Suchergebnisse

The author looks into the political-territorial division & the size of Croatia & Slovenia, prior & during the incorporation of the Military Border into Civilian Croatia. Arguing that historiography has not come up with an objective view of this event, the author challenges the prevailing thesis that the size of the Military Border was significantly smaller than that of Civilian Croatia & claims that, on the contrary, the Military Border made up 54.37% of the state territory, & Civilian Croatia only 45.63%. The process of unification was a gradual one, extended over a 15-year period, due to the territorial expansion & the political restructuring after the integration of the Military Border region into Civilian Croatia. Finally, the author talks about the emergence of a uniform political/legal structure, which integrated the former districts into Croatian counties, the structure that lasted until 1918. 9 Tables. Adapted from the source document.

The author is of the opinion that Serbian expansionism is the result of Serbia's geopolitical & economic disadvantages: its continental isolation, peripheral agrarian economy, & scattered population in relatively undeveloped regions outside Serbia proper. The Serbian state has tried in the last century to make up for these shortcomings by territorial expansion. Yugoslavia was the realization of that objective, since in it, Serbia arrogated significant resources by means of centralist redistribution. When the Yugoslav state met with a crisis, Serbian leadership did not agree to confederation reform, but instead opted for using their superior military might. The economic consequences of this show of force were tremendous: direct damage, due to destruction & occupation, & indirect damage through misappropriation of federal assets. Serbia is today faced with the failure of its venture, so its priority is the lifting of economic sanctions. The Croatian state in this historic moment must, above all, secure its territorial integrity & prevent the division of Bosnia & Herzegovina. Adapted from the source document.

Since mid 1991, in the context of structuring the ethnic relations & statuses in Bosnia & Herzegovina, a great attention is being devoted to the country's internal territorial division in accordance with the ethnic principle. The leadership of the three peoples in Bosnia & Herzegovina, appealing to the size of "their own" ethnic territories, formulated incompatible & extremely conflicting ethno-territorial demands. The Serbs claimed that two thirds of the country's territory should belong to them, the Croats demanded one third, & the Muslims/Bosniaks, being unable to articulate a project of a unitary state, demanded one half. After its initial involvement in the attempts to find a solution to the crisis in the country, at the beginning of February 1992, the international community supported a proposal for a federal arrangement where the federal units would be established according to the ethnic principle. However, since the international community rightly considered the existing demands as exaggerated, it tried to find an objective method to determine the size of the ethnic units in order to achieve a fair distribution of the country's territory. For that purpose, it used "the ethnic map" made on the basis of the numbers of each people in the existing administrative units -- counties (opcine). After the break out of the war (1992-95), the significance of that map would diminish in the subsequent peace plans & territorial division that accompanied them. Still, most of the experts interested in the problems of Bosnia & Herzegovina consider the mentioned map, thanks to its initial popularization by the international community, as an adequate basis for determining the size of the "ethnic units" according to which one should measure the ethno territorial divisions created by the war. Those views had their share of influence on the interethnic relation in the Bosnia & Herzegovina, on the internal geopolitical relations, & even on the aspect of international relations that was influenced by the war in Bosnia. The article claims that this map gives a wrong idea about the real size of the ethnic territories in the country. Thus, it was wrong to consider the map as an adequate "politically correct" basis in determining the ethno territorial units, & it is also wrong to use it as a standard by which one should measure the ethno territorial results of the war in Bosnia. Adapted from the source document.

The end of the Cold War brought about the emergence of a new geopolitics, one not greatly burdened with former international geopolitical views. One significant shift has been the recognition that geopolitical events cannot be limited to national states & their borders. Of course, states are still central for the world's geopolitical map, but no longer as the sole factors in the global geopolitical system. On the one hand, under the influence of globalization, new conditions have arisen, influenced by geopolitical factors; on the other, new entities are emerging whose influence is very similar to that of the central factors -- contemporary states. These similarities are primarily reflected in the claims of sovereign control over a certain territory, the organization of government on it, the shaping of a particular national identity by the majority population, etc. It is these new territorial & political units that contribute to the deconstruction of the geopolitical order; the disintegration of the Soviet Union is the best illustration. Adapted from the source document.