Suchergebnisse

The author analyses the relationship among atomism, pluralism, and democracy from the standpoint of contemporary Rawlsian and Kafkian theory of justice. The author views fairness and justice as forms of substituting democratic decision-making in multicultural communities. (SOI : S. 143)

In the research traditions of social and political science two central answers are being sought. The first is, what is the relationship between the specific con-figurations of the proponents of social changes and the particular outcomes of their activity? The other is, which changes in the configuration of the proponents lead to better results than the existing ones relative to th value criteria such as peace, feasible development, or social justice? This makes the reference frame-work of contemporary discussions on institutional shaping of the relations between the state and the society. In this work, the author first mentions three dominant dimensions of social change to which all of us are exposed. Second, by changing perspective, he goes over from a passive to an active approach in order to observe the actors (citizens) and the forms of their activity (civilness) that might challenge th forces of change and transform them into tolerable or even desirable outcomes. And third, he contributes to the discussion about civilness and depicts in bigger detail six fallacies that must be avoided if one wants to attain a competent configuration of activity. (SOI : SOEU: S. 37)

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)

The author surveys the public activities of Slavko Kvaternik, one of the leading Croatian nationalists of the 1930s, and for a time, minister of the Croatian Home Army during the Second World War (1941- 1942). The article states that Kvaternik occupied a peculiar position with respect to the radicals grouped around Ante Pavelic, the leader of the Ustasha regime. Kvaternik was not an ideologue of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), nor did he agree with Pavelic's repressive internal policy or Pavelic's dependence on fascist Italy. Because of this conclict, Kvaternik was pushed out of office and left Croatia at the end of 1942. None of these facts prevented the communist Yugoslavian government from proclaiming him a "war criminal" and carrying out the death sentence in 1947. (SOI : CSP: S. 398)

The author distinguishes between the antiquity's and Middle Ages' teachings on natural law and justice as a virtue and the modern-age Hobbes' theory of the prerequisites of the legal system. Hobbes' theory identifies the prerequisites of the legal system and describes the institution of legal constraint which guarantees the rule of law. The author points to the central historical difference between these paradigms. Finally, the author traces the evolution of Hobbes' paradigm in Kant's philosophy of right. (SOI : PM: S. 276)

This article deals with problems of poverty in Croatian society. The introductory part points out the economic and political circumstances in which the poverty of a considerable number of citizens becomes an important social problem. In the next part, concepts of absolute, relative and subjective poverty are defined. This is followed by an overview of the results of research into the extent of absolute and relative poverty in Croatian society conducted from 1998 to 2009. The results show that the rate of relative poverty basically remained the same throughout the above-mentioned period. Furthermore, it is shown that the risk factors causing citizens' poverty are the following: low level of education, unemployment, low retirement pensions, old age, and large number of children in the family. The author concludes that the Croatian government neither developed nor carried out any systematic and efficient plan of fighting poverty in Croatian society. Adapted from the source document.

After the assassination of king Alexander (1934) the Kingdom of Yugoslavia witnessed a revival of the party and political life and confrontation between the regime and opposing forces. The new president of the government Milan Stojadinovic recognized again the existence of the Croatian question. At all political meetings the followers of Vladko Macek and of the Croatian Peasant Party all over Croatia asked the prince Pavle and the government to abolish the dictatorship. The same happened also at the meeting of Croatian Peasant Party in Sisak (1936), when one of the Party leaders, Ljudevit Tomasic, criticized the political situation in the country. Facing 12000 citizens of Sisak and peasants from the Sisak region, he asked for full sovereignty of Croatian people, Croatian Parliament in Zagreb, and said that Croats had never been nor would ever be Yugoslavs "because Yugoslavism is no nation at all". Because of this speech a criminal proceedings against Tomasic were instituted. It was a political process which included a series of state-run institutions. After the agreement between the new president of the government Dragisa Cvetkovic and Vladko Macek and after the establishment of Banovina Croatia, the procedure against Tomasic was stopped. (SOI : CSP: S. 296)

Mixed government, which is commonly regarded as a distinctly medieval form of government, is relevant also to contemporary constitutional states. It is the best form of government, since the aristocratic element is a continuous source of virtue, especially of justice, and a check not only on the executive, as the monarchical element which is the seat of political power, and the legislature, as the democratic element which expresses the will of the majority, but also groups and institutions that have the might and will to impose themselves as oligarchies. Mixed government is also the form of government that is practised by most developed contemporary constitutional states: USA, UK, France, Switzerland, Germany etc. European nobility is the original aristocratic institution, by virtue of the fact that it was a system for the transfer of both virtue and general conditions of life. Three institutions that emerged in the late Middle Ages assumed structures and functions of the nobility. + The first is the clergy. When, as a result of the differentiation of feudal society ethical and intellectual virtues of the nobility could no longer maintain general conditions of life, the clergy, by virtue of their abstract knowledge that ranged from philosophy and theology to law and medicine, became a class of new experts in generalities and thereby a new aristocracy. The second modern aristocratic institution is the judiciary, which has a structure and function similar to earlier aristocracies. The task of judges is to establish the highest virtue o constitutionalism. It is justice by law, which regulates general conditions of life in the state and society. What qualifies judges for the task is expertise in the new generality. The expertise includes not only education and experience in law but also impeccable private life and demonstrated professional ethics. + The third modern aristocratic institution is the profession, whose most important instance is the legal profession. It shares its structure and function partly with the judiciary and partly with other professions. It seems that modern professions are degenerating. In the key area of data processing, due to rapid changes of technology, professions as systems of the transfer of virtue do not even seem to be possible. Professional aristocracies are replaced increasingly by oligarchies of capitalists and technocrats. (SOI : PM: S. 111)

According to Paul Kahn, one of the leading American constitutional theorists, the terms 'nation' and 'national sovereignty' are beyond the moral argument. From the perspective of constitutional ontology, the nation is the community of all those who share the 'political eros' love of the nation, who are ready to respond to her call and, if necessary, lay down their lives on the altar of its self-preservation. The moral debate about the limits of nation's state is meaningless, tells us Kahn. The boundaries of all, even liberal states arise through a 'make sacrifices' they 'never just a matter of geography', and therefore 'there is no abstract drawing of borders by some principle of justice. As in the life of the individual, the limits have the same necessity: There is nothing abstract in that necessity.'. Adapted from the source document.

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)

Was Wesley Clark, NATO's commander-in-chief, right when he said that, instead of launching the operation 'Allied Force' against it, the allies shoul have electronically isolated SR Yugoslavia? Yugoslav hackers and crackers used to good advantage the freedom of the cyberspace. During NATO's intervention, they declared a real 'virtual war' to all the countries supportive of this campaign, particularly to the USA. By swooping down by all available means on numerous official web pages of various American institutions and totally abusing the communicational freedoms on the Net, Yugoslav hackers in fact demonstrated a small part of the possibilities of the new e-force. However, the deleterious consequences of Yugoslav on-line users' activities were so harmful that they prodded the international community into issuing a blunt warning to the Serbian Telecom - we shall switch you off from the Internet! The objective of this research is primarily to evidence a totally novel phenomenon on the Internet, the first organized virtual war taking place in the cyberspace, at the time when a real military campaign was waged against SRY. One of the outcomes of these activities was striking out' the documents from the Net that had been preserved only in this texts' authors' archive. There are no additional scientific resources, since the key sources for this article were the Internet and newspaper articles. Although envisaged as a medium available to all, the Internet must soon be safeguarded and protected by legal means. Otherwise, it might simply cave in under the onslaught of all abuses and innumerable viruses circulating the global cyberspace. Due to the increase in the number of users and services, it may be expected that soon a completely new branch of criminal law is to emerge - computer crime. (SOI : PM: S. 242)

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)