Suchergebnisse

The author defines the state of law as a typical product of German political culture which corresponds to, but also differs from, both the experience of the English rule of law and that of the French l'Etat-Nation. The author pays particular attention to the issue of the legitimacy of the state of law. He focuses on two different approaches to this issue in the works of Volker Gerhardt and Ernst Wolfgang Böckenförd. Following a critical analysis of their fundamental assumptions the author goes on to divulge the thesis on the necessity of a balance between rights and power in the functioning of modern political systems. (SOI : PM: S. 13)

Since his student days in Zagreb, Milivoj Magdic, one of the leading Croatian political publicists in the first half of the twentieth century, was well-disposed towards Marxism. On a result, he gained a prominent place in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. But in his writings he soon divorced himself from official communist ideology. As a result, he was proclaimed a traitor to the party and a provocateur in the pay of the police. He nevertheless remained a committed Marxist until Stalin's purges in the USSR in 1935 left him disillusioned. Thereafter, he became the Yugoslavian communists most dangerous ideological opponent. Magdic' believed that Marxism was flawed because it attempted to build socialism by controlling people, because it left the responsibility of establishing socialism exclusively at the feet of one social class, and because, most fatally, it relied too heavily on materialism. For holding ideas such as these, the communists at one point even atempted to murder Magovac. During the period of the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945) he wrote mostly for the periodical Spremnost (Readiness), but he held no political office. At the end of the Second World War he emigrated across Austria to Italy, but he was arrested in Rome in 1947 by the English and handed over to the Yugoslav government. He was proclaimed a war criminal, brought before the court, and sentenced to death. This was primarily due to his writings against communism and Marxism. (SOI : CSP: S. 116)

Based on the experience of former rightist and communist dictatorships in Europe regarding different forms of opposition - both open and hidden within these regimes' structures - the author analyzes the role of the opposition in the process of the sweeping democratic change that has taken place the "new democracies" of Central and Eastern Europe in the direction of the state of law and civil society. His conclusion is, that in today's Central European countries political multi-party pluralism which includes viable parliamentary opposition was given a smooth start and has since taken root. However in the countries with only superficial democracy and an obvious "democratic deficit" - for example Croatia (and Slovakia) - parliamentary opposition plays the second fiddle. The prime movers of the change - and of the democratization as well - are still the ruling parties (not unlike during the communist single-party regimes). Changes occur only when the ruling party or its major fraction opt for them considering them the lesser of two evils, either because they are no longer satisfied with the distribution of power and goods within the existing status quo or because they are aware that it cannot be maintained in its present form. This happened in the Soviet Union , first under Nikita Khruschev and then again under Mihail Gorbachev. Changes, however, when imposed from above get out of hand and backfire against those who have set them off (remember Gorbachev); what emerges is usually a compromise between tbe vestige of the old and the emerging regime. (SOI : PM: S. 92)