Based on declassified documents from the Clinton library and the Department of State, this article examines the U.S. decision in favor of restricting the first round of NATO enlargement to only three new members, thus leaving Romania in the waiting room, despite the massive diplomatic efforts of the new government, resulted from the 1996 elections. The article delves into the connection between the open door policy and the NATO-Russia relationship, arguing that the U.S. decision sought to increase confidence in NATO's promise of having subsequent accession rounds in order to reduce Baltic pressures for membership, to avoid the perception of a Russian veto over NATO decisions and, eventually, to lessen further Russian antagonism by continuing enlargement in a gradual manner and making thereby the process more acceptable to Moscow. The U.S. approach was to start with a smaller group of the strongest candidates while keeping promising candidates for the next rounds in order to guarantee the credibility of the open door policy.
Although an increasingly voluminous scholarship has contributed to unpacking Central and Eastern European (CEE) "hybrid welfare regimes," significant gaps still remain, particularly vis-â-vis the very first policy choices. This occurs due to a preference for macro-structural approaches which do not fully dissect the layered and complex "etatization of welfare programs". Picking up the gauntlet, Maria Bucur offers an in-depth historical analysis on the transformation of individuals into socio-political stakeholders, via state centralization.
The book East Central Europe and Communism, Politics, Culture, Society, 1943-1991, was published in 2023 by Sabrina P. Ramet - professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, specialized in Central-European societies, politics and cultural evolutions. The author depicts in a comprehensive analysis the establishment of the communist regime, the development, the critical points and its collapse in the Soviet Bloc.
Transition to democracy in Eastern and Central Europe occurred as a consequence of the way communist regimes dismantled. Not as a momentum, but rather as a continuous overlapping series of phenomena, events around 1989 happened because of the actors, especially the intellectuals, that created them. This is the main thesis of András Bozóki's book published in 2022, Rolling Transition and the Role of Intellectuals. The Case of Hungary, 1977-1994. This work fills the gap in a literature that focuses mainly on the democratic transition in Eastern and Central Europe as a unitary space or on the Ruling Elites in a newly capitalist system.1 More recently, political writings on Hungary discuss the democratic backsliding and the illiberal turns of the regime, including it in a regional framework affected by populism, and Euroscepticism.
The hypothesis of the article is that the Russian Federation has developed a praxis in terms of territorial conquests, based on historical reminiscences, and it will not be renounced, especially in the case of Ukraine. By immersing in history, without making it a determinant of the present and without showing psittacism, we believe that the assertiveness of the Russian Federation in its proximity can be justified only from its point of view. The brutal and completely illegal intervention in Ukraine is an example of reality violation. The end of communism and the dissolution of the USSR have generated resentment among the Russians, which denotes capitulation. The Russians have probably rejoiced for a while over the end of totalitarianism, but they have constantly regretted the loss of the empire. The "Russian world" is, in fact, nothing but a form of virtual restoration of the Soviet empire, a trap of the past, in the souls and minds of the Russians, a ferment whose purpose is the internal destruction of the states that emerged after the collapse of the USSR, preventing them, by injecting feelings of confusion and nostalgia, to overcome the post-Soviet stage.
"In 1943, the Soviet fleet in the Black Sea was clearly superior to its opponents (Germans, Italians, Romanians, Bulgarians), but there were no major naval confrontations in this theatre of war. In most confrontations, starting in 1941, the Soviet naval forces suffered losses and were forced to retreat. The Romanian intelligence services had data on the organisation of the Soviet fleet, the dispersal, the commanders, the naval constructions and the ways of action. At the end of 1943, when the Red Army was on the offensive and had begun the landing in Crimea, the Romanian-German naval forces started an operation to supply the defenders, and later, in 1944, an evacuation of their own troops. Despite the vulnerabilities, the Soviet fleet did not attack decisively, so the withdrawal by sea was relatively organised and saved more than 120,000 soldiers and civilians."
The whole life of Ebbon, church hierarch, missionary, man of letters and 9th century politician, points without a doubt to a character who was never satisfied with what he had, what he knew or what he achieved. We intend to show to what extent this personal insatisfaction with his lot played a role în finding new ways of visual expression which marked the transition from antique models towards a new, middle ages esthetics.
The present study aims to capture some of the aspects of the relationship between Romanians and Jews, the targeted field being that of education. The school system, an area on which there have been extensive disputes over time, has been used in turn by participants in the training process as a tool for assimilation, discrimination and emancipation. During the period of consolidation of national consciousness, the majority gave shape to the desire to eliminate differences and opened public schools for minorities in order to assimilate them faster. Subsequently, finding shortcomings in the application of the principle of compulsory primary education among Romanians and the overrepresentation of Jews in the public sector, the latter were restricted access to free schooling. The introduction of restrictive provisions for other levels of education was the expression of the radicalization of Romanian society, especially in the twentieth century. On the other hand, these discriminatory measures boosted the opening and development of Jewish schools, and thus the emancipation of the Jewish population.
An insight that can greatly help us in our understanding of Romanian history during the era of the Communist totalitarian regime, is without a doubt provided by the historical dramaturgy of the period. During those years, a large number of historical plays were written and directed. It is for this very reason that historical theatre cannot be ignored by any historian interested in how the social representation of the past was constructed in the context of the four decades in which Romania was held in the grip of Communist ideology. There is an obvious parallel between the evolution of Romanian literature during the period in question (including dramaturgy) and Romanian historiography. In the latter field, changes that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s have been highlighted over the last two decades by Lucian Boia1. An analysis of literary criticism and writings reveals similar characteristics and developments in that field. Moreover, the literary genre of historical theatre can be closely linked to the rise of nationalism within the political discourse of the Communist regime, so it should not come as any surprise that the number of historical themes had been growing steadily since the mid-1960s. In a manner similar to other cultural policies of the time, the ideological twists and turns of Romanian Communism can be found in the evolution of historical theatre. Indeed, the closest comparison that can be made is with the historical cinematography of the time, which was better known and more popular than the dramaturgy of the era, through its themes, subjects and artistic approaches. However, while the historical movies of the era are still available today and indeed are frequently broadcast on Romanian TV, the historical plays of the time are available to the modern researcher only in specialized books in which they had been collected before 1989, in the volumes of literary criticism from the Communist period, or in the collective memory of witnesses. Nevertheless, a study of the impact of theatre under the conditions of communist totalitarianism is essential in order to be able to properly understand the effects of the regime's propaganda, its evolution in terms of ideological orientation, and how it contributed to the crystallization of social representations of the past. This research study is merely a first step. The themes of the historical plays written and produced during the Communist regime are closely correlated with its historiographical writings. Ideas such as the antiquity of the Romanian nation, its persistency, the permanent nature of the defence of its statehood, and the aspiration toward unity are all now emerging. One theme highlighted during the 1970s is that of 'heroism', also present in the propaganda of the time. This theme channels us towards a better understanding of the role and attributes of the leader, thus becoming one of the main themes of Romanian historical dramaturgy within a very short time. While a long line of voivodes and heroes appeared on the stage, and via this medium through history, they became in fact the moving parts of a bigger mechanism that would ultimately become the personality cult of Nicolae Ceaușescu.
The influence of cultural anthropology in Romania, more precisely in the historiographical school from Bucharest, is directly associated with the activity of a small group of very influential professors at the Faculty of History, in the University of Bucharest. This article evokes the atmosphere in the Faculty during the last decade of the communist regime, discussing the ideological ambiguities and contradictions that allowed a semi-subversive, but systematic use of methods and concepts specific to French and American cultural anthropology, especially for the study of Antiquity and the Middle Age.
The present paper aims to analyse the evolution of the writing profession in case of women writers during the first half of the 20th century and especially during the inter-war period. In this respect, the present research mobilises three main methodological frameworks mainly consecrated by Pierre Bourdieu and his later followers: the sociology of professions, the sociology of gender, and field theory. The professionalisation of the literary occupation is also analysed from three main perspectives in front of the backdrop against which it occurred: firstly, the evolution of the literary profession is related to the feminisation of the literary field that allowed a wide insertion of women therein; the practices of exclusion, insofar as the literary occupation remained capitalised by male dominants; and, finally, the professionalisation of writing in the case of women is correlated to the development of the literary infrastructure during the inter-war period that contributed to the dislocation of the established criteria of the co-optation of newcomers.
The paper argues that twentieth-century (post)coloniality was a multi-centric and poly-peripheral space and as such calls for a different, more complex geo-cultural and historical portrayal than the one provided by mainstream postcolonialism. Conventional postcolonialist critiques are ill equipped to address the historical interactions and the conceptual migrations between the discourses of the Second and Third Worlds, or with their "dual dependencies" because, with notable exceptions, postcolonialist studies only focus on the relations between the West and its (former) colonies. I argue that Eastern Europe and the (post)colonies of the West are alternative peripheries in the convoluted field of global (post)colonialism and that there were protracted two-way exchanges between these subaltern discourses in their interconnected experiences of (post)colonialism. This interplay, together with their vacillation between the two power centres during the Cold War, complicated not only the global power games, but also the processes of (post)colonial identity formation, and the ideological genealogies of repression and resistance
In 2011, Libya plunged into a civil war after the outbreak of the Arab Spring, a revolutionary movement characterized by massive civil protests which tried to build democratic societies in the Middle East and North Africa and put to an end the old repressive political regimes. After several months of civil war and bombings over Libya, longtime Muamar Ghaddafi's dictatorial regime fell. Although the U.S. did not directly intervene in Libya, it supported the overthrow of Ghadafi through the intervention of NATO, providing aerial support and airstrikes for the opposition force (it also established a no-fly zone over Libya, authorized by the United Nations). In 2014, contested parliamentary elections led to the formation of two rival political power centers — one in the east, based in Tobruk and backed by military commander Khalifa Haftar, and another in the west of the country, an UN-supported administration in the capital of Tripoli. Each side was supported by a variety of militias and foreign powers, who competed for influence and oil resources, raising fears that oil-rich Libya could become the theater of a regional conflict. In April 2019, Haftar and his forces, backed by Russia (the Russian military contractors of the Wagner Group), Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates launched an offensive to capture the capital. His campaign collapsed after Turkey and Qatar offered their military support to the Tripoli government with hundreds of Turkish troops and thousands of Syrian mercenaries, belonging to the Free Syrian Army. The outbreak of violence in Libya in April 2019 severely affected the institutional reunification and stability of the country. Warning that the situation in Libya could become "a second Syria", with a new large wave of refugees directed towards the EU, Germany offered to call a peace conference for the conflicting sides, held on 19th January 2020 under the auspices of the United Nations. The aim was to stop the military support for the civil war parties and uphold an existing UN arms embargo, re-launching the peace process for a political settlement, after nine months of fighting over the capital. Operation EUNAVFOR MED IRINI was launched by the European Union on 31 March 2020, as part of the European Union's contribution to the Berlin conference. The core task of the Operation is the implementation of the UN arms embargo on Libya through aerial, satellite, and maritime assets, an embargo that had been decided in 2016 by the United Nations Security Council Resolution. This ongoing mission replaced the Sophia Operation, which had been in place for five years, combating the organized crime and trafficking of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. In June 2016, the European Council decided to extend Sophia's mandate until July 2017, adding two supporting tasks: training the Libyan coastguards and contributing to the implementation of the UN arms embargo on the high seas off the coast of Libya. This paper attempts to analyze the response of the European Union to the Libyan crisis by launching the Irini operation, a military-naval Joint force, setting out to secure the Berlin Conference's commitments. Finally, we try to explain if Italy which seems to have preferred to stay on the sidelines, succeeded in reinserting itself into the Libyan equation, a significant diplomatic area for the Chigi Palace.
