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Nationalism and democratisation. Possibilities and limits of Yugoslav democratic alternative
Žaba, Jakub ; Slačálek, Ondřej (advisor) ; Barša, Pavel (referee)
This thesis is concerned with the relation of the democratization process and the national mobilization in the case of former Yugoslavia. In the first part, the author deals with the tension between democratization and nationalism and describes moments in which both processes could become mutually reinforcing. A product of that is a democratic nation-state as a final consequence of the right of culturally defined nations to self-determination. However, refusing the nation-state as the sole scope of the democratic process, the author puts forward the concept of the state-nation by Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan. This concept deals with multiple but complementary political identities and enables to democratize multinational states, without denying the national segments the right to foster their cultural originality. In the second part of the thesis, the author analyses the Yugoslav case and explains reasons why at the turn of the 1990s the idea of a democratic state-nation was not put in practice, while the particular national projects, with democratic ambitions in many cases, were. In the author's opinion, the answer lies in a reduction of multiple but complementary political identities caused by the fact that loyalty to an ethno-culturally defined nation and loyalty to the Yugoslav political centre...
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