Suchergebnisse

One of the directions in order to study the changes that affected the university in postcomunist Romania is to analyze the relationship between politics and university. This analysis is situated on three levels: the university, the political elites and university and the university and the state. Our study aims to offer a profile of the members of the Romanian Parliament during the period 1990-2008 in terms of academic career. Following the Bourdieu's criteria on academic relevance our conclusion is that the presence of important members of the academic space in the Romanian Parliament explains on one hand the backwardness of the higher education system and on the other hand, the creation of the private universities after 1990.

The analysis carried out by Benedetto Croce in Storia d'Italia dal 1871 al
1915 and in Storia d'Europa nel secolo decimonono, as observed by the
most perceptive interpreters of the historiographical activity of Croce,
excludes the conflict phases that preceded the historical periods taken
into consideration (The Risorgimento for the History of Italy and the
French Revolution for the History of Europe). This paper shows how the
perplexity of the historiographical setting of Croce is also found in the
book about the Baroque period in Italian history that was published in the
same year of the two most important and well-known historical works by
Benedetto Croce.

After the beginning of the experience of the center-left government in the early sixties, Italy proposes an independent and original foreign policy, consistent with its position in the Mediterranean, across the border between East and West. The preferred partner within the Warsaw Pact is Romania, considered the vanguard of a political process of internal liberalization and of political emancipation of Eastern Europe from Soviet-communism. So far, the limited historiography on the Italo-Romanian relationships has taken into account almost exclusively the economic and trade agreements. This paper, on the basis of largely unpublished documentation at the Senato della Repubblica and at the Central State's Archive in Italy, analyzes instead the main international issues of the meetings between Bucharest and Rome, namely the Détente, the Sino-Soviet conflict, the peace building in the South-East Asia, the Middle-East, the CSCE. The unpublished diary of statesman Amintore Fanfani, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1965 to 1968, reveals how the Italian ruling class has a substantial confidence in Ion Gheorghe Maurer and Corneliu Mănescu and high expectations around an alleged non-alignment of Romania. On the other hand, the correspondence from the Italian Embassy in Bucharest for Aldo Moro (Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1969 to 1972 and from 1973 to 1974), describes the violent and authoritarian temper of the regime established by Ceauşescu in his country. In any case the Italian strategy seems then to reappraise the special partnership with Romania, in favor of a multilateral approach to the problem of Détente within the continental conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Includes summaries in English.

In a context of geo-political changes, the Arab and Islamic world re-discovers, as usual in moments of crisis, the social and economic thought of Ibn Khaldun and his concept of assabiya to analyse the challenges and the risks of the present times. There is, also, a significant attempt to found an autonomous and autochtonous way of political approach in order to attribute a local philosophical origin and intellectual paternity to the recent revolts in contrast with any "westernized" aspect or interpretation.

This is a multiauthorial review essay of Daniel Ziblatt's Structuring the State: The Formation of Italy and Germany and the Puzzle of Federalism (Princeton: Princeton U Press, 2006) that includes a rebuttal by Ziblatt. Maurizio Cotta notes the persuasiveness & convincibility of the factors singled out by Ziblatt in support of the book's central thesis that the unification of Italy & Prussian Germany in the second half of the 19th century, although begun in both countries with similar regional institutions, ended with a centrist government in the former & a federalist regime in the latter. He questions, however, his attempt to project these factors in developing a more comprehensive theory of the emergence of major nation states in Western Europe, pointing out that the generalization that gives a satisfactory account for Germany & Italy becomes a fallacy when extended to Belgium or the Netherlands. Alfio Mastropaolo objects Ziblatt's implicit premise that federalism is superior to a centrist-unitarian governance & the implied conclusion that Italy would have fared better with a federalist government after its unification. He observes that neither Germany was spared from Nazism by federalism & nor Italy from Fascism by centralism. Mastropaolo points out that Ziblatt overlooks the importance of ideological factors, in particular the strong sentiments favoring a unitarian state in pre-1861 Italy. Gianfranco Poggi notes that the book fails to consider some important cultural & ideological theories of federalism that suggest an alternative explanation of the preference for federalism in Germany but not Italy. In his rebuttal, Ziblatt replies to the objections raised by each interviewer, defending the descriptive-explanatory efficacy of the historical-comparative approach adopted in the book & Charles Ragin's (1987) qualitative-comparative analysis applied in the extension of the generalization to other European states. He flatly rejects Mastropaolo's imputation that the book favors federalism as a superior form of government. Ziblatt also provides a rationale to justify the relevance of comparing the unification experience of Italy & Prussian Germany for contemporary political science. Z. Dubiel