Studia Politica, vol. VII, no. 4, 2007

ARGUMENTUM

DANIEL BARBU, Une paix inconditionnelle: la ville sise au sommet et les barbares, pp. 819-824

Abstract

The Unconditional Peace. The City upon a Hill and the Barbarians

Unlike the two World Wars of the 20th century, the cold war did not end in a major international arrangement that would decide who won and who lost and organize legally the relations across the world and among the states. This ”unconditional peace” allowed the East-European elites to turn from communists to democrats without having to amend their strategic vision. Most postcommunist governments, often times styled and led by ex-communists, had not only joined NATO and the European Union naturally, but would also unconditionally support american foreign politics for the simple and compelling reason that the US is the victor of the cold war.

ARTICULI

SILVIA MARTON, «Le sentiment national est une barrière plus forte que toutes les lois»: «la question juive» dans les débats du Parlement roumain (1866-1871), pp. 827-865

Abstract

”The National Sentiment is A Stronger Barrier then Any Legislation”. ”The Jewish Question” in the Debates of the Romanian Parliament [1866-1871]

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the debates in the Romanian Constitutional Assembly of 1866 concerning the article 7 of the Constitution that excludes non-Christians from political rights. It also examines the governmental regulations and the parliamentary questions to ministers on the discriminations and violence against the Jews during the years 1867-1869. The paper concludes that the Romanian legislators considered it to be of outmost importance to acknowledge the quality of being a Romanian, that is, a member of an ethnic body, and not to define citizenship as a legal membership. ”To be a Romanian” was more of an ethnic belonging, a given, rather than citizenship or civic loyalty, defined through political and civic rights. Citizenship was crushed by the primordial character of ethnic loyalty and by the weight of the state as expression and guarantor of the Romanian nation. Furthermore, the paper holds that the parliamentarians’ xenophobia and anti-Semitism is the expression of nationalism as the most modern way of understanding what binds a political community together, and not of medieval pogroms that oppose Christians and Jews on religious bases. The years 1866-1869 lay thus the basis for what was subsequently to become the more coherent and doctrinaire nationalist anti-Semitism that incorporated anti-Semitism into the very nature of being a Romanian and into the Romanian national identity itself. The paper aims at drawing more nuanced conclusions about the recently much-debated character of citizenship and nationhood in Romania and Eastern Europe during the mid-19th century. The article holds that the parliament is a site for political conflicts related to the process of nation-building and a privileged political space of production of the nation-state. Moreover, parliamentary discourse can be seen as an instrument of investigation of an epoch, the Parliament being both a symbolical and a historical site.

ALEXANDRA PETRESCU, Reflecții asupra mișcãrii fasciste din România anilor ’30, pp. 867-877

Abstract

Reflections on the fascist movement in 30s Romania

The author of the article proposes a few reflections on the Romanian fascist movement in 30s: the originality of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, the ideological struggle between the communists and the legionnaries, the conflicts and the cooperation between the extreme right parties, the connections between the legionnaries and the German national-socialists, the electoral campain of the Iron Guard in 1937, the anti-fascist movement before World War II. The study is based on documents from the Romanian National Archives, articles published between the Wars in Romania and unique bibliography sources.

MIHAI CHIOVEANU, The Unforeseen Defection. Romania’s Disengagement from the Final Solution, pp. 879-902

Abstract

A Romania free of Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities was for Ion Antonescu and his regime a major political aspiration. As a result, some three hundred thousands Romanian and Ukrainian Jews died along the road. Yet another three hundred thousands survived the war as Romania’s government decided at a certain moment to fail its ally standards and radical policy, and disengage with the Final Solution. The decision was motivated less by humanitarianism and more by domestic and international protests and interventions, massive bribe, and a rapidly changing military and political situation. From late 1942 onward, in Romania, political and military tactics and calculation gradually downplayed radical, eliminationist anti-Semitism, without totally eradicating it. Romania’s abrupt and unforeseen defection took the Germans by surprise. Nazi officials never gave up hope, continued to sway, pressure and, finally, even threaten the Romanians to hand over their Jews, and advised the Antonescu government to stay in line with the implementation of the Final Solution as it was already too late for them to persuade the Western allies on their innocence when it comes to the Holocaust. Stubbornly refusing to loose initiative and control over their Jews at the hands of the Nazi bureaucrats, a situation they disliked as it portrayed them as puppets and ordinary Executioneries, some of the Romanians continued with the desperate efforts to constantly depart from the Nazi plan, bravely opposing when not cunningly mocking German diplomats and the SS. Understanding the decision-making process, and the strategic logic of the perpetrators, is no less essential than the final outcome, the fortuitous (in many respects) survival of the already targeted victims. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to grasp the set of elements that altogether might provide us with an adequate explanation for Romania’s gradual shift from total commitment to outright defiance toward the Nazi Final Solution. My chief interest is with delineating the reasons and motivations behind the decision of the Romanian government not to hand over half of the Jews to the Nazis. Issues that are equally significant and helpful in understanding the process that ultimately led to Romania’s Disengagement from the Nazi Final Solution, most if not all of them already considered and sometimes reconsidered by other historians, will be analyzed in a wider, European context, as the dynamic of the Final Solution at large, the Nazi perspective on the events, their plans, expectation and so on; might help in understanding some inner developments of Romania’s semi-independent genocide.

DRAGOȘ DRAGOMAN, Factori determinanți ai opțiunilor electorale din România în 2004. O analizã la nivel agregat, pp. 903-932

Abstract

Determinant Factors of Voting Behavior in 2004 Romanian Elections. An Aggregate Level Analysis

The purpose of this research paper is to assess the causes of the territorial distribution of the votes in Romanian local elections held in 2004. Using an aggregate level statistical analysis, I explore three competing theories. The territorial distribution of votes might be first function of geographical localization, people from Transylvania voting against the ruling party and largely favoring the opposition. Counties supporting the opposition are generally the most developed, least rural and wealthiest counties, but in the same time number of these counties are located in Transylvania. All the same, people may support effective and accountable politicians in office and sanction the others. Testing the three hypotheses, I find that the economic voting has no empirical evidence. The only significant factor unraveled is the counties’ location in Transylvania. This factor continues to be significant even when the relationships are controlled with different local development measures, unraveling a regional voting pattern in Romania.

ANCA DOHOTARIU, Une catégorie sociale entre normes et projets législatifs. Politiques familiales postcommunistes en Roumanie, pp. 933-947

Abstract

A Social Category between Norms and Legislative Projects. Post-Communist Family Policy in Romania

Among several post-communist legislative projects regarding the family life and the couple, three initiatives elaborated in 2002 concerning the co-habitation have occupied a special place. More specifically, the three legislative projects represent different attempts to produce norms on some of the most important aspects of the life beyond the marriage. The author analyzes the three initiatives, as well as the empirical evidence provided by interviews realised with the initiators of the projects. Indeed, the article attempts at seizing the complex game of a democratic society, where the social transformations are constantly ”followed” by the update of the legislation. Therefore, the study tries to penetrate the stakes and actual tensions in legislative debates concerning the family life and the couple, where the paradoxical trend of marginalising but also emphasising the importance of the free union seems to be obvious

SUBSIDIA

MIRUNA TÃTARU-CAZABAN, Entre droit canon et théologie politique. Le consentement chez Guillaume d’Ockham, pp. 951-977

Abstract

The Concept of Consent between Canon Law and Political Theology in William of Ockham

Together with Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham has been oftentimes considered as a thinker whose radicalism, present in its works on Logics, did not exempt his political writings. The perspective that we have adopted in this study does not ignore a wider interpretation of his political thinking, in the context of the dispute related to the Franciscan poverty. Nevertheless, as we have shown so far, the Franciscan poverty issue cannot be understood without a brief introduction in the relationship between the canonists and the theologians of the XIIIth and the XIVth centuries. The method that we have pursued starts with the presentation of the theological and canonical arguments on the issue of poverty, up to a study focused on some of Ockham’s texts such as An princeps, the Compendium errorum papae Ioannis XXII, the Breviloquium de principatu tyrannico and the Octo quaestiones de potestate papae. Our approach takes into consideration the fact that Ockham’s perspective on the issue of consent must be placed in the context of the pursuit of ecclesiological truth. As we have asserted at the beginning of our investigation, one does not find in Ockham a precise source for the ecclesiological truth. In his perspective, the decretals or even the Councils of the Church, whose decisions are the expressions of general consent, do not represent a guarantee for theological truth. The notion of consent, fundamental for Ockham’s political thinking, echoes deeply into the ecclesiological sphere, for example, with reference to the issue of the wows of the Franciscans and specifically, to the poverty controversy. Because Ockham’s texts have mainly a theological significance, as Arthur P. Monahan justly noticed, the theme of consent is designated most often by the expression of causa fidei which involves the entire Christian community, and specifically those who wish to imitate Christ most perfectly.

ALIN TAT, Relația dintre religie și politicã în gândirea catolicã actualã: Metz, Küng, Ratzinger, pp. 979-986

Abstract

The Relationship Between Religion and Politics in Contemporary Catholic Thought: Metz, Küng, Ratzinger

Any reflection on the relationship between religion and politics in the Catholic thought cannot do without reminding the Augustinian distinction between the civitas Dei and civitas terrena. The goal and foundation of any just political community should be the orientation towards the common good. In the contemporary catholic thought, Johann Baptist Metz, proposes a political theology revolving around the concepts of the value of the human person, the necessary refusal, on the part of the Church, of any mundane ideology and the necessary use of  the socially critical potential of theological thought. Hans Küng criticizes any politicization of theology. He insists on the development of an internal pluralism within the Church and advocates a self-limitation of the magisterial intervention in the world in the name of a necessary ”eschatological reserve”. Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict the XVIth, invested with the magisterial authority, relies heavily on official documents of the Catholic social doctrine. He emphasizes the necessity of founding the state on the central value of justice and its acting according to the principle of subsidiarity. In this context, the Christian faith and the Church in particular may have a pedagogical role, as it may guide reason to follow the right priorities. All three thinkers agree on the public significance of the Christian vision of society and on the fact that it may help society both by its critical and by its constructive dimension.

RECENSIONES

MEHRAN KAMRAVA, The Modern Middle-East. A Political History since the First World War, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005 (GENȚIANA TRANCÃ), pp. 989-990

JUDITH M. BROWN, Nehru: A Political Life, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2003 (IULIA MOTOC), pp. 990-998

SHAHSI THAROOR, Nehru: The Invention of India, Arcade Publishing, New York, 2003 (IULIA MOTOC), pp. 990-998

ROBERT O. PAXTON, The Anatomy of Fascism, Penguin Books, London, New York & Toronto, 2004 (MONICA ANDRIESCU), pp. 998-1000

BENJAMIN A. VALENTINO, Final Solutions: Mass Killings and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2004 (DIANA ONCIOIU), pp. 1000-1003

AUGUSTUS RICHARD NORTON, Hezbollah, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2007 (AITANA RADU), pp. 1003-1005

JEAN-BENOIT PILET, Changer pour gagner. Les réformes des lois électorales en Belgique, Éditions de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 2007 (ANDREEA ZAMFIRA), pp. 1006-1009

CÃLIN MORAR-VULCU, Republica își fãurește oamenii. Constructia identitãților politice în discursul oficial în România, 1948-1965, Editura Eikon, Cluj-Napoca, 2007 (ALEXANDRA PETRESCU), pp. 1009-1015

SANDRINE KOTT, MARTINE MESPOULET (eds.), avec la collaboration d’ANTOINE ROGER, Le postcommunisme dans l’histoire, Coll. „Sociologie et Politiques“, Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 2006 (IRINA BUJDER), pp. 1015-1018

SAMMY SMOOHA, PRIIT JARVE, The Fate of Ethnic Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, LGI, ECMI, Budapest and Flensburg, 2005 (DRAGOȘ DRAGOMAN), pp. 1018-1023 

RADU CARP, DACIAN GRAȚIAN GAL, SORIN MUREȘAN, RADU PREDA, Principiile gândirii populare. Doctrina creștin-democratã și acțiunea socialã/Principles of Popular Thought. Christian-Democratic Doctrine and Social Action, ed. bilingvã, trad. din limba românã de I. Moldovean, Editura Eikon, Cluj-Napoca, 2006 (CAMIL ALEXANDRU PÂRVU), pp. 1023-1025

Martha Bibescu în timpul ocupației germane la București, studiu de CONSTANTIN IORDAN, urmat de un fragment din jurnalul prințesei (15 noiembrie 1916-17 martie 1917), în traducerea Lidiei Simion, Editura Anima, București, 2005 (LAURENȚIU VLAD), pp. 1025-1028