ИПИ Библиотека

There still is, in many multiethnic local communities, a non-negligible number of people who think that hatred against those who are different is neither “natural” nor “normal.” And in some local communities such people are capable of offering, organizing and defending practices of interethnic relations substantially different from the one presented above. This alternative pattern is the main subject of the project Managing Multiethnic Communities in Countries of Former Yugoslavia. In the project, this pattern is named “good practice,” and it can be summarized as the process of reestablishment of life together based on principles of mutual respect and tolerance.

It is almost a truism that local government is an important feature of constitutional democracy. No democratic order of today can be envisioned without a system of governmental institutions authorized to make political decisions and to manage and administer public policies on a limited territory within a sovereign state. Indeed, there is no modern or contemporary sovereign state which does not know some form of local government or is at least divided into local communities. In other words, local government
is not an exclusive property of democracy. Nondemocratic systems of yesterday and today know some forms of territorially identifiable local subunits. This holds for communist authoritarianism as well. In countries of the communist sphere—with the partial exception of Yugoslavia—local government was of a purely administrative nature, following the overwhelming centralization of the party-state regime. Decentralization of power, as one of the key features of democratic local government—and which includes a set of guaranteed local functions as well as autonomy in their implementation—was virtually absent. In its
stead stood a system of subordinated deconcentration of essentially the one and the same authority. This multilayered structure, extremely complicated in some countries, of local government served mainly as a transmission mechanism for technical implementation of decisions passed by the party-state apparatus.

Nenad Dimitrijevič

Няма налична информация