Is Transition Heading the Wrong Way?

Even after a 15-year-long transition experience the question can be asked whether the transition is heading the wrong way. This question originates from practice and personal experience of the author of this paper. The background of this question consists of four dilemmas. (1) Is transition a constructivist project or a project based on evolution? (2) Is transition a problem to be solved by several generations? (3) What were the expectations from transition? (4) Which social groups needed transition? Do transition countries want to develop a capitalistic system or do they just want to introduce capitalism constructively? What has been achieved till these days in most transition countries is a state of so-called political capitalism. It means a system with strong relations between politics and business. Does political capitalism per se have to turn into entrepreneurial capitalism? No! The current transition paradigm leads us into that trap of belief!     

Economic Freedom and Economic Growth in South East Europe

Economic freedom, understood as absence of barriers for business entry, business operations and business exit, is a source of economic development. Its impact is indirect: through institutions framework creation and environment that encourages economic development. Primarily, economic freedoms are a reflection of institutional arrangement, which makes business operations and the realization of business ideas easier for entrepreneurs and managers, who are two extremely important groups for economic development. The aim of the paper is to present empirical analysis of interrelation between economic freedom and economic development, expressed through several indicators, such as gross domestic product, income per capita, foreign direct investment per capita.     

In and out from the European margins: reshuffling mobilities and legal statuses of Romani minorities between the Post-Yugoslav space and the European Union

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the mobilities of Romani minorities between the ‘old’ EU Member States and the non-EU Post-Yugoslav space. It unravels how the mobilities of Romani individuals, who are Non-EU Post-Yugoslav citizens, were different from the mobilities of Roma coming from other post-socialist spaces, now EU Member States. Instead of focusing on motivations for mobility of Romani individuals as some previous work has done, this paper investigates the treatment of these mobilities by different states and the legal statuses these states ascribe to those labelled as Romani migrants. By using the combination historical and socio-legal analysis, this paper diachronically examines the precarious migrant statuses of Post-Yugoslav Romani minorities in the old EU, such as Yugoslav labour migrants, Post-Yugoslav forced migrants and subsequently the ‘bogus’ asylum seekers. The paper points to the interconnectedness of these statuses, but also to their interminable liminality: they are constantly on the verge of being rendered ‘illegal’ and are hence subject to deportability. I claim that while their legal statuses are being reshuffled, their liminality and interconnectedness also contribute to circular mobilities between the Post-Yugoslav space and the EU. I investigate how these mobilities are not only socially produced, but are also legally and politically conditioned by the hierarchical relationship between the Post-Yugoslav space and the EU. As a side effect of this relationship, Roma are positioned as a racialized minority, treated only as temporary migrants in their ‘host country’ and without prospects of inclusion in their ‘country of origin’ as minority citizens.     

Foreign policy priorities and ethnic return migration policies: group-level variation in Greece and Serbia

ABSTRACT

Why do ethnoculturally defined states pursue favourable policies to integrate some returnees from their historical diasporas while neglecting or excluding others? We study this question by looking at members of two historical diasporas that, in the 1990s, returned to their respective ethnic homelands, Greece and Serbia, but were not treated uniformly by their respective governments. Utilising a wide range of primary sources, we consider evidence for a number of plausible explanations for such policy variation, including the economic profile of an ethnic returnee group, its status in internal ethnic hierarchies, its lobbying power, and dynamics of party politics. We find, instead, that the observed variation is best explained by the role that each particular group played in the ruling elites’ ex ante foreign policy objectives. Elites discouraged the repatriation of co-ethnics from parts of the world they still had claims over, by pursuing unfavourable repatriation policies. Conversely, absent a revisionist claim, states adopted favourable repatriation policies to encourage their repatriation and facilitate their integration upon return. Methodologically, the article illustrates the importance of focused comparisons across dyads of states and particular sub-diaspora groups.     

Priming the Nation for War: An Analysis of Organizational Origins and Discursive Machinations of the Serb Democratic Party in Pre-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1990–1992

Abstract

This article examines the role of the Serb Democratic Party of Bosnia-Herzegovina (SDS BiH) in the constitution of Bosnian Serbs as a palpable political group primed for violence, a process that took place in the two-year period preceding the 1992–1995 Bosnian War. In the November 1990 Bosnian elections, SDS BiH won a decisive majority of the vote of ethnic Serbs. Yet, SDS was not an ordinary political party. In the 16 months that followed the elections, it initiated a series of activities that eroded the power of BiH institutions to which it had been elected. SDS BiH declared its own organs superior to those of BiH and established exclusive control in Serb-majority areas. In early 1992, it united these areas into a single Serb Republic, formed an exclusively Serb armed force, and launched a campaign of murder and expulsion of non-Serbs from the territory under its control. This article examines discursive mobilization of affective sensibilities of ethnic Serbs as an important aspect of SDS's ability to gain a mass following of Bosnian Serbs for its ethno-territorial engineering. It offers a discussion of progressive homogenization of ethnic Serbs by looking at SDS's organizational origins and the evolving rhetorical strategies in the period from the party's inception until the onset of the war.     

Applications of Marshall–Olkin Fréchet Distribution

In this article, we consider the applications of Marshall–Olkin Fréchet distribution. The reliability of a system when both stress and strength follows the new distribution is discussed and related characteristics are computed for simulated data. The model is applied to a real data set on failure times of air-conditioning systems in jet planes and reliability is estimated. We also develop acceptance sampling plan for the acceptance of a lot whose lifetime follows this distribution. Four different autoregressive time series models of order 1 are developed with minification structure as well as max-min structure having these stationary marginal distributions. Some properties of the models are also established.     

The Family and Work in the Post-socialist Transition of Serbia: 1991–2006

For a long period of time, the family and the household have not been considered agents in the economic sphere. However, in contemporary theoretical and research practice we are witnessing a rehabilitation of this aspect of family activity. The importance of the broader social and economic impact of this activity of families and households is legitimated through the concepts of social capital and household strategies in the labor sphere. This paper presents the results of three successive representative empirical studies of households in Serbia between 1991 and 2006. The main goal of these studies was to observe the problems households and families are facing in the transition process. The specific profile of Serbia's transition path, determined by numerous societal disturbances, is emphasized. The relation between the work sphere and the family sphere is viewed through five forms of the working status and activities of household members. Research results show a remarkable proliferation of informal work activities, which enable the survival of households in the circumstances of high unemployment and low wages in the formal labor sector.     

Towards the strategies of modern societies: systems and social processes

While several sociological theories have traditionally dealt with rational action by human actors, little attention has been devoted to the possibilities for rational steering of the entire subsystems of functionally differentiated modern societies in the context of their increasing complexity. Although rational intentional action is clearly limited at the macro-level by the complexity emphasized by Luhmann's social systems theory, strategies are required to approach the normative ideal of active society as defined by Etzioni. Understanding the strategic processes requires micro–macro and agency–structure connections. A possible solution to understanding strategy as a social process in this respect is found in the adaptation of the three-level – individuality, reality and totality – approach of Sztompka's theory of social becoming.