 Academic director: Radovan Vukadinović About the study This postgraduate study programme in international relations is now in its seventh year, with a designed syllabus and deeply rooted in the foundations of its discipline. The present programme, the second in the independent Republic of Croatia, offers a longed for opportunity to leave the lecture-halls and participate in the social life (practice). Two important features of the new Croatian political reality open up these prospects: firstly, the independent Croatian state has become an autonomous entity in the international political relations, and secondly, the democratic nature of its government liberates its foreign policy from the voluntaristic misconceptions of the past: that success in international politics does not depend on knowledge, but on ingenuity (will). Fighting for its fundamental rights and entitlements, Croatia entered the world's political stage in exceptionally complex circumstances of sweeping changes in the international order, caused by historical turmoil. These circumstances require a careful, multifaceted, and well-thought out foreign policy and the establishment of highly differentiated international ties and relations. The key to success in foreign policy activities is the same as for any other activity: the more complex the problems, the more knowledge is needed for their solution. The realization of Croatian national interests in the existing international constellation is a complex problem and requires considerable expertise, even in those segments of that process where diplomacy is involved, not to mention the foreign policy creators. Such knowledge cannot be acquired by commonsensical inferences on the basis of publicly distributed information. The public image of international relations is only a manifestation of their substantiality, of various historical, geopolitical and other forces. Their phenomenology often conceals their real meaning. Only analytical knowledge can grasp these forces, their meaning and synthesis, acquired through studying an adequate programme of theoretical and methodological education. |