This analysis is based on the post-colonial society experience as well as the one of the countries facing the similar evolution. Since these countries have known an unfinished transition during the Popular Democracies it seems necessary to take into account both their transitional process towards liberalism and the historical form that will give birth to the State sense. I will focus on the democratic way and its impact on the necessity of justice. The interest is to lighten this tension that allows the emergence of democracy and the social link based on citizenship. In this context, it appears that the State has rights over the society. A reversion of this situation seems necessary. The political and social reversions that will transform a State into a Political State, i.e. a State where the rights of the State over the State will emerge. If this reversion process takes place, it will occur with the disappointed consciousness of the promises of equality of the post-independance State. Will this compulsory need of justice constitute a priority in the general welfare?

State, Nation, social justice, people rights, democratisation

The rural parties and socialist parties are animated by contradictory ideologies: projects commune versus class struggle. However the observation of their relations between the years 1920 to 1960 shows a strong similarity. The two political currents criticize the liberal economy and the rural parties are often partisan of an agricultural reform to which the socialists aspire, even if the final result is different. Last but not least, the parties which group together between the two wars in an agriculture International belong in majority to the camp of political democracy. Many of them are to become victims, as well as those of the left wing parties, of the authoritarian regimes which took over at that time in Europe. These similarities facilitated the constitution of alliances between rural parties and left wing parties in Scandinavia (where they tempted to put an end to the 1930's crisis by conjugating a policy of protectionism and a rise in taxes) as well as in Czechoslovakia. With the exception of Scandinavia, the Nazi expansion put an end to these experiences. After the Second World War, the establishment of communism in central Europe either reduced the rural parties to the role of satellites or forced them into to exile. In Scandinavia, the alliances between the parties promoting agrarianism and the social democrats came to an end in the 1960's and the rural parties became the right wing (centre).

The present study investigates the participation of French women at war as reflected in documents, media, diaries. Women emancipation, pacifism, socialism, feminism, are but a few issues introduced with this study. The main purpose was to analyze the impact of interventionist state policies on women life in France, and to reveal its social, political and cultural outcomes that altogether generated the upheaval of the French Civilization.

The Great War, women, feminism, emancipation, pacifism, trauma, civilizational upheaval.

Focusing on the way Easterners, both westernizers and traditionalists perceived the West and its values, and responded to its challenges (modernization, industrial revolution, urbanization, and national-state), the present paper aims to analyze and present in general outlines, the politics and ideology of ”anti-”, the Eastern ”negations” of the West. Aware of the fact that many of those negative responses were mere anticipative and embedded by intellectual inadequacy, I will try to approach them not as Eastern indictment and symptoms of a conservative fear of progress, typical for backward societies. By the time East European societies entered the world system, classic liberalism lost its hold on the new elites and the masses that were no longer to accept inequalities and explanations from the political top. Past frustration and tensions were retrieved and were also to feed the ideological challenges of both Marxism and Fascism. If it was for fascism to succeed that was due only to the fact that the new elites were striving for national specificity and original doctrines, and not a new international or universal model and order. Like their ancestors those ‘ideological mutants’ appealed on one hand revolutionary means, and on the other hand looked into the past just to extract the grasp of values that was supposed to shape their utopia. Nonetheless their henchmen had to make people believe that they perform an important social function and represent the ”highway from backwardness to progress”.

Backwardness, intelligentsia, radical politics, Eastern Europe.

This article explores various conceptualizations of populism and tests their heuristic virtues against a Romanian case, the Legion of the Archangel Michael. First, after reviewing several contemporary theoretical approaches on populism, a term whose ambiguity is constantly deplored, the study tries to clarify its content by examining it in relation with other fundamental notions like democracy, representation, or people. Second, while acknowledging the relative consensus of the historiography as to the fascist nature of the Legionary Movement, the article focuses on the debate around its populist character. The disagreement in interpreting the character of the Movement is arguably due to the variable criteria that define populism, fascism and their relation.

Populism, democracy, the people, fascism, Legionary Movement.

This article explores the social construction of the Catholic religious identity within the Csángó community from the Moldavia region. A challenging endeavour, the origins of the Csangos are shrouded in mystery due to their ambiguous history and their unacknowledged ethnic minority status. Emphasizing on the concept of memory and the imperative of continuity, the article reveals the unchallenged religious memory of this community. The authoritative tradition of the Catholic church is uncontested, the respondents being Catholics above all. What is more, the religious identity is pervading every sphere of their identification process, its clash with the ethnic dimension being analyzed in detail.

Identity, memory, Catholic, Csangos, ethnicity, religion.

The article examines the political configuration of elected institutions in Bucharest, the capital of Romania. After offering an overview of the evolution of the electoral setting up of local government in Bucharest, we explain the particularities of the capital within the Romanian administrative and political framework. We then focus our analysis on local party politics since 1992, on the basis of a cross examination of the various electoral results for the city hall in the 1990s and 2000s. Our analysis shows a double trend: on the one hand, a significant reduction of the number of political parties acting at the municipality level is noticeable; on the other hand, we can observe that whereas the scenario of a single party or coalition governing undisputedly the city hall and its sub-units was valid in the 1990s, it started to be refuted since the beginning of the 2000s.

Political representation, local government, parties, post-communism, Bucharest.

Political participation is generally taken for an important asset for democracy. In Western settings, participation moved from classical forms as voting and supporting political parties to new, unconventional forms, as protest. During this important change from conventional types of political action, new social categories previously excluded, as women, have been brought in. What about Romanian political participation? Is it as unequal as the former Western conventional participation was many decades ago? And protest, is it the same as in Western settings? If the Western participation is no less than the same kind of participation but by new means of expression, as acknowledged by some scholars, is it the same in Romania? Could one take protest in Romania as undermining the legitimacy of democracy? The conclusion is that Romanian protesters resemble by and large to their Western counterparts and that they are not a serious threat for the still incipient Romanian democracy.

Political participation, democracy, protest, transition, Romania

The article presents the way the first Associations and Foundations are set up in Romania, focusing on the tight circle of people dedicated to the domain and specialized on the road, staying forever in the NGO sector, moving from one organization to another or working for more than one at the same time. From lack of legislation to unclear regulations, NGOs struggle on their path with logistical issues which influenced their performance, public image, their projects and mostly their results. The author identifies the outcome as determined by the struggle to access grants, the NGO agenda versus financer’s agenda, the absence of grants for a specific type of issues, the shortage of the professionalized staff, the challenge of working with volunteers, the compulsory annual reports and financial reports to the Government authorities.

NGOs, legislation, projects, grants, volunteers.