Suchergebnisse

Nowadays, criticism of the UN is related to excessive bureaucracy, to the parallelism in the functions of many of its structures. In addition, the UN is accused of reacting more to crises than preventing them. The selective interest of the United Nations in conflicts in different regions of the world gives reasons to assert the presence in its activity of double standards. Especially, the UN authority has been greatly undermined by such events as the United States's actions in Iraq and Yugoslavia, after which many have questioned international law in general and United Nations, in particular. Thereat, there are a lot of statements that the United Nations is in the deepest crisis and there is a set of proposals and views on the content and essence of the need for UN reform. In this article, the author argues the opportunity of UN reform, elucidating some current gaps in the work of this international organization and coming up with concrete recommendations to remedy them.

This article examines the influence of the soft power on the process of ensuring the national interests of the Russian Federation and the Republic of Moldova. The author determines soft power as an important mean of securing national interests, an essential component of the process of realizing relations between states, deducting that soft power contributes to the foundation and promotion of national interests, the consolidation of stability, of order and peace and the creation of a positive image of the state on the international arena. Taking into consideration that the concept of soft power has developed, gaining a legal foundation in the Russian Federation quite recently, the importance of research on the subject is growing to follow how this concept has been defined and how its own action plan is developed and materialized without adapting the Western templates to Russian realities. The research of the soft power role in promoting the national interests of the Republic of Moldova stems from the fact that our state requires a clarification of the foreign policy objectives and their means of realization, a determination of the role of soft power, its specificity and its efficiency in the transmission of values by a democratic and modern state to other actors of the international process.

The current financial and economic crisis has highlighted the inadequacy of existing institutional and policy arrangements at the EU level. Even before this crisis, the EU economic growth was low, by international standards, revealing deep structural problems across EU countries, especially in the Southern flank. Macroeconomic imbalances have been building up, exposing a stratified EU with divergences in productivity and competitiveness, with rigidity of labour markets, impeding efficient market responses to shocks. The Monetary Union does not have adequate institutional arrangements, which may help it manage a major crisis, such as that of a last-call borrower, depreciation and burden-sharing mechanisms of asymmetric shocks, etc; various sui generis formulas are now being tested. Fiscal reactions vary depending on the level of the debts and on the speed these accumulate; at the same time, these are linked to the size of the budgetary expenditure and fiscal revenues as percentage in the GDP. The sooner the growth picks up, the more acceptable is the downsizing of the certain expenditure and/or the rise of some taxes, so that the ratio between the public debt and the GDP stabilizes (reduces, when it is the case).

International audience ; The article questions, in a skeptical and prospective way, the institutional outcomes of this major trans-national trend of administrative reformism known as "New Public Management". In our view, the main cross-border legacy of the process of acclimatizing NPM precepts and recipes to various national configurations consists essentially in institutional rearrangements and in a repertoire of managerial tools and recipes, embedded into different institutional orders and hybridized with many other key features of various administrative cultures. Backing up major administrative reforms started several decades ago, the NPM rhetoric claimed to furnish the universal cure for the "bureaucratic" disease which was supposedly affecting the developed states at the end of the 1970s. From then on and although it never acquired the inner coherence of a real doctrine, it spread all over the world at the point of becoming both a "policy paradigm" and a "praxeologic". However, once implemented and in order to endure, the NPM-inspired logics, instruments, and methods have fatally begun to suffer a process of routinization which transformed them significantly. Hence, far from achieving their initial goal of "de-bureaucratizing" the state, NPM reformism became part of the endless processes of bureaucratic reproduction inescapably affecting modern states and ensuring their resilience.

It is certain that contemporary higher education institutions have entered the era of great transformation. The environment they operate in has changed fundamentally: professional knowledge and skills have become the main generator of economic development. At the same time, the university is no longer the only provider of high-quality knowledge. Competition on the market of knowledge and academic education services is getting tougher. The efforts made by national education in modernizing and reforming the national higher educational system, in the context of European rigors and exigencies, would not be that obvious if they were not supported by our international partners through various community programs. The successful promotion of reforms in the educational system becomes possible only in terms of identifying, taking over good European practices in the field and implementing/ institutionalizing beneficial and valuable elements for the national higher education system. Good enforcement of reforming provisions is not possible unless there is a cooperative framework between the three main actors. The government shall implement new modern policies in higher education system; the civil society, on its turn shall take the responsibility and availability to be engaged in the reforming processes, and the higher education institutions shall accept the new context and implement the reforms on the institutional level, cooperating in the same way with the other two actors, meanwhile paying attention to the labour market.