The state vs. its citizens: a note on Romania, Europe, and corruption

According to most accounts from home and abroad, Romania is a corrupt country. Journalists, civic activists and public prosecutors suspect every top politician, past and present, of either committing or planning to commit a felony. As far as any knowledgeable Romanian can tell, the European Commission itself is the inspiration behind the current official anti-corruption drive. Ten years ago, discussion of wider powers for prosecutors and intelligence agents would have seemed inappropriate, even indecent, reminders of the Stalinist secret police, while state prosecutions of conspicuously wealthy politicians evoke memories of communist witch-hunts against owners of private property. How could the European Commission ostensibly support Romania's use of judicial proceedings so reminiscent of the communist era? After the collapse of state socialism, western leaders were unable or unwilling to recognise that decades of communism had transformed many institutions of state. Courts, Parliament, government and the army had all been shaped by more than 40 years of suppressed civil and political liberties, radical social engineering and inhibited economic activity. The Romanian legal system, designed under communism, still works as an instrument of the state. A citizen is considered as good as guilty from the moment he or she is denounced in the press or prosecutors begin an investigation. The Romanian justice system creates corruption as a necessary enemy of the state. Larger-than-life corruption appears thus to serve a political purpose in Romania's relations with the EU. It is a smoke-screen that helps both sides to explain away obvious economic and political disparities between this country and the rest of the union. If corruption were uprooted, Romania would become a country much like any other EU member. Corruption has become a political commodity that helps Romanian and European policy makers alike to evade analysis of what is really necessary to achieve representative democracy, the rule of law and liberal citizenship in post-communist Romania

Political science - Romania

Analysis of the pre-1989 situation; The development of political science since 1989; Core theoretical and methodological orientations; Thematic orientation and funding; Public space and academic debates; Views on further development and major challenges

The nation against democracy: state formation, liberalism, and political participation in Romania

The National Liberal Party was created in 1875, but various radical and liberal factions were already the driving force behind the unification of the Romanian Principalities in 1859. The same factions fomented the coup against prince Cuza in 1866, offered the crown to a foreign dynasty and wrote the Constitution of 1866. Inspired by the Belgian model and amended several times, the Constitution lasted until 1938. A liberal government sent the Romanian army to fight successfully in the Russian-Turkish War of 1877, proclaimed the independence of the country and negotiated its full recognition at the Congress of Berlin one year later. Other liberal governments gave their unremitting support to the Romanian national movement in Transylvania, established a Central Bank and a national credit system, and bloodily crushed the peasant uprising of 1907. Finally, another liberal government overturned the alliance with the Central Powers concluded by the Crown and backed by the Conservatives, took the French and English side in the Great War, resisted the German and Austro-Hungarian invasion, aggrandized the Kingdom of Romania by bringing the Western provinces of Transylvania and Banat into the nation, introduced universal suffrage and set in motion the agrarian reform. From 1866 to 1919, helped by an electoral system based on limited representation, the Liberals held the reigns of the government twenty one times, being in charge of the country for 38 years. The Liberals' strategic choice was to build the nation-state at the expense of democracy. In order to assemble and strengthen the political nation they choose to exclude from any significant form of participation in the public life the majority of their countrymen. The reasons and consequences of this option are explored in this paper

The reason of democracy: a preliminary note on political consent

The surmise underlining this introductory note is that an examination of the forms taken by political consent, apprehended as the reason of democracy, may grant the benefit of historical depth to the transformations the corporeality of democracy, that is European nation-states, both Western and Eastern, had to cope with in the period between the junctures of 1945 and 1989, but also before and beyond. The assumption of the paper is that the language of political consent was, and still is idiomatic, dialectal and rarely submitted to a universally accepted rule and that the nation-state may not be, the only imaginable incarnation of democratic expectations. Regarded as an autonomous and discriminating response given by ordinary citizens to the different appeals of democracy (electoral, liberal, constitutional, popular, pluralist, populist), consent might be a research object that is worth being imagined, contrived and probed

Do You See What I Mean? Visual Resolution of Linguistic Ambiguities

Understanding language goes hand in hand with the ability to integrate complex contextual information obtained via perception. In this work, we present a novel task for grounded language understanding: disambiguating a sentence given a visual scene which depicts one of the possible interpretations of that sentence. To this end, we introduce a new multimodal corpus containing ambiguous sentences, representing a wide range of syntactic, semantic and discourse ambiguities, coupled with videos that visualize the different interpretations for each sentence. We address this task by extending a vision model which determines if a sentence is depicted by a video. We demonstrate how such a model can be adjusted to recognize different interpretations of the same underlying sentence, allowing to disambiguate sentences in a unified fashion across the different ambiguity types.Comment: EMNLP 201

ANALYSIS AND MODELATION OF THE CONSUMER’S BEHAVIOUR OF FINANCIAL PRODUCTS ON THE ROMANIAN CAPITAL MARKET

The study of the consumers’ behavior of financial products is based upon the hypothesis according to which they behave rationally that is they try to aim their objectives at the highest level possible, taking into account the restrictions that they are forced to face. Having this context the basic idea that guides the consumers’ behavior of financial products is maximizing the forecasted utility. Utility will be maximized when a certain combination of forecasted gains and risks is preferred in report with the other combinations. The consumers of financial products establish their objectives in the conditions of the estimated risk and profitability and they have to make a choice taking into account the uncertainty conditions.consumer behavior, financial product, utility function, risk, uncertain

La Cité des Ro(u)mains: un projet roumain de constitution imprimé à Bruxelles en 1857

Constituţiunea Romaniei reintegrată, sau schiţă pentru o constituţiune în Romania (La Constitution de la Roumanie réintégrée, ou esquisse pour une constitution en Roumanie) est un petit volume publié en 1857 à Bruxelles par Emanoil Chinezu, juriste et homme politique libéral radical, participant à la révolution de 1848, ensuite plusieurs fois député et élu local. Le livre, pratiquement inconnu par l'historiographie du droit et de la modernisation roumaine, fait l'objet d'une édition critique. Le texte, imprimé en alphabète de transition (quelques lettres latines insérées de manière non systématique et souvent aléatoire parmi les graphèmes cyrilliques), a été transcrit selon la méthode phonétique interprétative en conformité avec les règles orthographiques actuelles de la langue roumaine

Une paix inconditionnelle: la ville sise au sommet et les barbares

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

Les questions De Waele

The paper is a transcription of the response given to the discourse of acceptance of the title of doctor honoris causa of the University of Bucharest by Jean-Michel De Waele. The laudatio lays emphasis on the intellectual mainlines of the scholarly work Professor De Waele devoted to the study of Central and Eastern European politics after the fall of communism, and in particular on the issue of the emergence of political parties. These mainlines are summarized by what might be called the "De Waele" questions, that is by the strategies the Belgian political scientist used in order to question the fabric of post-communist polities, politics and policies