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ARGUMENTUM
ARGUMENTUM
Keywords
New public management, state, policy, reform, bureaucratization.
Abstract
The article questions, in a skeptical and prospective way, the institutional outcomes of this major trans-national trend of administrative reformism known as ”New Public Management”. In our view, the main cross-border legacy of the process of acclimatizing NPM precepts and recipes to various national configurations consists essentially in institutional rearrangements and in a repertoire of managerial tools and recipes, embedded into different institutional orders and hybridized with many other key features of various administrative cultures. Backing up major administrative reforms started several decades ago, the NPM rhetoric claimed to furnish the universal cure for the ”bureaucratic” disease which was supposedly affecting the developed states at the end of the 1970s. From then on and although it never acquired the inner coherence of a real doctrine, it spread all over the world at the point of becoming both a ”policy paradigm” and a ”praxeologic”. However, once implemented and in order to endure, the NPM-inspired logics, instruments and methods have fatally begun to suffer a process of routinisation which transformed them significantly. Hence, far from achieving their initial goal of ”de-bureaucratizing” the state, NPM reformism became part of the endless processes of bureaucratic reproduction inescapably affecting modern states and ensuring their resilience.
ARTICULI
ARTICULI
MIHAI CHIOVEANU, Transnistria, the ”General Plan East”, and the ”Shoah by Bullets” (pp. 427-446)
Keywords
Deportations, ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism, war, genocide.
Abstract
With the early ”flush of victory” against USSR, and the (under)cover provided by Hitler’s ”war of annihilation” in the East, Ion Antonescu and his regime turned ethnic cleansing into a top priority policy. Mesmerized by the promise of a Jew free Romania, with other ethnic and religious minorities targeted as well, the government easily accepted mass killing, ghettoization, and brutal deportations as means to achieve envisioned ultra-nationalistic ends. However, with late 1942 and the ”pallor of defeat”, at a time the Nazi continent wide Holocaust was in full swing, Bucharest decided to reject the International Final Solution proposed by Berlin. Plans to deport the Romanian Jews to Poland were unexpectedly abandoned, and further evacuations to Transnistria halted. The shift came too late, at a time the evil was already done, and Romania stood on the verge of genocide. Transnistria was by now an infamous ”kingdom of death”. Bullets, famine, hard labor and diseases were effective means in the Romanian process of destruction of the Jews, a process that did not included gas vans and chambers, but in which not one community east of the river Prut was spared. Acting as liaison to the Nazi perpetrators the Romanian ones moved hastily from savage massacres to more bureaucratic ways of killings. The cruelty is striking, and the process is no less structured in its brutality when compared to the Nazi one in the occupied Soviet territories. The importance of Transnistria stays with the staggering number of victims, the expediency of killing operations in the vicinity of villages and towns, very personal, a human butchery that resembles in its mixture of police, military, and bureaucratic violence, efficient and organized, many other killing fields and cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and the proximity of the Holocaust in Ukraine, different from the classic Shoah only in terms of framework and method. Moving from here and aiming for clarity, I will try to understand the policy that made Transnistria possible, a development that is not incidental and accidental. Attention is given not only to the Romanian government, institutions and agencies but also to the Nazi perspective on Eastern territories, the empire-building policy in the Ukraine, and the dynamic of the Nazi solution to the Jewish Question. When analyzing the actions and attitudes of the above-mentioned actors in a wider context, my intention is simply to shed some light on the inception and role of Transnistria during the Holocaust.
ADRIAN CIOFLÂNCĂ, The Communist Propagandistic Model. Towards A Cultural Genealogy (pp. 447-482)
Keywords
Communism, propaganda, mass communication, social control, cult of personality.
Abstract
The present study starts from a legitimate question: why the communist regimes, though they allocated massive resources to the propagandistic apparatus, did not refine their propaganda in order to increase its persuasive impact and to enhance its adaptability to necessities? The proposed answer is that the communist propaganda maintained the known coordinates because it corresponded to the ideal model imagined by the doctrinaires of Marxism-Leninism and, more important, because it fulfilled several functions which were extremely useful to the communist regimes. Propaganda was endowed, besides its communicative function that we customarily take into consideration, with two other, even more important, for which its brutal aspect was the appropriate one: that of stimulating terror by exhibiting the power’s discretionary character, as well as that of exerting, together with other key-factors of the regime, the social control. The type of mass communication practiced under communism was forged during the first three decades of the Soviet regime, depending upon presumptions on human nature, state and society which were specific during most of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, internalized by the ”classics” of the Marxism-Leninism. The fidelity to the ideological canon, maintained by the inertial functioning of the regime in the Soviet Union and its political and academic parochialism, explains why the propaganda model created during the Leninist and Stalinist period perpetuated in the main up to the end of the regime. The domination of the Soviet Union upon Eastern Europe led to the taking over of the Soviet mass communication model all over the communist camp. The communist propagandistic model is based on the presumption that the human being is radically malleable, the propaganda being endowed with the ideologically meliorist function of creating the ”new man”.
Keywords
Multiple citizenship, social integration, boundary ethics, post-nationalism, democratic theory.
Abstract
The article focuses on multiple citizenship from the theoretical perspective in an attempt to seize the conceptual implications of this expanding phenomenon in relation to the nation and to democracy. We argue that the proliferation of multiple citizenship is likely to wear out democracy and the sovereign state, as multiple citizenship goes against the very logic of citizenship. There are however symptoms in Europe of this very problematic conceptual dimension of multiple citizenship which illustrate the social dissolution and the security dilemma brought up by this phenomenon, despite being regarded as the ultimate embodiment of democratic citizenship. Thus the study combines the conceptual analysis of multiple citizenship with the empirical evidence brought in support of the argument that multiple citizenship has a perverse effect on democracy, representing the dissolution of the bond between state and individual. We argue that the gradual expansion and acceptance of multiple citizenship in international law and in national law should be at least regarded with suspicion from the standpoint of political theory because of its undermining effect of western democracies which evolved as bounded political communities based on bounded citizenries in order to further democracy. In support of the argument the article mobilizes the literature on postnationalism, boundary ethics, liberal nationalism and democratic theory and attempts to bridge the legal dimension of citizenship (that is emphasized in the studies of multiple citizenship) and with the political dimension.
Keywords
Romania, foreign policy, strategy, diplomacy, energy, beliefs, values.
Àbstract
As Romania became a NATO and EU member and geographically a border country for these organizations, its new interest in the foreign policy area should turn to the East, in order to reduce the level of risks, vulnerabilities and use the existing opportunities to develop more positive relations with the Republic of Moldova, Ukraine and Russia. As there are numerous obstacles like the psycho-cognitive misperception affecting leadership of states, the negative aspects of the organizational processes and the systemic pressures on all states, the only solution would be the progressive development of pragmatic areas of cooperation, especially the economic, cultural and environment issues. Mutual knowledge and the diminution of traditional, historic, fears generated by political myths inherited from the communist era would produce positive outcome, especially if new generations of policy-makers come in power with a new mentality.
Keywords
Democratic consolidation, veto players, independence of the judiciary, criminal trials, delegative democracy.
Abstract:
The democratization literature often singles out the process of institution-building as a core and durable issue for young democracies. This article assesses Argentina’s first democratic decade in light of this essential requirement and does this by suggesting the worth of assuming that democratic consolidation is an unpredictable outcome of contingent contributions at selected points in time through which political actors struggle to shape institutions, which in turn constrain future political behavior and incentives. This progressive crystallization of formal rules (what is acceptable) and political ambitions (what is attainable) will be illustrated through an analysis of the relationship between the executive and the judiciary in two particularly sensitive areas for the Argentine polity in this period and fundamentally intersecting one another: the independence of the judiciary and transitional justice.
HANNAH ARENDT, Făgăduinţa politicii, Rom. transl. Mihaela Bidilica-Vasilache, Editura Humanitas, Bucureşti, 2010 (DAN-ALEXANDRU CHIŢĂ), pp. 581-584
MIHAI ŞURUBARU, Piatra-Neamţ în anii Primului Război Mondial (1914-1919), Editura ”Cetatea Doamnei”, Piatra-Neamţ, 2010 (CONSTANTIN IORDAN), pp.585-586
PHILLIP COLE, The Myth of Evil, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2006 (ANA-MARIA TANAŞOCA), pp. 586-590
PETER LONGERICH, The Unwritten Order: Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution, Tempus Publishing, Gloucestershire, 2005 (ALEXANDRA ILIE), pp. 590-593
ADAM JONES, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, Routledge, London, 2006 (CRISTINA MANOLACHE), pp. 593-596
BARRY BUZAN, LENE HANSEN, The Evolution of International Security Studies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge & New York, 2009 (MONICA ANDRIESCU), pp. 596-599
CARY NELSON, No University is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom, New York University Press, New York & London, 2010 (ADRIAN DOBRE), pp. 599-600
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