Flying Flags at Weddings in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Nationalism and the Limits of Flag Power

This study examines the practice of ethnic communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina flying a state, entity, religious, or foreign flag at wedding ceremonies in public spaces. The wedding custom is analyzed through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the way nationalism in the modern era links family and state. After a tragic war, flag power in this context appears to exacerbate nationalism and ethnic tensions in a polyethnic society trapped in a dysfunctional state structure created by the Dayton Accords. The empirical study finds that flag power does not, in fact, privilege ethnic solidarity over national solidarity to the degree that social and political theory would have us imagine. The national identity of being Bosnian is more likely to be exemplified. A clustered, stratified, random sample of 2,500 subjects over the age of eighteen was drawn from the country’s population, including the two entities, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska and Brčko District. Survey questions involving face-to-face structured questions asked participants whether flags were flown at their weddings, which flags were flown, and attitudes toward the wedding custom. Variations by age, religiosity, education, ethnicity, type of flag flown, and political party affiliation are reported and interpreted.

Tackling the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Economy and Labour – a Case Studey of Serbia Regulation

The paper deals with the foundation of policy and legal national framework addresses, particularly, the adequacy of state measures in the areas of economy and labour as a response to Covid-19 pandemic. The aim is, by analyzing recent soft law documents of international organizations and the introduced models of comparative policy practices, to make critical considerations regarding the policy responses in the crises conducted by the Serbian Government. The human-centered, holistic, and integrated approach had been applied accompanied by the legal normative and comparative methods. Putting the current Serbian regulation in the context of the international area of policy emergency response, the territorial approach has been determined as most applicable, accompanied by the spatial coverage to the most vulnerable sectors. Government stimulation policy in the area of economy and employment in the Covid-19 crisis must be based on the rapid and reliable assessment of the impact of a lockdown or trade and job restrictions as on medium to longer-term recovery strategies of trade and employment. The principle of global and national solidarity, public-private partnership are core elements that need to be incorporated in the legal framework to tackle the impact of the Covid-19 pandemics in the economy and labour.

Folk Games in Southern Khmer Culture in Vietnam

Folk games have long been viewed as a vivid picture reflecting people’s materials and spiritual life accumulated through multiple generations. Folk game, whether it serves as an entertainment activity in idle seasons, leisure time, or just jollity for children; is aimed at the solidarity and unity of the communities, villages, and the entire national solidarity. Folk games were once a page of precious memories imprinted on the homeland and villages, which nurtured people with good lifestyles and souls. Nevertheless, these days, the role of folk games is no longer blooming as before. The preferences and ways of entertainment of all classes of people, especially the youth, witness more or less changes. For the Khmer residing in the South of Vietnam, an ethnic group associated with the rice farming tradition, folk games in particular and folklore, in general, are of prime importance. This article presents the origin, gameplay and recognizes the cultural values of folk games in daily life and festivals of the Khmer people in the South to contribute to popularizing and preserving the beauty of Khmer culture in today’s society.

Current Situation of Building and Development of Ethnic Minority Staff in Vietnam

As a multi-ethnic country, the Party and the State of Vietnam have always determined that ethnic affairs and national solidarity have a huge significant position. Building a contingent of ethnic minority staff in the political system remains one of the solutions to realize equality and solidarity among ethnic groups. The recent building of ethnic minority staff has been paid special attention and achieved certain remarkable results. The quality of ethnic minority staff has been increasingly improved. This importantly contributes to the socio-economic development of Vietnam in the upcoming years.

National Solidarity and Unity in the Works of Fra Rajmund Rudež, Fra Josip Vergilij Perić and Don Ilija Ujević

The paper analyzes the cultural, literary, and political activities of three priests related to the area of Imotska Krajina in terms of their by origin, works and service. An analysis of selected political and literary texts written in the last two decades of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century will show how (the)?priests’ discourse followed the development of Croatian intelligentsia in terms of balancing between spiritual and political Slavic unity and the vision of an independent and properly united Croatia. While in political works the priests expressed stronger rebellion, their literary works are a continuation of pastoral work, but without greater artistic value with a clear didactic message. The purpose of both types of texts is to continue the revival work, to enlighten the Zagora part of Dalmatia and to spread Croatian thought. They differ in their view of the solution to the Croatian question, political affinities, level of engagement, position and function, while what they have in common is the work on internal harmony, which among those more politically engaged included rebellion against Croatia's internal and external enemies.

The Refugees We Are: Solidarity, Asylum, and Critique in the European Constitutional Imagination

This Article aims to reimagine post-national legal solidarity. It does so by bringing debates over Habermasian constitutional theory to bear on the evolving use of mutual recognition and mutual trust in the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice (AFSJ), particularly in the context of European asylum law and reforms to the Dublin Regulation. Insofar as critiques of Habermasian “constitutional patriotism” apply to the principle of mutual trust, the Article suggests why post-national solidarity requires fallibilism and dynamic responsiveness that exceed formalized rules of forbearance and respect.On this revised view, legal solidarity guarantees a particular form of adjudication through which individual litigants in a particular case challenge the transnational structural conditions that give rise to individual harm. Because it acknowledges that violations of individual rights are always potentially or in part the result of a collective systemic failure, this conception of solidarity restores meaning to the transformative “transfer” of sovereignty that post-national law had promised. In the field of asylum law, I detail how this application of solidarity would offer a much-needed corrective to structural imbalances in the existing Dublin regime. I conclude with reflections on the principle’s application in additional fields of EU law, as well.

Building Solidarities Through Public Education: National, Multicultural and Cosmopolitan?

In most countries, the education system seeks to instill two kinds of solidarity: a thick sense of national solidarity with one’s co-citizens, and a thinner sense of global solidarity with all of humanity. Many commentators argue that we need to rebalance these two forms of solidarity, de-emphasizing national solidarity and re-centering global solidarities. More radical commentators argue that we should abandon ideas of national solidarity entirely as inherently exclusionary and outdated. I will suggest that we in fact need both kinds of solidarity, although our conception of education for national solidarity needs to reflect our multicultural realities.