From an extensive comparative study conducted in 27 European countries about the attitude of young people towards history, the winnowed variables show the attitude towards history and the causes of historical changes as well as the attitude towards nation and religion. The results (obtained from a sample including 1,025 Croatian high-school first-graders) show that the attitudes of young people towards history do not significantly differ from those in other European countries. However, the interest of young people for national problems, national communities and religion has increased. The attitude towards history is shaped by the factors that homogenize the living space of young people. (SOI : PM: S. 128)
The Croatian Constitutional Court by its decision of June 24, 1992 partly rejected a reqest to start proceedings, and partly terminated already started proceedings, to determine the constitutionality of some thirty emergency decrees passed by the President of the Croatian Republic during the undeclared war with Serbia and the Yugoslav People's Army in the second half of 1991. The Court backed its decision inter alia by the following arguments: the President has the power to pass emergency decrees without declaring first the state of emergency; presidential emergency decrees can be retroactive since Croatian Constitution does not forbid specifically their retroactivity. The Court's reasoning which endorses a permanent coup d'etat, is very probably a corollary of the idea, which is taken for granted by some Croatian constitutional lawyers, that the Croatian Constitution has been modelled on the Constitution of the French 5th Republic so that the sweeping powers of the French President belong also to his Croatian counterpart. The paper challenges the idea and discusses the relevance of comparative constitutional theory for Croatian constitutional practice. The first three sections demonstrate that, despite political similarities between the early years of the French 5th Republic and the Croatian Republic the two semi-presidential systems differ in several important constitutional and legal respects so that the powers - especially emergency powers - of the French President cannot be used as a persuasive authority to interpret powers of the Croatian President. Section four indicates that if anything in French law is authoritative in interpreting Croatian constitutional provisions on the state of emergency it is the effort of the French Conseil d'etat to control, even though in a very limited way, the legality of presidential emergency decrees. The last section points out that assumptions with which Croatian Constitutional Court interprets presidential powers are more in accord with the Weimar Constitution than with the Constitution of the 5th French Republic. The paper ends with the warning that the unrestrained exercise of presidential powers in Croatia may lead, as it did in Mussolinni's Italy and in the Weimar Republic, to a dictatorship. (SOI : PM: S. 165)
