Rock 'n' roll nation: counterculture and dissent in Romania, 1965–1975

A vibrant countercultural and dissident movement developed in Romania between 1965 and 1975. Young Romanians combined elements of the global youth movement with local cultural and political practices. Thus, Romanian counterculture and dissent shared the era's hippie aesthetic and anti-authoritarianism, but was highly isolationist, vehemently antisocialist and heavily couched in the language of the nation and nationalism. Furthermore, during this early Ceau?escu period, the socialist regime attracted some level of nonconformist support through a program of reform, opposition to Soviet interference, and nationalist rhetoric. These conclusions demonstrate that the rubric of 1960s counterculture needs to be extended to include a variety of ideological and cultural positions beyond the New Left that scholars generally emphasize. Furthermore, scholarly avoidance of Ceau?escu's early period has obscured the existence of an alternative culture, and has led to an un-nuanced interpretation of Romania's postwar history.     

Russian nationalists in the Komi Republic: a case study of the Frontier of the North

The article examines some generic traits of the “new” Russian ethnic nationalism, namely, de-ideologization of the nationalist milieu and its inclination for civic activism. It results from a case study of the Frontier of the North (FN – Syktyvkar), an ideologically ambivalent organization that combines dual Russian/Komi ethnic nationalism, anti-migration sentiments, white racism, and fragments of other ideologies. The article demonstrates that, unlike nationalists of the previous generation, FN is not hostile to public authorities and is ready to cooperate with them. FN’s grassroots activism, as well as sports and healthy recreational activities, attracts young people. The organization tackles the most acute social problems, often neglected by everyone else, and has become a working civil society institution. The authors argue that these tactics win the “new” nationalists sympathy among ordinary people and makes the groups politically stronger and more influential than the previous nationalist generation. However, state anti-extremist policy hampers the advancement of nationalists into mainstream politics.     

Blocked Mobility and the Rise of Cultural Nationalism: A Reassessment

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the blocked mobility thesis, especially in regard to its use to explain the rise of cultural nationalism. The thesis states that young university students see their upward mobility thwarted and as a result develop nationalist movements which, they believe, will provide them with an independent state and open up career opportunities for them. Using quantitative archival data from Ireland during the early 1900s and Canada during the 1960s, this paper challenges the major assumptions of the blocked mobility thesis. For these two cases it was found that there was neither an overproduction of graduates nor a contracting state structure, two essential preconditions of the blocked mobility thesis. This empirical finding forces us to develop an alternative approach to explaining the rise in cultural nationalism. Part of this paper is taken up with outlining this alternative approach.     

Creating a Business School in Romania: Made in the USA,Delivered in Romania

Abstract

This article describes the establishment and maintenance of a successful Executive MBA program in Central Europe funded initially by USAID. The dynamics of a society in transition to a free market economy create special problems of management that require the capabilities of skilled managers. We argue that Executive MBA programs are efficient and effective vehicles for developing managers with the requisite skills. As new conditions occur in rapidly evolving legal and institutional environments, however, the curriculum and organizational structure has to be continuously adapted to these new challenges.     

“Nationalism as a national danger?” Early Romanian socialists and the paradoxes of the national question (1880–1914)

This article traces the gradual accommodation of early socialists in Romania with the predicament of nationalism in the period between 1880 and 1914. The attitudes of Romanian socialists evolved from initial ambivalence toward nationalism to staunch commitment to internationalism in the 1890s, and an inadvertent but unmistakable growing engagement with nationalism after the turn of the century. Locating socialism in the broader political and cultural debates of the time, this article argues that belonging to the Romanian public arena forced socialists to become increasingly more sensitive to the challenges of nationalism. Especially after 1900, the rise of very influential competing nationalist ideologies, as well as the necessity to address the Jewish question and the problem of ethnic Romanians living abroad, turned Romanian socialists into opponents but also implicit partners of dialogue in debates on nationalism. In the long run, however, socialists failed to find a persuasive alternative to nationalism and eventually resorted to the same language, concepts, and imagery they were so vocally dismissing. Engaging the popular nationalist trends of the time required socialists to reevaluate their own theoretical tenets and to put forward different, but essentially no less nationalistic, projects for the future.     

Have Lower Real Wages Helped Industrial Restructuring in Romania?

A reduction in real wages arising from price liberalisation has been a standard feature of economies undergoing industrial restructuring. In this article, the impact of real wages on industrial performance is examined using a panel dataset of Romanian industries from 1990-96. Using both static and dynamic panel estimation, real wages are found not to be negatively associated with either output or employment. These results are consistent with a view that an institutionalist approach, aimed at improving productivity, may be more likely to achieve the long-term objective of successful industrial restructuring than standard adjustment programmes based on neo-classical theory.     

“The Magocsi Problem” (Problema Magochoho): a preliminary deconstruction and contextualization

An academic gathering – be it a symposium, a conference, or a round-table – to examine the work of a fellow scholar is invariably timely. At the very least it presupposes a consensus on the basic significance of the subject being addressed and a collective decision to address it. As a launch of a new book (in Ukraine a phenomenon known as prezentatsiia), it provides the welcome opportunity to discuss a new contribution and with that to fill in and redraw our map of the field. If more than one work or project is involved, it provides a still greater opportunity, and indeed poses a scholarly obligation, to see the larger picture and to engage in stock-taking and rethinking. By contextualizing, problematizing, and where need be, deconstructing, we recalibrate our understanding and thus revive the field and our commitment to it. Clearly, the process of laudatio, of paying homage to achievements spanning a whole career, also contributes to this.     

Foes of our rebirth: Ukrainian nationalist discussions about Jews, 1929–1947

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN, came into being in 1929 as an “integral nationalist” movement that set itself the goal of driving Polish landowners and officials out of eastern Galicia and Volhynia, joining hands with Ukrainians in other countries, and establishing an independent state. The OUN defined Jews, along with Russians and Poles, as aliens and enemies. There was no need, wrote an OUN ideologist in 1929, to list all the injuries that Jews caused Ukrainians. “In addition to a number of external enemies Ukraine also has an internal enemy … Jewry and its negative consequences for our liberation cause can be liquidated only by an organized collective effort”. The article examines archival documents, publications by OUN members, and recent scholarly literature to trace the evolution of OUN thinking about Jews from 1929 through the war years, when the German occupation of Ukraine gave the OUN an opportunity to stage pogroms and persecute Jews, and the prime minister of the state that the OUN proclaimed wrote that he supported “the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine”.