Suchergebnisse

The paper explores the merits of Protagoras' view of politics as a possible intellectual source of the post-communist theory of democracy. Unbeknownst to themselves, Romanian politicians and political scientist tend to understand the function of politics in the footsteps of Plato and Lenin, as an art, or science of leadership. Interested mainly in the effectiveness of government, they give no significant heed to the issue of rights and liberties. The great discourse of Protagoras of Abdera could supply, in a normative way, the conceptual tools for a different approach to politics, as a pedagogical rhetoric of legal and political equality.

The article explores the rationale of the Romanian political community as defined by its successive constitutional layouts, since the first fundamental law of 1866, including the Communist constitutional settings, and concluding with the post-communist constitutional design. This consistency of the political community is tested by means of an analytical distinction between the Nation-State and the National State. The former is understood as the institutional underpinning of a community bearing a political project. The latter is seen as the institutional outcome of an ethnic group and the warrant of its political integrity. Such an examination of the Romanian constitutional production sheds light on the historical and unambiguous predominance of the National State, while the Nation State emerged briefly and warily in the Romanian setting in the form of the socialist nation state. By the same token, this approach questions the adequacy between democracy and this rationale of the Romanian political community. While the socialist Nation State, as it was constitutionally designed, failed to guarantee the effectiveness of popular democracy, the Romanian National State, as it was shaped by the successive constitutional texts, pre-communist and post-communist, was always unable to accommodate completely with democracy.

The study investigates the history of prisons in general. In particular, the author outlines how this process has been developed in Romania. The study is conceived and analysed taking into consideration the historical evolution of humanity, firstly the appearance of prisons is approached and afterwards their evolution until the XVIIIth ce ntury. Later on the reform process of the punitive feudal systems until the establishment of modern prisons is analysed. The study pays special attention to the penitentiary system under the communist regime (in particular, the author analyses the penitentiary system in communist Romania). At the end of the study, the penitentiary system in the post-communist period is analysed, suggesting some prospective visions on the future of penitentiaries.

The Jews of Hungary had to face difficult situations at the end of the war. Before the Holocaust, they were approximatively 756 000-800 000 people in the extended Hungary, so it shows Tamás Stark in the study Hungarian Jewry during the Holocaust and after liberation. From them almost 600 000 died during Nazi and Hungarian persecutions. Budapest was an important train station for the returned Jews. Once they arrived in Hungary they saw that the series of difficulties continue. They were in impossibility to regain their old houses, they did not have sufficient money to survive. They were helped by the international organization Joint Distribution Committee to survive. Hungarian antisemitism was a feeling that did not manifest all of a sudden, it grew in time. The interwar period time was a time when this antisemitism manifested itself including through the law numerus clausus which limited the number of Hungarian students in universities and which was imposed in these years. Antisemitism was abolished immediately after the end of the war. Most Jews chose the path of assimilation in Hungarian communist state in spite of the persecutions which they had suffered before. A new system was emerging on the horizon, the communism, which promised the equality of all citizens in the Hungarian state, no matter of their ethnic background. A lot of Jews accepted this system and chose to keep secret the fact that they were Jews and did not tell their children about their origin.

The aim of this paper is to provide the reader with an insight analysis of the postcommunist Romanian constitutionalism. In order to achieve this objective, it is concerned with the way in which the constitutional framerwork has been build. Another topic of the paper is an attempt to clarify the political nature of the constituonal regime, starting from the very institution of the presidency.

The present paper wishes to be an inventory of the historical-demographical writings within Romanian landscape. We were able to identify preoccupation for demographic phenomena even since late 19th century, that have grown once with the creation of a discipline of historical demography in the post-war period, especially after the changes that Romania was put througt after Revolution in 1989.

This article try to observe if some concepts which was used in order to explain the changes in the western party systems can be use for the Romanian case too. We concentrate our analyze on the concept of "cartel party" and his emergence in the Romanian political space. The Democratic Party was chose as a study case because we think that this political organization illustrate very well our hypothesis that in the last years, in Romania we pass from a model of mass parties to catch-all parties and cartel parties. We must clarified that this concept of "cartel party" can be understood only if we have in mind that the hole party system is subjected to the same cartelization logic. The author focuses his analysis on the evolution of the Democratic Party between the two electoral moments of 2000 and 2004, whit a special attention on the modalities for establishing the lists of candidates, the discussion about the internal reforms and organization. An important part of the article is dedicated to the political migration of the members of Democratic Party, a very often practice for the Romanian political system.

The paper analyzes the institutional transformation of cultural policies in postcommunist Romania and the correspondent emergence of an art market in Romania. The case studies considered show that both artists and policy makers adapted to extraneous expectations and patterns rather than promoting new visions and models. The "triangle metaphor" forged by Magda Cârneci, representing the relationship between artists, the state and the Union of Visual Artists (UAP), offers the basis for analysing the game of continuity and change after the fall of Romanian communism.

The study presents statistics showing that half of the managers who came in leading positions have no education in the field, no readings management. The need for training and consultancy is very high, but people will not allocate money for their education.

The article describes the candidacies and the results of the elections for the Mayor of Bucharest of April the 3rd 2005. The author remarks two aspects: none of the candidates of June 2004 "re"-presented himself in front of the electorate; moreover, several parties did not fulfill the legal specification of obtaining 50 thousands votes in the local and the general elections of 2004.

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.

The 2000 Romanian General Elections marked the disappearance of the Romanian Democratic Convention (CDR), until then a remarkable fixture within the party system. The Convention's dissolution enabled other parties to emerge and fill in the void. This article explores these replacements at their geographical level. The historical region of Transylvania, once a stronghold for the Convention, became a favorable place for the Justice and Truth Alliance (DA) in 2004 and for the National Liberal Party (PNL) and the Democratic Liberal Party (PDL) in 2008. Using Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA), we examine the geography of party replacement in six Transylvanian counties. ESDA indicates that the party replacement process within the Romanian context has a definite and clear geographical dimension. Our study shows the need to place electoral changes in a geographic framework for a better understanding of Romanian party politics.

The article explores the way political participation, representation and governance
are conceptualized and rationalized by the Romanian legislation on parties. The
plurality of parties was initially set up as a way to discipline and organize the
political pluralism manifest in society in order to contain it within the boundaries
imposed by the Constitution. This disciplinary vocation of parties was confirmed
and reinforced by the laws enacted in 1996 and 2003 that embedded parties into
a functional vision of democracy where they were explicitly endowed with
the public mission of ensuring the political integration of Romanian citizens.
The detailed rationalization of parties' mission to organize citizens' political
participation and to contain the expression of their political will contrasted
sharply with both the ambiguity of their governmental role within the "eclectic"
institutional design of the Constitution, and with their organizational friability.