Suchergebnisse

The homogenisation of voting patterns within the territorial units constitutes one of the major features of the post-communist electoral contests. In the Romanian case, despite forecasts, the empirical analysis of voting behavior both in national and local elections unveils an exceptional trajectory. First, this study will scrutinise the evolution of citizens' political choices across the territorial units after the breakdown of communism, emphasizing the difficult process of party system nationalisation. Secondly, concentrating on state regulations and party organisational development, the paper aims at exploring possible justifications for the low levels of nationalisation. The conclusions will highlight the significance of more inclusive definitions of the institutional arrangements (introducing the impact of party regulations) as well as the importance of party development strategies, mainly from the perspective of political recruitment, in order to explain the post-communist electoral reconfigurations.

This article retraces the evolution of the Romanian electoral management system
during the postcommunist decades, by considering it from an institutionalist
and strategic perspective. Electoral management is the setting where various
institutional actors are in constant interaction with the view of producing the
postcommunist democratic legitimacy. Their very interaction is a test of the
validity of the postcommunist polity. If the general design of electoral management
remained relatively stable, the institutional actors called to participate in the
endeavour changed their political status, and their institutional attributes and
their policy capacities. The sequence of postcommunist elections unravel the
process of institutional disjunction and political re-conjunction between the
central government, local administration, and the judicial, which set the patterns
for the institutionalisation of Romanian democratic politics.

The paper deals with the necessity to implement sub-regional specific solutions in order to achieve the economic recovery. EU2 countries (Bulgaria and Romania) have the same political and economic past, present and future and the same challenges to face. This is why both countries are analysed together in order to present the disparities between the real economic environment and the economic recovery measures implemented. The punt is high, because these latest Member States would be transformed into a good practice example for other member and candidate countries. Unfortunately, the reality is different. The analysis is focused on the anti-crisis programs from EU2 and their experience with the international financial institutes. The analysis is supported by Eurostat and official databases in order to describe the symmetrical shock to asymmetrical implications on the economy. The conclusions of the analysis can be resumed to the following: the global crisis affected powerfully the latest two EU member states; the financial regulation represents a critical area to create a sustainable and efficient financial system; the real target for Romania and Bulgaria is to save themselves from the national bankruptcy; the popular pressure on the policymakers increased and the economic recovery implemented plans are not able to support the economic recovery in both countries. The analysis and the conclusions of the paper are followed by pertinent statistical tables and diagrams.

Ernest Gellner betrachtet den Nationalismus als eine Konsequenz moderner Industriegesellschaften und verortet dessen Genese in den sozialen und kulturellen Transformationen von den Agrar- zu Industriegesellschaften. Der historisch erfolgte Funktionswandel von Kultur und sozialer Organisation hin zu einer Verbindung beider Phänomene ist der Kerngedanke seiner Definition des Nationalismus. In Abgrenzung zu primordialistischen Theoretikern, die er als Sympathisanten des Nationalismus bezeichnet, ordnet er sich selbst den modernistischen Nationalismustheoretikern zu. Der Nationalismus ist daher kein Jahrhunderte altes Phänomen, wie es im wissenschaftlichen Mainstream noch bis in die 1980er Jahre angenommen wurde. Gellner steht somit in der langen Tradition der soziologischen Modernisierungstheoretiker wie Max Weber und Emile Durkheim, die aus eurozentrischer Perspektive irreversible und konvergente Modernisierungsprozesse beschrieben haben. Gellners Nationalismustheorie wurde vielfach kritisch rezipiert und mit empirischen Überprüfungen konfrontiert. Hierbei lassen sich drei häufig wiederkehrende Kritikpunkte identifizieren, die sich im Wesentlichen auf die funktionalistische Perspektive, auf den proklamierten Zusammenhang von Industrialisierung und Nationalismus sowie auf die Lücken in der Erklärungskraft für das Wiederaufleben von nationalistischen Gefühlen beziehen. (ICI2)

The political regime change that occurred in Romania, along with the dismissal of communism, elicited a process of emergence of new political elites and of new patterns in the functioning of the country's political institutions. But new political elites do not emerge ex nihilo and institutional changes are slower in practice than the ambition of change. Given the extensive absence of decision-making or technical expertise among the political actors, the new parties in government conducted a policy of cooption of personnel instituting new patterns of selection. The paper will emphasize the fact that, in the Romanian case, the process of professionalization of governmental personnel took the form of a long process, and that the protocols of the reconfiguration implied divergent strategies in what concerns the governments' ministers and the secretaries of state. It will be shown that although the ministerial careers suggest the institutionalization of recruitment procedures similar to other European parliamentary democracies, the junior ministers' level remained dominated by forms of cooption from outside the political realm.

This article explore the popular attitudes of Ottoman Muslims (mainly Turks and Kurds) and foreign residents (German, US, British, so on) towards their Christian (mainly Armenian and Syrian) friends, neighbors, and countrymen during the tragic events that occurred in WWI Ottoman Empire, known in Western scholarship as the Armenian genocide. Overall, the attitudes of Ottoman Muslims and foreign residents towards local Christians fit into the perpetrators/bystanders/ rescuers paradigm and varied from active persecution, to indifference, opportunism, and sometimes help and rescue.

The present global crisis began in 2007 in the USA. It affected all economies of the world during 2008-2010. Our research deals with the idea of a new paradigm for the European cohesion policy in order to limit and to decrease the regional disparities across the Member States. The paper uses the Eurostat official data base as a neutral approach for all Member States' economies. We talk about the Economic Forecast Spring 2009 of the European Commission, Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs. The analysis is focused on some specific economic indicators (GDP at previous year prices, private consumption, public consumption, gross fixed capital formation, exports, imports, employment, unemployment rate, unit labour costs whole economy, savings rate of households, harmonised index of consumer prices, trade balance, general government gross debt as % of GDP) and covers 2008-2010 period. We used the ranking of the Member States using the method of the relative distances, the ANOVA method (under the unemployment rate) and the cluster analysis, as well. The data processing leads to an unexpected result: the Members States can be easily divided into three categories, each of them with specific evolutions. Moreover, the economic evolution of those Member States' economies leads to greater disparities in 2010, comparing to 2008. These disparities are presented using pertinent diagrams and critical remarks. The question we have to answer is if the present European cohesion policy is able to solve these disparities. Unfortunately, the answer is negative, at least in 2010. As a result, these new socio-economic evolution of the EU under the global crisis represents the real greatest challenge for the EU.

The paper attempts to offer a rather sketchy analysis of Romanian postcommunist politics with the help of Theodore J. Lowi typology of political processes. The collapse of communism can be seen as a sudden disorganization of the patterns of both constituent and regulative processes set up during the communist rule, annihilating by the same token the redistributive capacities of the political system and reordering the logics of its distributive policies. Striving to rearrange the postcommunist constituent arena in order to become the political subjects of the new regime, parties in the making formulated a sequence of operational definitions of democracy while engaging in distributive processes as vectors of their own organizational production. However, these constituent blueprints proved to be constantly caught in the trap of the interplay of the other processes, especially in the collision of the regulative and the distributive ones. So, quite rapidly, Romanian party and democratic politics became less the agent of the transformation and more the byproduct of an erratic and ungoverned political change.

The paper deals with the analysis of the regional development using RIV model which uses a regional sphere. The regional development is analysed as a sum of boundless number of sphere sectors. We must carry out a translating process that should make the passage from a two to a three-dimension space. Each specific influence is allotted certain, clearly cut sphere sector as shown by the pattern. We consider standard life as the element aimed at by the study at issue. Using specific factors, RIV model can obtain a diachronic time-progress diagram. More, a series of relevant comparisons can be made between regions, between regions and the country mean or between regions and the E.U. average. RIV model allows completing forecasts using scenarios method which is able, for example, to provide the regional decisions makers with a wide range of possible involvements. ; peer-reviewed

Trade unions in Central and Eastern Europe exhibit a difficult organizational development, a high degree of fragmentation and a lack of strength. Focusing on the Romanian trade union confederations, this paper aims to provide an alternative explanation of their influence during the democratization process. The study emphasizes that, in the Romanian case, the articulation and the consolidation of the trade union movements were directly dependent on the relationship created with the political arena. In its turn, the reconfiguration of the trade unions' politicization entailed a change in their internal structures and in their strategies. The general mechanisms of Romanian unions' transformation are scrutinized in the last section of this article by mobilizing the case of the civil servants interests representation after 1989.

This article examines how the Holocaust survivors from Romania represented and reinterpreted the notions of resistance and collaboration. Overall, it seems that the treatment of the Holocaust in post-WWII public opinion and scholar- ship influenced the way survivors represented the Holocaust. For many years, resistance was equated with "heroic" armed struggle. Gradually, the perspective of the Holocaust began to change, and new interpretations enlarging the concept of resistance have since emerged. The issue of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis has also triggered heated debates. Due to changing social and political contexts, new interpretations focusing on the difficulties and moral dilemmas faced by the Jews have started to emerge.