Recuperative memory in Romanian post-Communist society

This paper explores the idea of “recuperative memory” with respect to the process of coming to terms with the past after the fall of the Romanian Communist regime in 1989. Its method is to examine the mechanisms used by recuperative memory in order to re-appropriate the past and emphasize the inherently mediated and multifaceted nature of this process. Using various examples from oral testimonies, autobiographical writings, literary works, and cinema, the paper argues that the role of recuperative memory is not only to facilitate the process of coming to terms with the past, but also to offer the material necessary to sustain a viable politics of memory. This entails providing a platform for the intergenerational transmission of memory and knowledge for those who did not live under the Communist regime, filling in this way the intergenerational gap, despite the lack of political class engagement.     

Playing for and against the nation: football in interwar Romania

The article explores the development of football in interwar Romania, stressing its role in the dissemination and grounding of Romanian nationalism. I show how, due to its modular form, the game of football was deeply involved in the efforts of centralizing, territorializing and naturalizing the Romanian nation-state of the interwar period. The founding of the leading Romanian sports club at the University of Cluj and the selection of the national representative for the Paris Olympics of 1924, in conjunction with the institutional infrastructure developed to nationally regulate and control the game, are used to present the acute tensions between local/regional and national aspirations and projects, with a strong ethnic component, that have shaped the history of the game in Romania. I argue that the increasing calls for the full Romanianization of football in the 1930s have their immediate roots in these tensions and frictions.     

Romania is a family and it needs a strict father: conceptual metaphors at work in radical right populist discourses

Investigating Romanian radical right populism, I evidence the gendered nature of conceptual metaphors and provide insights on the specific masculinities that they underpin in such political discourses. With the 2004 presidential elections as a backdrop, the analysis focuses on how the radical right populist candidates articulated in their discourses the conceptual metaphor of the “strict father.” At first, the theoretical standpoints on conceptual metaphors are corroborated with the conceptualization of populist charismatic leadership. Subsequently, a gendered perspective is added to the populist conceptualizations. The leaders' self-representation as messianic fathers of the national family is evidenced by investigating their discursive appeals to protect, discipline and punish the people. Furthermore, I elaborate how conceptual metaphors may be employed to consolidate a position of uncontested leadership and moral superiority of the radical right populist leaders.     

The relationship between religious and national identity in the case of Transylvanian Saxons (1933–1944)

Hitler's coming to power in Germany had its key consequences upon the fate of the German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. The German community in Romania constituted no exception. After 1933, a process of radicalization can be noticed in the case of the Transylvanian Saxons, one of the several German-speaking groups in Romania. The phenomenon has already been analyzed in its political and economic dimensions, yet not so much in its social ones. This article looks at the latter aspect, its argument being that the Nazification of the Transylvanian Saxon community can be best comprehended by using a conceptual framework developed by political scientist Donald Horowitz in the early 1970s. The analysis uses a series of contemporary sources (diaries, issues of the official periodical of the Lutheran Church in Transylvania, Kirchliche Blätter), but also a wide range of secondary sources, academic and literary. Consequently, the article shows that especially after 1933, the Lutheran affiliation, highly relevant for the production and reproduction of the traditional model of Transylvanian Saxon identity, shifted from the status of a criterion of identity to a mere identification indicium. At the same time, the attraction of a (Pan-) German identity, with its Nazi anchors, became stronger and the center of gravity for Transylvanian Saxon identity radically moved towards German ethnicity, in its National-Socialist understanding.     

Nationalism and orthodoxy: Nichifor Crainic and the political culture of the extreme right in 1930s Romania

This article explores the interplay of religion, anti-Semitism, and personal rivalries in building the ultra-nationalist movement in 1930s Romania, using the career of Nichifor Crainic as a case study. As a theologian, Crainic created and taught a synthesis of nationalism and Romanian Orthodoxy which was broadly accepted by most ultra-nationalists in interwar Romania. As a journalist, Crainic directed several newspapers which spearheaded acrimonious attacks on democratic and ultra-nationalist politicians alike. As a politician, he joined and left both Corneliu Zelea Codreanu's Legion of the Archangel Michael and A.C. Cuza's National Christian Defense League before attempting to form his own Christian Workers' Party. Crainic's writings ultimately earned him a place as a minister in two governments and membership of the Romanian Academy. His career reveals an ultra-nationalist movement rife with division and bickering but united around a vaguely defined ideology of religious nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism.     

Viorel Virgil Tilea and the Origins of the Second World War: An Essay in Closure

The 'Tilea Affair' of March 1939 is among the most contentious of the short-term events leading to the Second World War. V.V. Tilea, the Romanian minister in London, brought information to the British Foreign Office, about an alleged German threat to his country. The guarantee to Poland soon followed and, in turn, the outbreak of the war. This article examines the evidence offered by contemporary British witnesses, the ensuing historical controversy - bringing to bear a variety of new revelations, including materials derived from the author's acquaintance with Tilea - and the present state of historical knowledge. It concludes that closure can be applied to most aspects of the 'Tilea Affair'.     

Accountable or Untouchable? Electoral accountability in Romanian local elections

While retrospective models of voting posit that voters should “vote the rascals out”, a wave of recent research has found that this is rarely the case. We investigate this question in a context in which many sitting politicians have recently been indicted on corruption charges – the municipal level in Romania, a surprisingly under-researched case in this sub-field. Romania provides a good case for electoral accountability. Not only do Romanians deeply detest corruption, the party system also contains many parties that would make it easy for voters to switch from a corrupt to a cleaner alternative. We collected an original data register of electoral and socio-political data on roughly 3200 localities together with all cases of corruption charges published by the Romanian anti-corruption agency, the Direcţia Naţională Anticorupţie (DNA), accounting for magnitude and timing of the scandal as well as the judicial outcome for the indicted mayor. In all, we find that 81 sitting mayors elected in 2012 were charged with corruption prior to the 2016 election. We test the electoral impact of corruption on the incumbent mayors on four outcomes indicating electoral accountability commonly used in the literature – retirement, vote share compared to the previous election, voter turnout, and reelection using difference and difference and a pairwise matching designs, inter alia. The results show that Romanians do punish their corrupt incumbent mayors to a quite high extent compared to the clean mayors. However, due to the large vote margins, the punishment is not severe enough to make them lose more often than similar “clean‟ mayors, although they tend to not run for re-election at much higher rates. Turnout is unaffected by corruption at the municipal level. In line with previous results, we thus find a certain amount of electoral accountability, but not to the extent that the ‘rascals are thrown out’.     

The forest behind the bar charts: bridging quantitative and qualitative research on Roma/Ţigani in contemporary Romania

ABSTRACT

Rughini? discusses three controversial issues with regard to surveys of the Romani population: ethnonym use, self-identification versus hetero-attribution of Romani ethnicity, and the use of variables in reference to Romani settlements. She uses data sets from ten surveys of Romanian Roma between 2000 and 2008 as well as the 2002 Romanian Census to compare two types of samples, and to explore the consequences of several research choices for the quality of the data. In addition to specific methodological issues, Rughini? addresses the relevance to such surveys of qualitative research in Romani communities.     

Some Aspects of Management Training in Romania and American Assistance in its Development

Abstract

Romania emerged from 40 plus years of communism with little understanding of management under free market conditions. The country's managers have been scrambling to catch up to the western world so that it can compete on an international basis. Romania has rich resources and untapped capabilities that are slowly being developed in the post communist era. Assistance from western nations has helped to fill the gap left by the socialist mentality. The United States has been noteworthy in its management training assistance. This article is a survey of the programs attempted over the past thirteen years plus some reflections of earlier programs from the west.     

Integrating the past: regional integration and historical reckoning in Central and Eastern Europe

This article considers how regional integration in Europe has informed processes of collective remembrance and transitional justice in Central and Eastern Europe. By taking the cases of Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic, two claims are made. First, although European institutions have not initiated top-down projects of historical reckoning, activists who have an interest in promoting engagement with the recent past have been able to draw the political, financial and/or judicial weight of European institutions behind particular reckoning initiatives, on an ad hoc basis. Second, the nature of the projects that have been realized with the assistance of European resources has varied across the region, according to the extent of prior efforts to promote collective remembrance and transitional justice at the national level. Where there have previously been constraints on historical reckoning, activists have drawn “Europe” behind efforts to promote national-level confrontations with particularly national experiences of communist rule. By contrast, where there has previously been extensive state sponsorship of collective remembrance projects and/or processes of transitional justice, European resources have been used in support of efforts to raise awareness of the repressions of communist rule, and transitions from that system of rule, among a wider, international audience.