conflict following with the reaction of the conflicting parties towards offered arrangements. Both moments are assumed to be of importance in providing a larger picture in the understanding of the outgrowth of Kosovo conflict.
As a motivational factor of action, political efficacy is an important predictor of political behaviour. The term was invented to capture the extent to which people feel that they can effectively participate in politics and shape political processes. Today, we have a comprehensive knowledge of the individual-level factors (socio-demographic variables, political preferences etc.) that shape the level of internal and external dimensions of political efficacy. However, while it is widely demonstrated that media consumption influences the level of political efficacy, the country-level media context factors affecting it have rarely been studied. This paper reports the findings of extensive research on how two crucial features of the media context, the political significance of the media and the level of political parallelism in the media system, shape the level of external and internal political efficacy. The investigation draws upon the dataset of the seventh round (2014 – 2015) of the European Social Survey (ESS) and includes more than twenty-two thousand respondents from nineteen European democracies. The research hypothesizes that in countries where the media play a more important role, people have lower levels of external and higher levels of internal political efficacy. Political parallelism, which shows the extent to which media outlets are driven by distinct political orientations and interests within a particular media system, is expected to directly increase both external and internal political efficacy. Its indirect effect is also hypothesized, arguing that partisan media amplifies the winner-loser gap in political efficacy as a kind of "echo chamber". The findings show that in countries where the media play a major role in shaping political discourse, people have lower levels of external political efficacy, while the political parallelism of the media system indirectly affects the external dimensions of political efficacy. Internal political efficacy is, however, not related to these context-level factors.
What we today call the international system was created by the West from early modern age. This term is often used in political theory, but less focused on how to classify integrative forces within the international system. In the context of this study, we are attempting to lay down some conceptual basis. How do we understand the linking and unifying factors within the international system? Initially, the emergence of the international system was largely attributed to political factors in theory, but we can also refer to other explanatory principles: one considers economic factors and civilizational factors are taken into consideration as essential aspects of the international structures. According to our viewpoint, inter-civilization dialogue seems to be a "third way" that goes beyond the expansive one-sidedness of Western universalism and the world-level confrontation of hostile civilizations. This "civilizational approach" incorporates the two previous aspects - economic and political - and this is what gives its importance. In our view, inter-civilization dialogue is the only viable way to create global ethos, and only the resulting "intellectual revolution" can make national and supranational economic and political institutions to operate in effective way under the conditions of globalization.