Suchergebnisse

As newly established nation-state Slovenia continues to develop concepts, policies, and institutions to provide for its national security. She does so as a young country in a new Europe and must consider not only her own experiences, principles, and international politics, but also the dynamic environment of th multifaceted proposals and efforts at European integration. These are the basic considerations for understanding the process whereby Slovenia is forming a new national security network, both internally and on the international level, and for following Slovenia's endeavors to participate in European integration and NATO and the European Union. (SOI : PM: S. 123)

Democracy and constitutional state should understandably be reviewed in the context of a society's progression in curbing the state. In any community the central issue is the relationship between the people as individuals and as members of a collective, since it is desirable for a collective to be a synerg sum of individuals. Thus it is prudent to search for a corellation between democracy and constitutional state. Democracy is an emanation of freedom, constitutions always a limitation. A state hems in a civil society; within it there is a network of the processes of structuring government from "above", which is of particular interest in transitional countries that gave up on the ideologised inaugural effect in designing government and adopted "constitutional engineering": power-sharing, popular sovereignty, representative parliamentarism, promotion of freedoms and basic rights of individuals and citizens. In this, it is imperative to make note of the necessity of structuring societies from "below" by means of the principle of local self-rule. (SOI : PM: S. 147)

Religion and religious communities as active components of each social and cultural set and as major factors in its functioning, may contribute to social processes and relations or affect them both integrationally and disintegrationally. The paper lays out the theoretical and methodological grounds (functionalism) for the analysis of these processes and relations. As the examples of the integrational influence on the social and political processes in Croatia following all the social and political changes, we can mention the activities of the Catholic Church (particularly in the diaspora) and, to a degree, those of the Pentecostal Church, while the disintegrational influence was exemplified by the activities of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The text also includes a comparative analysis of the empirical data obtained from two studies carried out in Croatia (based on several partial indicators), which indicate a marked turn towards religiosity. Highlighted are possible individual and social aspects of these changes as well as the need for a complex and systematic monitoring of the religious developments in Croatia, the results of which might point to the possible integrational or disintegrational potentials of this "new religiosity" within broader social framework. (SOI : PM: S. 191)

The author analyses the relationship among legal nationhood, social nationhood, and democracy in democratic constitutional states. After identifing the definitions of democratic constitutional state, he concludes that it is an efficient structures within which one can mvestigate the relationship among democracy, legal and social nationhood. He suggests that these three principles have their normative roots in human freedom i.e. in the freedom of participating in p0litical negotiation, in the freedom from coercion and unjust rule, in the freedom from exigency, and in the free participation in the "we" of the modern industrial, technological and information society. And finally, the author analyses the tension between the legal and social nationhood which may be fruitful only if democracy contributes to the accomplishment of major social changes that maximise human freedom. (SOI : PM: S. 91)