Documents political development 220 results

"Hardly any European country receives as little attention in the international press as the Republic of Moldova. Since the end of the bloody civil war across the Dniestr in the early summer of 1992, the country has provided no spectacular headlines, but has developed almost silently: neither the comparatively dramatic problems, nor the moderately encouraging first signs of progress in Moldovan politics, have been acknowledged outside of the country with the exception of limited expert circles. Nevertheless, this young state on the strategically significant dividing line between the crisesshaken south-east Europe and the post-soviet transformation region is worthy of examination. In the shadow of political turbulence and some bloody disputes in the region of the “crisis belt” from Central Asia over the Caucasus up to former Yugoslavia, Moldova endeavours to attain stability and reform to overcome the overwhelming problems inherited from the Soviets. On 22 March 1998, 2.4 m electors in the Republic of Moldova were called upon to elect a new Parliament. With the constitution of the new legislature by 101 parliamentarians, those deputies from the previous period, who emerged from the first free elections in 1994, lost their mandates. In the same way that the presidential elections carried out at the end of 1996 had led to a peaceful power change at the level of the head of state, the parliamentary elections can also be regarded as evidence of noticeable advances in the democratisation of the country. For the first time, reform-oriented forces now represent the majority of members of Parliament, who brought a reform-minded government into power in May. After the crises, retrogressions and crippling power struggles of the last few years, Moldova has thus received a second chance for profound economic and democratic change."

"It may be said that the media in Serbia are the Archimedean point of reliance for any political change. Without the liberation of the media, any attempt at political change seems like an attempt to lift oneself or to leap over one's own shadow. The regime in Serbia has built its position on the iron control primarily of the state electronic media which are the only ones that cover the entire territory of Serbia and have the decisive impact on the formation of public opinion. For years now, Milosevic has been combining the politics of crisis building and ethnic conflicts with a media campaign which has created a psychosis of general national threat; in such a situation, so has been the explicit message of the media, Serbia can only survive if we all give up any and all political bickering and unite under the leadership of the legally elected president, i.e. Milosevic.
The first part of this paper gives a brief history of the Serbian media in the post- communist period, while the second part describes how the media have been used to create support for the regime. "

"The main issue arising from the controversial Yugoslav developments over the past few years, mainly in the differences between the politics of Serbia and Montenegro, is whether a successful transition can be accomplished if it is the smaller part of the two-part federation that is the engine of change, and in what ways the political violence that the Serbian regime regularly uses to accomplish its political aims can be countered by peaceful means in the smaller Republic. The answers to these questions will determine to what extent the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia can become integrated into modern Europe, and how far it has progressed in developing the democratic potential necessary to effect political change without resorting to political violence."

"This article is an account of an interview with Prof. Dr. Dragoslav Avramović, who has had a long and varied career as a statesman in both Yugoslav and international politics, including being Governor of the National Bank of Yugoslavia between 1994 and 1996. The SEER was interested in Professor Avramović's views on a number of issues, including privatisation, the labour market, and the contemporary economic, political and social trends in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The interview was conducted on January 4 1999 by Dr. Darko Marinković."

"In this article, we show that Next Generation EU (NGEU) is mainly a response to the economic and political imbalances left over from the Eurozone crisis. It is a pre-emptive intervention, especially targeted at structurally weak economies with rising Euroscepticism, to avoid costly ex-post bailouts as in the Great Recession. We demonstrate, using quantitative analysis, that pre-existing vulnerabilities, rather than the impact of the pandemic, drove the allocation of NGEU resources: per capita grants largely correspond to past economic vulnerabilities, as well as to political ones. Countries most vulnerable to another adjustment by austerity after the COVID-19 economic crisis receive most resources. Also, countries with strong anti-EU sentiments are entitled to larger NGEU grants per capita. In contrast, grants are not correlated with the severity of the health crisis. Then, we show the domestic relevance of economic and political vulnerabilities through qualitative case studies of national political debates and domestic positions on NGEU in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Despite its innovative traits, NGEU is a politically constrained solution to address the mess from the previous decade, and as such, it is a Janus solution: promising a fresh start, but haunted by the past."

"Like all the other countries of central and eastern Europe, Hungary has experienced at least five substantial changes in its political system during the last fifty years. Before World War II, Hungarian agriculture was characterised by feudal relations, landlordism and large masses of immiserated workers (but very few peasants, in the real sense of the word). The picture was completed by the Catholic Church as the major landowner, owning more than 20 % of arable land. It was evident that the most important democratic measures after the war were going to be linked to radical land reform. Strong evidence of the vitality and adaptability of the Hungarian land workers and their powers of self-renewal is that, in spite of diverse changes, they have never stopped improving Hungarian agriculture. It has to be emphasised that Hungarian agriculture is well supplied with land and labour but, typically, it is extremely under-capitalised. This, among other things, explains the lack of development of the middle classes. At the same time, all these changes were abrupt – they were not transformations or “changes in trend” as a result of organic development – and they wasted the most scarce resource: capital. Now, we begin again to make plans for the development of agriculture and the creation of an appropriate structure that best responds to the challenges of the EU."