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The Church-State relationships in EU Member States are in a process of a radical transformation. This is the result of a rapid political integration and also of the major transformations of the modernity. Religion is still part of the European public space even if, according to modernity premises, it should be only a private matter. According to Max Weber and other authors, secularization diminishes the role of the religion in society. However, these theories are being contested in recent years, due to the interpretation of statistical data and to the emergence of fundamentalist religious movements spreading around the world. Consequently, secularization is a tendency and not an "iron law". As regards the current role of the religion, Silvio Ferrari developed the theory according to which there is a common European model. This model does not exist yet, but certainly we live in an era defined by the continuous searching of such a model. There is no European identity without common values. Some of these values, like toleration, do have a profound religious foundation. European integration is based on the action of different actors, including interest groups located in Brussels. The Churches and the religious organizations are also part of this category of actors and they try to be part of a process by which a common space for consultation will emerge.

By analyzing the parliamentary debates of 1866-1867 on foreigners' (notably Jews) requests for naturalization and property rights, this article tries to identify the parliamentarians' answers to the following questions: On what grounds were foreigners accepted as Romanian citizens? How did the parliamentarians define the foreigner? What was required from a foreigner in order to become a citizen? The overall objective is to identify some major themes that preoccupied the representatives of the nation, circumscribed around the primordial character of the "union" and of "nationality", with a special focus on the solutions proposed by the liberals. The argument is that the Parliament, by its vote, instead of granting citizenship rights, merely established the conditions according to which one could become a Romanian. In other words, the Romanian legislators considered it to be of outmost importance to recognize the quality of being a Romanian, that is, a member of an ethnic body, and not to define citizenship as a legal membership. "To be a Romanian" was more of an ethnic belonging, a "given", than citizenship or civic loyalty, defined through political and civic rights. It seems that citizenship was crushed by the primordial character of ethnic loyalty and by the weight of the state as expression and guarantor of the Romanian nation. In engaging the parliamentary debates about naturalization, the article attempts, first, to draw more nuanced conclusions about the lately much-debated character of citizenship in Romania and Eastern Europe during the mid-19th century. And second, such an analysis may provide a better understanding of the nature of political representation during the same period.

The image of the European culture is given by the association of the concepts people – culture – history – territory, which provides certain local features. From this relation, we identify a cultural area with local, regional and national features beyond a certain European culture. Thus, we identify at least two cultural identity constructions on the European level: a culture of cultures, that is a cultural area with a particular, local, regional and national strong identity, or a cultural archipelago, that is a common yet disrupted cultural area. Whatever the perspective, the existence of a European cultural area cannot be denied, although one may speak of diversity or of "disrupted continuity".
The paper is a survey on the European cultural space in two aspects: 1. Europe with internal cultural border areas; 2. Europe as external cultural-identity border area. From a methodological point of view, we have to point out that despite the two-levelled approach the two conceptual constructions do not exclude each other: the concept of "culture of cultures" designs both a particular and a general identity area. The specific of the European culture is provided precisely by diversity and multiculturalism as means of expression on local, regional, or national levels. Consequently, the European cultural area is an area with a strong identity on both particular and general levels.

Cultural heritage represents an essential component of human identity, and as a part of of the contemporary world, it has both symbolic and economic value. Cultural heritage is finite and non-renewable though, being endangered due to recent conflicts and due to the way it is perceived. This article analyses how different political regimes have influenced the way Iraqi and Syrian cultural heritage has been perceived, preserved, protected and even destroyed, starting with internal laws, institutions responsible of heritage administration and the people who led them, in the attempt of demonstrating that continuous attempt to impose a cultural unity can have unwanted consequences.

Cinematography was deliberately organized, financed and oriented towards the purposes of the system and consequently became the most effective element of political and cultural pedagogy. The synchronic correlation between word and image, the power of visual suggestibility, empathy as an emotional response to the actors' performance - all these had immediate effects on the collective imaginary, on the perception of reality as a social and identity-forging project determined by the emergence of the ideological discourse. The Romanian socialist cinematography from the time of Ceauşescu synthesized and systemized a coherent and explicit system of values wherein it integrated the message of literary and other artistic works, of variegated forms of cultural expression, so that Romanian cultural axiology could find new possibilities to stand out in strict dependence to the institutional and optional structures of mass culture. The cinema per se thus became a sort of pedagogy for universal use, rendering the past heroic, as it exacerbated the national ego via the instruments of entertainment. Highly permeated ideologically and quasi entirely subordinated to the Communist cultural policies, the cinema production, carried out because of the appeal to emotions and collective memory, thus became part of the official discourse and orientated its issues, especially after the 11th Congress of RCP, according with the political and ideological interests of the national Communist project. The analysis focuses on the Romanian historical films with subjects and episodes relevant for the ancient and mediaeval history, in relation with the efforts of identity reconstruction, coordinated during the Communist regime in relationship with the project of the socialist nation's building and, after 1989, in relationship with the attempt of reconsolidating, sometimes from a radical perspective, the nationalist mythologies. Socialist patriotism thus incorporated many stereotypes drawn out from the ante-bellum, as well as from the inter-bellum Romanian spirit: the lyric of self-identification expressed by the film soundtrack and by the majestic character of the heroic gestures, the heroic epic obvious in the popular ballad pattern of pre-modern nature, the activist pedagogy specific to all forms of identitarianism. Despite all this ideological infusion, the mythology of Romanian historical films during the Communist nationalist times remains one of a sadistic-masochistic nature, cultivating the fear towards the Other, fatalism, expectation and obedience, all chronic and historicized.

This study consists in an analysis of the modern Romanian conservatism's evolution. Starting with the semantic definition of the term "conservative", the author sketches the circumstances of its use in the Romanian political language in the middle of the 19thcentury and later in political practice. The author highlights that in the 50's and the 60's decades of the 19th century there was a great interest in a precise definition of the term in the political vocabulary. It was the time when "conservative" together with its antonym "liberal" were two political terms just entering the political language. Also in Romania, the conservatism defined its identity from the ideas of natural progress, organic evolution, order and legality in the spirit of the ideas of E. Burke, already common in the political imagology of the European conservatism. At the beginning of the 20th century Romanian conservatives continued to use the specific vocabulary and ideas of the former century, trying to unveil the consequences of the forced modernisation of the country, so that later, after the First World War, to disappear as a party from the political stage; conservative doctrine persisted in a fragmentary form in the interwar period.

This study aims to answer the question whether Christian Orthodoxy can inspire political movements. In so doing we start from the political theories of modernity where the link between Christianity and democracy is central. Our result sounds unexpected: interaction between Orthodoxy and democracy seems to not have a perspective. It is too late for it since most political movements in post-communism do not have the religious identity of their members as criterion. The situation was not different before. As an example the effort of the orthodox theologians and laymen in Romania before the outbreak of the Second World War is quoted here. Almost without an exception all focused and restricted their interest on the question of the nation. Therein we see the principal reason for the above postulated perspective of an orthodox political doctrine until now. On the European level the situation looks also no better. Even the parties, which attribute themselves the Christian values, have at present large difficulties to convey their message. It remains only to hope that the political actors rediscover the social and actively support the Christian ethics in the public area. Only so can democracy be regarded as one of the most important binding forces also under the Christians.

Pierre Manent is viewed as a French thinker that develops in modern times the liberal tradition of political thinking. One of the most important issues of Manent's thinking that was not enough underlined it is the relationship between religion an politics and how this evolved from the beginning of Christianity until the main consequences of modernity. Manent view on religion and politics is the core of this paper analysis. The main contributions of Manent, such as Naissances de la politique moderne. Machiavel, Hobbes, Rousseau (1977), Histoire intellectuelle du lib.ralisme (1987) La cit. de l'homme (1994), Cours familier de philosophie politique (2001), La raison des nations. R.flections sur la d.mocratie en Europe (2006) are analyzed from this perspective. Our conclusion is that in the way Manent deals with the relationship between politics and religion there are some constants that may be found in all his work. These are: the relationship between the Church and the different forms of political organization in Europe (Civitas, Imperium, monarchy); the fact that Christianity is one of the few current relevant concepts for political, due to the failure of totalitarian ideologies; the idea that secularization in Europe is not irreversible; we live in "an age of separations", and Church-State is one of these separations; we witness the religion transformation process and the .tat la.que cannot survive to .tat-nation; the role of Islam in modern societies and his perpetual finding of a political form; the relationship between Judaism, state and nation; the issue of the Christian identity of Europe.

his paper aims to illustrate how institutionalized education has been a significant identity management strategy for an ethnic group in Romania. After its foundation in 1872, the University of Kolozsvár (Cluj) was regarded as a provincial higher education establishment within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, meant to satisfy merely regional demands. Although legally the two Hungarian universities (in Budapest and Kolozsvar) were considered equal in rank, government and society gave priority to the first one. It is only over time that the University of Kolozsvár proved its utility. This change of image resulted in a leading position, especially at the start of the twentieth century. After the outbreak of the World War I, the activity of the University witnessed disruptions due to the drafting of many professors and students into the Army. The end of the the war not only meant the achievement of 'national unity' for Romania, but also generated significant changes for Ferenc József University, beginning with the process of dismissing minorities from the public sector and replacing them with Romanians. After the Second Vienna Award, the University of Cluj became Hungarian once again. The historical lesson of the inter-war period on the treatment of minorities had to be prevented from repeating itself, and within the new geopolitical context the USSR seemed the guarantor for the final resolution of the ethnic rivalries and resentments. In this ideological context, on 29 May 1945 two royal decrees sanctioned the functioning of two distinct universities in Cluj; the Hungarian university János Bolyai officially opened its doors. The preservation of a representative higher education institution for the Hungarian minority in Cluj, adapted to the new political realities, was achieved. But after Stalin's death in 1953 the feelings of 'national specificity' resurged, and national histories were re-individualized and reconstructed. The events in Budapest in the autumn of 1956 offered further reasons for central authorities to rethink the 'national domain'. In the years to come, propaganda insisted on the futility of institutional separation between the Romanian and Hungarian students in Cluj. Hence, a meeting of the unification commissions, held in 1959 led to the fusion of the two universities. This evolution of the University of Cluj shows the constraints, openings, compromises, and 'avatars' of the most important institution of higher education in Transylvania, which continues to function as a source of symbolic prestige and social capital for both Hungarians and Romanians.

The implementation of the principles of local democracy has proven to be one of the most complicated tasks of the political and administrative reform in the Republic of Moldova. To overcome this situation, it is important to develop and substantiate theoretically such concepts as "local power", "the subject of local power", "local territorial collectivity". A clear scientific definition of those notions would serve as a foundation for developing an appropriate legal framework and public policy in the field. In order to elucidate the notions mentioned above, the existing essential approaches in the contemporary social sciences regarding the public territorial collectivities have been analyzed. The factors affecting the formation and existence of the local territorial collectivities have also been emphasized. Two types of authorities: private and public have been briefly considered. This paper analyzes the concept of "local authority" in contrast to the term "territorial administrative unit" with which the legislator operates in the Republic of Moldova. It was concluded that the concept "local collectivity" is more acceptable because it is the appropriate expression of the phenomenon of the territorial organization of public power in general, as opposed to the concept "administrative unit" which refers only to the territorial organization of state public power. So, from this point of view, the territorial administrative units and the local territorial collectivities are two different phenomena. In a strictly legal sense, the territorial-administrative unit is an inhabited territory which has no heritage (in the territory there is the state property or another kind of heritage) and it is administered by an official appointed by the state. The local collectivity has its own heritage that is managed on its own account and in order to solve local problems. The issues belonging to state power can be delegated to local authorities by sending financial and material resources needed to achieve them. A territorial community of the residents becomes local authority if it possesses and uses democratic institutions, creates bodies of self administration on the basis of the elective principle, takes binding decisions for the community, and has its own financial and material resources in order to regulate the internal life. These indicators make public territorial collectivities to be different from the territorial administrative units, in which only administrative methods of management are used. The defining elements of the identity of a local collectivity, such as: a) name, b) territory, c) population, d) the public authority of the eligible authorities, e) the Statute, f) the distinctive insignia of the local collectivity, have been identified. These elements make the local territorial collectivity to be distinguished from other similar collectivities.