Autonomy: Notion and forms on the meaning, types and scope of autonomy

Abstract

Autonomy and its autonomous law is an extremely significant phenomenon. The idea of autonomy contains the idea of the right to self-organization, which also encompasses the right to relatively independent i.e. autonomous normative activity. But if autonomy were independent, i.e. independent of state authority, then it would not be autonomous, but new state authority. That means that autonomy, despite its origin, is possible only as a correlative or as an appendage of state authority, which permits and defines it. For that reason autonomy, in comparison to state authority, is always relative and proportionate. The existence of the appropriate measure of autonomy and the autonomous forms adapted to it - no matter when and where - is a sign of the assessment and decision within the state that autonomy is necessary as a measure of proportionate and relative freedom within the given borders. Autonomy in the sense just described, therefore, is not only a matter of the will of a person, nor is it only a matter of the decision, assessment or relevant legal measure, it is also the result of the development of state communities in which decentralization, deconcentration and devolution - as synonyms for the said assessment and change, are accompanied by simultaneously integrative and disintegrative trends and processes represent a clear intimation of the need to satisfy in the mentioned sense only those reasons that are conducive to legal and not false autonomy.