RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

of those states in which' the nations and nationalities are a composite part of a different constitutional system... In many countries this is a source of conflict between the ruling nations and the national minorities. Therefore the problem of inter-cultural communication is always linked with political autonomy, with the equality of nations, the autochthonous nature of national culture, with problems of the domination of the cultures of great nations and threats to the cultures of small nations: it is linked with the economic exploitation of and pressure on small nations by great ones and, naturally, with all the problems studied in the world today under the name of ”nationalism”. The national question is not an acute problem for шапу civil states and ”democrats”, but one of the central problems of socialism too, that is, in the social order which has furnished the theoretical bases for solving the problem of the equality of nations and nationalities, and has offered different solutions in practice. The concept ”inter-republic” encompasses relations between different nations and republics within a single state or federation and points to relations in the socio-economic structure, the political structure, the cultural and scientific fields and other spheres of life. ’lnter-republic communication” therefore expresses various ways of solving the national question, as well as the level of quality of communication between different nations, republics, or autonomous parts of an integrated system. The concept ”inter-republic communication”, then, could notbe reduced only to institutional forms of communication between political, state and other institutions. The specific features of inter-republic communication are different in the system of civil democracy, where the dominant interaction takes place between the ’Tepresentatives” or oligarchic heights of political and state institutions, national and international oligopolies, and horizontal communication between different national or republic publics is reduced to forms of inter-cultural communication in the anthropologicai sense. The form and content of interrepublic communication in the system of state socialism is framed by norms and

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