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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.

At the end of World War I, Germany was neither politically, nor culturally
"attendable", for most of the European countries. In this context, one of the main
cultural aims of the Weimar Republic will be the resumption of the cultural and
academic relations with other countries. The foreign students were invested with a
major role in this respect. The Weimar Republic has taken institutional and financial
steps in order to intensify the student migration and to repopulate its universities
with foreign students, measures that have paid off in the mid 20s. In 1925, the
percentage of foreign students in Germany reached again the pre-war level. The
groups of foreign students best represented in the German universities were the
Romanians, the Bulgarians and the Polish. The paper also takes a look at the
evolution of the foreign students in Germany during 1918-1933, focusing on their
country of origin, the preferred institutions of higher education and fields of study,
as well as on the presence of female students from foreign countries in Germany.

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.

This article aims to present the situation of the foreign students in general – and of Romanian students in particular – studying at German institutions of higher education during the
Third Reich. Beyond its quantitative considerations, which prove how intense was the migration of Romanian students to Nazi Germany the article highlights the political role assigned to the Romanian students by the Nazi authorities, as well as the political and ideological impact that the study in the Nazi universities had on the Romanian youth.

Drawing upon the first Romanian journal devoted to the broad promotion of hygiene and health education -The Sanitary and Hygiene Handbook- the article investigates the interaction between politics and medicine, politicians and doctors in modern Romania. Published uninterruptedly between 1899-1907 and considered "essential for the rural sanitary service", the journal shows the evolution and predicaments of the position of the medical profession: as public servants, the physicians were agents of the various territorial sanitary administrations; however, by virtue of their medical expertise and field experience, they were also harsh critics of local and central authorities, claiming a special status in both the design of health policies and their implementation on the ground. This dual and conflictive nature of the medical profession added to the increasing polarisation of the medical profession and of the sanitary staff as a result of the salient "proletarization" of its members in the rural areas, as opposed to the elitist character of the corporation in the capital, well represented among MPs. At the beginning of the 20th century, the debates hosted by the journal testify for the transformation of hygiene and medicine from a doctor-to-patient relation to a generally acknowledged policy sector.

Any reflection on the relationship between religion and politics in the Catholic thought cannot do without reminding the Augustinian distinction between the civitas Dei and civitas terrena. The goal and foundation of any just political community should be the orientation to wards the common good. In the contemporary catholic thought, Johann Baptist Metz proposes a political theology revolving around the concepts of the value of the human person, the necessary refusal, on the part of the Church, of any mundane ideology and the necessary use of the socially critical potential of theological thought. Hans Küng criticizes any politicization of theology. He insists on the development of an internal pluralism within the Church and advocates a self-limitation of the magisterial intervention in the world in the name of a necessary "eschato logical reserve". Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict the XVIth , invested with the magisterial authority, relies heavily on official documents of the Catholic social doctrine. He emphasizes the necessity of founding the state on the central value of justice and its acting according to the principle of subsidiarity. In this context, the Christian faith and the Church in particular may have a pedagogical role, as it may guide reason to follow the right priorities. All three thinkers agree on the public significance of the Christian vision of society and on the fact that it may help society both by its critical and by its constructive dimension.

The article examines a few episodes during the 1866-1871 legislatures of the Romanian Parliament. The debate on the annual budget for 1867 represents a good opportunity for the members of the Parliament to define politics as a matter of opinion, with negative connotations, in opposition to the face-value and clearness represented by the mathematical percentages and figures. The latter ought to guide, in their opinion, good governance, which does not belong to the realm of politics. According to such a mental scheme, the members of both Chambers of the Parliament appear to be convinced that majoritarian politics and the fragmentation of the political parties must be utterly rejected in order to adequately realize representation. The difficulty of the Romanian members of the Parliament to define politics influences their difficulty to define their own role, namely the nature of political representation.