Czech Foreign Policy – Small State or Middle Power Approach?

The majority of countries in the world are small states. Their role grew up rapidly in the period after the Second World War and especially after the end of the Cold War. In this period new themes appeared in the international relations and small states profiled on them as so-called middle powers. Development aid and cooperation or support for human security were two such a themes. The Czech Republic too could in the near future aspire to become a medium-sized power. Czech foreign policy was formed in the dynamic period after the end of the bipolar conflict of the Great Powers and the disintegration of the Czechoslovak Federation. Nevertheless, since the very beginning the Czech Republic has been able to define its clear priorities, often with reference to the historical development of Czechoslovak statehood. The euphoric period when the Czech Republic was established could be one of the reasons why the first official concept of Czech foreign policy was presented as late as 1998. These policies, and later policies since 2002, represent a combination of small state and medium-sized power strategies. The article analyses which themes could be the vehicle for transforming Czech foreign policy from that of a small state towards the policy of a middle power

Political culture and its types in the post-Yugoslav Area

The aim of the article is to apply the concept of traditional, modern, and obmodern society on the development of political culture in the post-Yugoslav area. The post-Yugoslav – and generally post-Communist – societies might be analysed as interesting example of limited modernisation after the 1945, when some spheres were developed similarly in the comparison with the Westerns societies, but in other the development was stopped, retarded or deformed. Next to the traditional dichotomy traditional vs. modern society we apply the interesting model of obmodern society presented by the Slovenian sociologist Ivan Bernik. Based on the analysis we generally construct the “geocultural” dividing line between two groups of political culture in the post-Yugoslav area

Decentralization Processes in Croatia and Slovenia

The article analyzes the decentralisation processes in two post-Yugoslavian countries that underwent a distinctively different development after their secesion from Yugoslavia. The analyzes verifies two basic hypothesis: 1) the the process of joining the European Union, especially the demand to accept specific criteria of home politics, includes the demand for subsidiarity and decentralization; 2) that the development of democracy encourages the decentralization process more than the development in an authoritative regime, or in a regime with limited, e.g. formal democracy

Traditional, Third Way or a Different Path? The Czech Social Democrat Party in 2010

This text is not intended to be an expert analysis but rather a refl ection upon the state of ideological debate within the Czech Social Democracy Party, and the position of the Democratic Socialist left within the party and political systems of the Czech Republic and the European Union. This text primarily reflects the writer’s opinions on the events and an idea examined, and is in this sense primarily an essay

Nova personalizirana stranačka politika u Češkoj

U drugoj polovici devedesetih godina i u prvom desetljeću 21. stoljeća, češki je stranački sustav obično opisivan relativno stabilnim. Unatoč tome, već tijekom tog razdoblja mogle su se uočiti neke važne promjene unutar sustava

Brenneis, Alexander: Das parlamentarische System in Slowenien und Österreich im Vergleich

Knižní recenze / Book review

Twenty years of Czech EU membership : between the pragmatic bandwagoning and the ‘Visegrad-effect’

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Czechia has presented itself as one of the leading post-Communist nations regarding Europeanisation. Such an assumption created the platform for the establishment of the Visegrad Group (V4) – the nations who share the same main geopolitical goals – NATO and EU Membership. Promotion of further EU enlargement as well as the importance of an Eastern Partnership became flagships of V4 nations declaring in 2009 their ambition to become the ‘second engine’ of the EU. Nevertheless, such ambitious goals were continually undermined with the transformation of the V4 into the populist cooperation and leader-driven format which presented the most visible internal opposition and challenge to the EU’s mainstream and its values. This analysis focuses on the most important modalities and the oscillation of Czech politics and society between the two ideal types of Europeanisation – the role-model position stressing the need to finalise the catching-up process with the EU-15 and join the ‘core’, and the policies copying the nationalpopulist narratives with an ‘anti-Brussels’ framing, which are labelled the ‘Visegrad Effect’. In the first part of the paper we present the framework for how the East-West cleavage influences the perception of the EU in Czechia and V4 debate. We then examine the economic dimension of EU-membership. In the last part we focus on the growth of Euroscepticism and national populism in Czechia and the V4, including the modalities of Czech European policy related to the differences among the key political actors as well as societal groups.peer-reviewe

Kopeček, Lubomír: Éra nevinnosti. Česká politika 1989–1997

Knižní recenze / Book review

Jakub Charvát: Politika volebních reforem v ČR po roce 1989.

Knižní recenzeBook revie