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That matters of the state must always be resolved before democratization seems to be a fairly common position in the scholarly literature. There are, however, also scholars that stress the importance of an alternative perspective: ‘no democracy, no state’. This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of this very important issue, advocating the need for a more nuanced argument about the relationship between the state and democracy. To do so, Croatia and Serbia serve as empirical examples as their different outcomes regarding the consolidation of democracy are explained as due to their (un)resolved stateness problem. The article uses process tracing to explain these outcomes and attempts to craft a minimally sufficient explanation of the outcomes by developing causal mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The problem of the influence of the Europeanisation process on party systems became a “hit” at international conferences in European studies and political sciences just after the “big‑bang” EU enlargement in 2004. Although in the last ten years this research has often encompassed the party systems of many Central and Eastern European countries, it still seldom includes the post‑Yugoslav states. On the other hand, although some scholars had assumed that the EU’s impact on party politics (including both political and organisational changes) in the new member states would be greater than in the old EU countries (EU‑15), in general their assumptions have not been confirmed. Of course we can find exceptions, though, and in the author's opinion one of these is the Serbian party system. In the first part of the paper the author deals with conceptualisation of the Europeanisation of political parties, examining theoretical problems above all connected with the question of how we should measure the significance of the influence of Europeanisation on domestic party politics. The second part of the article is devoted to the problem of Europeanisation of Serbian and Croatian parties as well as the party systems in both investigated countries. To examine this question, four of the five elements (leaving aside government‑party relations) of Ladrech's approach to the Europeanisation of national parties will be used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El autor reflexiona sobre los enfrentamientos armados en Bosnia Herzegovina a los diez años de la firma de los Acuerdos de Dayton que les pusieron fin y que firmaron Serbia y Croacia como participantes de la guerra. Con estros acuerdos Bosnia quedó dividida por la mitad con los croatas en el territorio occidental y los serbios en el oriental. La comunidad internacional creen que la consolidación estatal en el contexto multiétnico y multirreligioso es posible. Sin embargo el periodista bosnio Marinko Sekulic dijo reciente mente que Dayton no puso fin a la guerra sino que simplemente transformó el conflicto militar en otro que se lleva a cabo por otros medios.

The article focuses on the views of Branko Ancic of the Institute for Social Research in Zagreb, Croatia on political and social views on Croatia. When asked about the relationship between Serbia and Croatia, Ancic said that the two countries have a better relationship. According to him, there is about 95% overlap between the languages of Serbia and Croatia. With regard to the issue of economics and religion, he mentioned that Croatia has a greater advantage over Serbia due to its coastline. Ancic also mentioned that he was only a teenager when Croatia became a state in 1992.