Partidul Comunist Român - continuatorul pe o treaptă superioară al rădăcinii socialiste revoluționare
Propaganda paper about the Romanian Communist Party - the successor to a superior stage of the revolutionary socialist roots.
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Propaganda paper about the Romanian Communist Party - the successor to a superior stage of the revolutionary socialist roots.
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“1968” happened not only on the streets of the cities in the United States, in Paris and Berlin (West), but also in Prague and Bratislava. Soviet tanks and people on the street protesting against it determine the collective memory of this year. However, the eastern “1968” was more than that. There was a reform movement and a lot of hope. The changes started with the party congress of the Czechoslovak communists at the end of 1962. The Czechoslovak reforms did not begin in the streets as a protest movement against the rulers, but started at a meeting of the ruling party at which the communists criticised their own policies. The central keyword is political rehabilitation.
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With the coup of the Bolsheviks in October 1917, the communist party seized power in the Russian Empire for the first time. The revolutionary spark of the party in power in the Soviet Union did not, as Lenin and later Stalin intended, spread across Europe to shape societies. Instead, contacts to Moscow via Berlin to Vladivostok were continued as an instrument ranging from equality to state terror. The so-called great terror in 1937/38 was marked by excesses of socialist violence. Key actors became victims of terror, whose fate was concealed and whose existence spread throughout the Soviet Union and through the member states of the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe after the Second World War.
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On July 28th, 1968, when I was working at the department of international relations of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, I was called and told that we should report to work with a bag packed and enough supplies for a few days. I was not permitted to discuss this with anyone, as it concerned a simultaneous interpretation at an international conference. When we arrived, nothing was explained, except that we would be travelling to Čierna. The participants were brought to the airfield where everything was ready for the government plane to take off.
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Review of: Luke Harding - Assignment Russia. By: Marvin Kalb. Publisher: Brookings Institution Press, Washington DC, 2021.
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The case of the Fifth Republic encourages reflection on comparative constitutionalism both because of the originality of de Gaulle’s constitutional work and the fact that during its validity the 1958 Constitution had to face new challenges – a change in the balance of political powers, European integration and the growth of the judiciary. The last two trends were universal in nature. The Fifth Republic proved an original and permanent constitution, giving the French democracy stability and efficiency. The constitutional system has not evolved either towards parliamentarianism or a presidential system like that of the USA. If there were significant amendments to the constitution, this happened in the area of external challenges. But also, in this area, where the constitutional judiciary became more dynamic and the guarantee of independence of the common judiciary increased, the Fifth Republic retained its originality, expressing the specificity of the French legal tradition.
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The Fifth French Republic was created as a modified parliamentary system, but due to constitutional changes and tendencies revealed in political practice, the functioning system of government was quite significantly modified. The purpose of this article is to analyze the elements of the presidential system that were introduced in 1958, thus in the original text of the constitution, resulted from its subsequent amendments, or can only be seen in the practice of exercising power in the conditions of the politically homogenous executive branch, i.e. outside of cohabitation periods. The author draws attention to two different ways of defining the term “presidentialism” in the French context (as a formal constitutional structure or as a pro-presidential configuration of the semi-presidentialism of the Fifth Republic), and argues that the regime initiated in 1958 is still based on at least some pillars characterizing the parliamentary model. Hence, its subsequent modifications were only to highlight presidentialism as one of the possible variants of political practice under the Fifth Republic, and not to accept presidentialism as a constitutional system of government.
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In France, the institution of the constitutional court appeared relatively late. In the period of the Third Republic, the main obstacle to a serious discussion on the introduction of a constitutional court to the political system was the prevailing concept of a “sovereign parliament” and the associated primacy of the act (statute). The doctrine of those times strengthened the view of the special role of the act (statute) in the legal system; also in the protection of individual rights. These are the main elements of the French republican tradition, which was formed during the Third Republic and was strengthened in the next republican period under the Constitution of 1946. The Constitutional Council, the first independent constitutional court, was introduced into the new system of France (1958) not so much from the conviction of this institution, but from the desire to limit the sovereign power of the parliament and the primacy of the law. The earlier Constitutional Committee (1946) could not fulfill this role, but its importance is underlined in French literature.
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The aim of this article is to analyze two aspects of the French principle of the secular state. The article outlines the characteristics of the normative legitimacy of the separation of church and state, focusing on the documents that introduce and specify this principle. It also presents political aspects of the separation of church and state, especially the evolution of its implementation, which has changed along with the dynamics of the social and political context. The presented argumentation will serve to prove the thesis that the French concept of laïcité is not a clear and uniform political principle since its versions may significantly differ.
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The aim of the article is to discuss the framework of the semi-presidential system of government, which directly or indirectly affects the functioning of political parties and the format of the French party system. These factors include a strong and active presidency, the hierarchical dualism of executive power, the institution of referendum, the majority electoral law and the weak systemic position of the parliament. The author points out that although the entry into force of the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic in 1958 significantly reshaped the position and role of political parties, institutional factors were not conducive for their functioning. Political parties reacted with active political strategies and managed to consolidate their systemic position, and voter behaviour confirmed that deep-rooted political cleavages are still important in the contemporary political scenario.
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This paper analyses post-memory narratives concerning the loss of the eastern provinces of the Reich as well as the flight and expulsion of their German inhabitants as found in the novels of German writers born in the 1950s and 1960s: Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s ‘Der Verlorene’ (1998) and ‘Anatolin’ (2008), Reinhard Jirgl’s ‘Die Unvollendeten’ (2003) and Ulrike Draesner’s ‘Sieben Sprünge vom Rand der Welt’ (2014). These stories showing far-reaching consequences of the ‘expulsion from the East’ examine complex mechanisms through which traumatic knowledge about the past is handed down from generation to generation. Consequently, the paper focuses on how the German authors make use of motifs characterizing post-memory or post-traumatic discourse about mourning and loss, and the way the key figures of that discourse structure their texts.
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This study investigates the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on exports in the case of Jordan, employing Autoregressive Distributed Lag Bounds Testing (ARDL BT) cointegration approach to the data ranging from 1980 to 2018. The results indicate that there is a long-run relationship among the variables. Also, we find that there is a positive and statistically significant impact of FDI on export in the long-run. The estimation results indicate that a 1% increase in FDI increases exports by 0.13%.
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Social trauma is a result of a collusion between the individual experience of trauma and the culture-mediated process of communal creation, negotiation and structuring of meaning. It emerges from the process of communalisation of individual trauma: when individual trauma becomes an experience shared originally by a ‘carrier group’ and later on spreads throughout whole societies. As a communal experience trauma alienates from their carriers by means of cultural media and their products. In the form of cultural artifacts, such as movies or books, it transforms into a Durkheimian social fact. The inability to negate it ultimately forces the society to engage in negotiations of meaning, resulting in either a refutation or an inclusion of the carrier group’s trauma into the wider social identity. The act of emergence of social trauma can be defined as a complex, multilayered process of continuous expansion of the intersubjective field. The history of American engagement in the Vietnam war and the society’s reaction to it serves as an informative example of this process.
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Is it worth exporting corn and fodder in exchange for toys and cosmetics? It was a question Gheorghiu-Dej of Romania asked himself, when confronted with increasing East German demands for agricultural exports. He was keen on overcoming underdevelopment through a vast program of industrialization in order to overcome the status of a predominantly agricultural country but he perceived his CMEA partners to be opposing this prospect. In the context of increasing economic difficulties in the Soviet bloc in the early 1960s, an idea was circulated that specialization would help increase efficiency so that Socialist countries could successfully compete on Western markets. But the meaning of specialization appeared different for each country: Gheorghiu-Dej thought that Romania deserved an equal status with other more developed nations of the Soviet bloc, but it soon became clear to him that they had different views. His perception was that the East Germans and Czechoslovaks wanted Romania to remain a provider of agricultural products and hold off its industrialization plans, but he could not accept that. This study argues that intra-CMEA competition between developed and less developed member countries played a major role in compromising the reforms planed by Moscow in the early 1960s.
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This article is primarily dedicated to the analysis of the evolution of the Italian party system after 1945. This phenomenon was considered to be of cognitive importance because of the clearly noticeable profound transformations of the Italian party system in the last decade. The purpose of the article is an attempt to analyze the structure, mechanism and conditions of the party system of the Italian Republic with particular emphasis on the terms “First”, “Second” and “Third” Italian Republic, disseminated in journalism.
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The main aim of this article is to present the genesis, instruments and real influence of the concept of the realistic détente policy of the German Minister of Foreign Affairs Hans-Dietrich Genscher on the foreign policy of the German federal government in the years 1974-1989. The author formulates a thesis that Genscher’s concept had very significant influence on the program activities of the FDP as well as on the practical foreign policy of the SPD/FDP governments (1974-1982) and CDU/CSU/FDP governments (1982-1989), whereby the year 1985 was an important turning point in this evolution.
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The main goal of this article is to show how the Ukrainian community in North America, thanks to cultivating the memory of a marginal event from the point of view of American history, managed to appear in the social life of the USA and Canada. Here I use the concept of ‘community of memory’ to emphasize those Ukrainian communities in the USA and Canada that are of utmost importance in the commemoration of Holodomor. They also managed to retain this event’s memory in many other competing memories, dabbling in the memory of their identity as American Ukrainian. Therefore, in the following sections of the article, I will attempt to answer why it was the diaspora that undertook a tremendous effort to commemorate Holodomor’s victims and the course of that process for years. Finally, I employ critical analysis of media discourses. Moreover, I will consider the Holodomor generation’s role in cultivating that memory and emergence of the ‘communities of memory’.
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One of the issues constantly discussed in the context of human rights is their assessment as universal or relative. International human rights norms are universal, which corresponds to the nature of human rights. The process of universalization of human rights began after the second world war with the creation of the United Nations, whose Charter declared its determination to reaffirm faith in the fundamental rights of the individual, in the equality of men and women and in the equality of nations large and small. These intentions of the organization were confirmed by the adoption of universal documents: the International Bill of Human Rights, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the International Covenants on Human Rights, opened for signature on December 16, 1966, and other acts. However, the problem lies in the fact that human rights recognized at the international level as universal and enshrined in international instruments, which must be respected by all and everywhere, lose the signs and qualities of universality under the influence of various socio-cultural, national traditions and customs, religious and other factors, and acquire the meaning or status of relative ones.
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The article is a collection of thoughts that transpired during the work at the Archive of Włodzimierz Odojewski. The aim of the authors was to identify and indicate the potential ways to study the life and works of the writer, and the expected result of the research is a biography of Odojewski. The research was based on the exploration of the writer’s private collection: unpublished documents, manuscripts, typescripts, personal papers, correspondence, family and estate papers and photographs. The authors focused on a number of issues. One, the biographical facts that influenced Odojewski’s output – World War II, frequent relocations, censorship and a ban on publishing in Poland, emigration, the relation with the Polish Institute in Maisons-Laffitte and working at Radio Free Europe’s editorial office. Two, the analysis of literary works including hundreds of typescripts in many variants (related to the phases of the genetic history of a literary work through the stages of Odojewski’s life) which allowed for describing Odojewski’s writing techniques. Three, ‘The writer’s map’ which points out places important for the author – Poznań, Gniezno, Kłecko, Podole, Szczecin, Warsaw, Paris, Berlin, Munich. Four, the correspondence (personal and cultural) which can be used as an important source of knowledge of the history of Polish post-war emigration. One of the most interesting parts of the collection is a collection of letters from Jerzy Giedroyć that show Polish culture outside the Iron Curtain.
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This paper is devoted to the reception of Jerzy Grotowski’s ideas of theatre and actors’ training system in China and Taiwan at the end of the twentieth century. The author analyses the scope of Grotowski’s influence on Chinese and Taiwanese theatre reformers, stage directors and actors/dancers at a specific moment of deep social, cultural and political transformations in Asia. She also tries to determine the main reasons for Grotowski’s popularity in mainland China and Taiwan in the 80s and 90s.
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