Search results

An insightful look through the history of punishment and prisons offers a new perspective on the changes that have been undergone or would occur in the Romanian penitentiary system. In the last instance the Romanian punishment and prisons have not displayed the same functions from their origin till now. The study of documents, old chronics and writings of various historians unveil huge differences in thinking the punishment and the role of prison in different historic ages. There were times when the prisons were situated either in the center of society (in country's Principe or boyars' courts) or times when they were placed at society's periphery. The execution was public or hidden. A trip in the history of the Romanian detention system opens a wide window toward the future of this social system.

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.

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.

In the interwar Romanian democracy, the main actor in this political mechanism around which the electoral system and the political parties were rounding was the King. He was designating a party in order to form the government, and afterwards the elections organized by the cabinet were inevitably won by the political party in power. As no party was designated one after another to rule the government, the sequence in power was simply and efficiently ensured. Winning the elections for each party in power was closed related to the voters dedicated to the government, meaning those who were giving their votes to the leading power. And this way, the interwar electoral puzzle was completed. The cohort of voters willing to vote for the government was influenced by many indicators such as cultural (literate) and economic ones, so that the electoral behavior differences between regions like Oltenia and Banat were significant, taking into consideration the economic gaps. Therefore, the electoral comparison between Romania and Dobrudja in the interwar period makes sense.

A common argument for the nomination of the Romanian city of Sibiu as European Capital of Culture 2007 by the European Commission is the actual local multiculturalism, which makes the city seem somehow different when regarding the more general ethnic background in Romania. The aim of this article is therefore to map the local multiculturalism and identify its limits. The conclusion is that the local context is multicultural in fact, yet some ethnic tensions are to be taken into account. These tensions are rather symbolic and still weak, and are related to the way one might conceive local public space. The findings not only confirm the initial supposition, but they could become a starting point for a future comparative analysis of ethnic contexts in Romania.

This study consists in an analysis of the modern Romanian conservatism's evolution. Starting with the semantic definition of the term "conservative", the author sketches the circumstances of its use in the Romanian political language in the middle of the 19thcentury and later in political practice. The author highlights that in the 50's and the 60's decades of the 19th century there was a great interest in a precise definition of the term in the political vocabulary. It was the time when "conservative" together with its antonym "liberal" were two political terms just entering the political language. Also in Romania, the conservatism defined its identity from the ideas of natural progress, organic evolution, order and legality in the spirit of the ideas of E. Burke, already common in the political imagology of the European conservatism. At the beginning of the 20th century Romanian conservatives continued to use the specific vocabulary and ideas of the former century, trying to unveil the consequences of the forced modernisation of the country, so that later, after the First World War, to disappear as a party from the political stage; conservative doctrine persisted in a fragmentary form in the interwar period.