The Union is defined as an association of corporations and citizens based on voluntary or in cases specified by law, compulsory membership. The Union was established to represent and protect the common, including professional interests, as well as to achieve public benefit goals.
But what forces people to seek such forms of unification as unions, associations, and parties?
Philosophy presents us with an opportunity to understand such phenomena as the self-organization of societies. Seen as a philosophical concept, self-organization can be called synergetics. The term “synergy” comes from the Greek word, συνεργία (cooperation, community) and ἔργον (business, work, impact, action). It is the joint action that characterizes the processes of self-organization.
The development itself is also an objective appearance. It is a phenomenon of material and spiritual reality. Development, these are qualitatively oriented changes in the system. Knowledge of the laws of self-organization and development makes it possible to change peace in accordance with the needs of human civilization.
Society as such develops not in itself, but through structuring in the following levels: individual – family – collectives (parties, unions, associations), social groups – nationalities – nations – states.
The Balkan Cultural and Economic Union is an element of this system. The reason for its creation is not only the initiative of individuals who founded this union as a command of the times, in line with the global trend of self-organization of society. We can safely say that in the development of the Balkans there has been a period of rethinking the originality and meaning of unity as a cultural and economic community. Today, we, the people living on the Balkan Peninsula, are united by something much more than that – the awareness that we are part of a global Europe, of its civilization and of the European Union and we are part of the whole world.
That is why the creation of the Balkan Cultural and Economic Union is a form of realization of the opportunities for interaction not only within the Balkans, not only within the European Union but also worldwide.
What will be said below is not a discovery of the author of this article. This is a postulate many times repeated in textbooks on “Theory of State and Law”. For law students, this knowledge is the basis of their legal intelligence, the basis of their perceptions, and their understanding of the state, society, and social development.
In societies that are not bound by economic ties, the natural form of government is the monarchy. In societies that are based on exchange relations between free and politically equal subjects – owners, where all authorities are either elected for a fixed term or form parliaments, they have a republican form of government. In fact, in the history of the Roman state, the term “republic” has been known since 310 BC. The principle developed by Charles Louis de Montesquieu for the division of powers into legislative, executive, and judicial was used as early as 1787 in the drafting of the American constitution. Later, thinkers of this era gave birth to two more fundamental principles of government: substitutability in power and the separation of municipal and federal power.
It is with the advent of the municipal level of government in the country that opportunities for participation in politics appear (let the word politics be understood as a solution to common issues and not as an opportunity to hold positions in the state apparatus) of whole groups of free citizens and all kinds of organizations, which means that more effective self-organization of society is achieved. All this has its explanation, laid down again in the scientific discipline “Theory of State and Law”. Science tells us that if a state exists as a republic, unification of sovereign individuals, then such a state would look like one big corporation. The corporation is built from the bottom up and is governed by the principle of eligibility. If, in essence, a state is the power of the monarch, who stands above the population, then such a state is built as an institution, namely from top to bottom. And when the state is an institution and not a corporation, then the people in it are not self-governing, but rely on power, educate and obey. In this case, there is no room for self-organization and interaction. A convincing example of effective self-organization and interaction is the example of the creation and operation of chambers of commerce and industry, existing for 400 years, which in themselves are business associations.
The need for the existence and activity of such structures as associations, unions, and other forms of unification is not only preserved but also increased. This is explained by the fact that at the beginning of the 21st century the contradictions between the cosmopolitanism of capital and the sovereignty of nationalist states as a form of social organization are escalating. Today, the balance between decision-making by traditional state institutions and the new centers controlling the resources and economic processes necessary for their implementation has been disturbed. However, the need for supranational regulation ignores the selfishness of nationalist states.
Such selfishness hinders the development of the economies not only of the countries of the Balkan Peninsula but also elsewhere in the world. It is for this reason that the Balkan Cultural and Economic Union has set itself the task of creating a platform for a possible dialogue between culture, science, and business, in order to develop professional analysis and implement optimal solutions and actions.
Nikolai Kalinov – Chairman of the Managing Board of the Balkan Cultural and Economic Union
