CEPOS New Call for Papers 2020 10th International Conference after Communism. East and West Under Scrutiny
Place: Craiova (Romania), University House; Date: 27-28 March 2020
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Place: Craiova (Romania), University House; Date: 27-28 March 2020
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Place: Craiova (Romania), University House; Date: 27-28 March 2020
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Place: Craiova (Romania), University House; Date: 27-28 March 2020
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Władyslaw Gomułka, was a first secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. He born in Białobrzegi, near Krosno in former Austro-Hungarian Kingdom (actual in Poland) on February 6, 1905 and he died in Warsaw on September 1, 1982. From 1956 to 1970 he ruled the communist party of Poland. He was the creator of the concept – the Polish road to socialism. Władyslaw Gomułka is appreciated to be one of the remarkable men in Polish politics after the second war. Władysław Gomulka has been one of the most important men in Polish politics of the 20th century. In a same time he performed an important act in his quality of the leader of the East European Communist Party. In 1926, Gomulka became a member of the Polish Communist Party (Communistyczna Partia Polski, KPP), so during World War II he played a crucial role in the resistance struggle. By the other hand Gomulka played in post-war Polish politics and the “de-Stalinization” process. Although he will be the artisan of Poland's deStalinization process, Gomulka will not give up the Soviet bloc. Gomułka represented a very distinct kind of communism and his slogan the “Polska Droga” (the Polish Road, or Polish Way was understood by the other communist countries in the Eastern bloc that everyone must choose their own path to socialism. An undoubted achievement of Gomulka's politics was the negotiation of a treaty with West Germany, signed in December 1970. The crisis at the end of Gomułka's tenure coincided with great success in foreign policy. The economic difficulties facing Poland in the late 1970s will lead to prices hikes. In these circumstances, in December 1970, violent clashes will take place between law enforcement and workers at the shipyards on the Baltic Sea coast. Several dozen workers will lose their lives, Gomułka being forced to resign.
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Place: Craiova (Romania), University House; Date: 27-28 March 2020
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Place: Craiova (Romania), University House; Date: 19-20 March 2021
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Austrian socialists and their attitude to the past, or neglect that took place in the 1970s and 1980s, were gradually appearing in the Polish public sphere due to reprints from foreign press services. The aim of the study was to determine whether and to what extent the topic of Austrian denazification occurred in communist Poland, whether the Poles were interested in the problem of settlements and how they commented on them. Research questions focus on: the quality of comments on the group of Austrian socialists in the Polish public sphere; perpetuating the images of post-war Austria in the Polish public discourse; circumstances in which denazification affairs were described, as well as the historical and political background of this process. The research method adopted was content analysis in the qualitative dimension. The population (data corpus) is press, journals, serial and archival documents. The subject of the study were Polish comments on the denazification process in Austria, and in particular the socialist influence on its course. With reference to the times of the Second World War in Austria, for a few decades, one rhetoric vision prevailed, but from time to time an alternative vision was formulated. In the Polish public discourse, references to this alternative vision do not occur. The applied “metaphorical scenarios” referred to by Polish publicists speak about situations of “healing” the state by the first generation of politicians involved in the creation of the Second Republic. Austrians were defined as victims in the great community of victims, without the need to explain the Holocaust.
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The events that took place after August 23, 1944 made the political life in Tulcea County not to differ in a broad way from that of the rest of the country, but to nevertheless have some specific accents. The present study is based on the research undertaken at the County Directorate of Tulcea National, but also at the Central Historical National Archives. By using data provided by the archival documents, given the small number of scientific studies dedicated to the area for describing the mentioned period, as well as of general papers and, based on the research methods such as qualitative and quantitative analysis of the mentioned documentary sources, the study tries to capture the specific accents of the political life in Tulcea County between August 23, 1944-1947. At the same time, the study tries to describe the evolution and organizational activity of the Communist Party in Tulcea county during 1944-1947.
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The normative inflationary phenomenon appeared and developed in the post-communist period, after the number of normative acts adopted increased considerably. This increase has led to inaccessibility and lack of legislative quality of the normative act. All these consequences have produced effects in the sphere of human rights protection, causing the regress of this protection. In order to identify the content, the determining factors and the effects of the normative inflationary phenomenon, we started from the meaning, causes and effects of inflation in the economy, proceeding to a legalization of the normative inflationary phenomenon. The simple analogy will not be sufficient to identify the cause and effect of normative inflation, so it will be necessary to identify effective adaptation methods that will help us to identify the most effective methods to counteract this phenomenon. Using the method of teleological interpretation, one of the adaptation methods that we will identify, will be that of reporting the emergence of the normative inflationary phenomenon to the protection of human rights, considering that the normative act by which this protection is affected is inflationary.
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As a result of society evolution, monetary policy, as well as the objectives of central banks, have suffered and continue to suffer several changes. The case of Central and East European countries is no different, and most of these countries have changed their monetary policy strategies after the collapse of the communist regime. This article aims to create an overview of the changes that have taken place in terms of monetary policy strategies and objectives in the Centrale and East European Countries, especially in Romania, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part provides an overview image of the monetary policy promoted by the central banks immediately after the fall of communism, while the second part presents the main features of the current monetary policy strategies promoted in these countries.
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The article reveals the moment and the implications of the Romanian intervention in Hungary, in 1919, after the proclamation of the Soviet Hungarian Republic, under the leadership of Bela Kun, an advocate and journalist with Jewish-Hungarian origin, born in 1886, at Cehu Silvaniei, then in Austria-Hungary, today in Romania. The issue was presented in the historiography with multiple senses. Romanian intervention was seen by the contemporaries as a defensive action of Romania to impose the decisions of December 1-st 1918 of Alba Iulia. Hungarian republican troops refused to retreat according to the international agreements on the Franchet D (Esperey Line. After Bela Kun seized power as a Bolshevik internationalist leader, on March, 21 1919, the great powers had seen an immediate danger for extending the Communism from Soviet Russia which was in the Civil War. For Romania, the attitude of Bela Kun was seen as a threat regarding Transylvania, because Bela Kun refused to admit the historical rights of Romania and declared war on Romania, on April 16, 1919. Romania succeeded to have Banat under complete Romanian administration on August 3, 1919, when Romanian troops entered in Timisoara. Romanian campaign in Hungary, started on passing Tisa on July 24 1919, had a double asset, as the researchers considered: on the main side, a communist government in Central Europe could be dismissed, on the other side; Romania could have more rights when the Treaty with Hungary will be signed. On August 4, 1919, Romanian Army entered in Budapest. After 1989, the Romanian Campaign from 1919 was seen as the first successfully anti-communist military action in Europe after the collapse of the democratic forces help against Russian Bolsheviks in 1921. Hungarian communists and also Romanian communists who respected Moscow political line considered the Romanian campaign as an “imperialist aggression”.
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In recent years, several European states have witnessed the emergence and / or intensification of the radical right, whose exponents have even managed to obtain very good electoral results in some cases. In Central and Eastern Europe, the success of right-wing extremism has been more visible in Poland or Hungary, but other states have also had their fair share of extremist movement in the years since 1990. Compared to the other states in the region, where political formations on the far right of the political spectrum became, in recent years, electorally viable, in Romania this trend did not take hold. Instead, the right-wing extremism has manifested itself outside the political class, within different groups or social movements. Of the Romanian right-wing political formations, the Greater Romania Party (PRM) had been the most successful, and the presidential election from 2000 represented the peak of the extremist political discourse in post-communist Romania. In this paper, we will analyze the Romanian general and presidential elections from 2000, with an emphasis on the PRM and its candidate, as the main center of right-wing extremism. PRM, as the analysis will show, had registered a double electoral success during these elections. On the one hand, it became the main opposition party in the Romanian Parliament; on the other hand, its candidate entered the second round of the presidential elections, managing to obtain, in the first round, almost one third of the valid votes cast. Consequently, the main thrust of the paper will be on discourse analysis, focusing, in particular, on the themes used in the electoral campaign for the presidential elections by the two candidates who qualified for the second round. Given that the incumbent president did not seek to be reelected, we argue that the right-wing surge witnessed during this period can be premised, in part, on the poor performance of the outgoing president and government from the 1996-2000 period. Similarly, electoral absenteeism also played a major role in PRM’s electoral success to a certain extent.
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Following the collapse of the communist regime, Romania entered a process of globalisation which has greatly influenced many sectors of life, including education. For over 30 years now, researchers, institution leaders and organisations have addressed the issue of the internationalisation of higher education. In this context, an increasing number of foreign students is attracted by the study programmes and courses offered by Romanian universities. Some of these courses are available in foreign languages, but most of them are in Romanian, hence the growing demand for teaching and learning Romanian as a foreign language. The aim of this paper is to analyse the major components of internationalisation and their impact on higher education in Romania, focusing on the latest development of the study programme called The Romanian Language Preparatory Year (Anul pregătitor de limba romȃnă). As a method, we resort to official facts and figures to analyse how the main strategies of internationalisation have been implemented into the Romanian higher education system. Our research concludes that the preparatory year instills international, global, and comparative dimensions not only in the classroom, but in the entire academic life, leading to a higher respect and tolerance for other nations, cultures and life-styles.
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In the last 30 years since the Romanian revolution, there have been a lot of changes occurring at the level of acquiring foreign languages, especially English, trends which have grown hand in hand with the changing needs of the learners. More and more students in higher education as well as adults working for different international companies are becoming aware of the importance of learning English at a professional level so that they might become proficient speakers of the language. Thus, the present paper aims at discussing some of the important aspects of teaching and learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in Romania in the post-communist period. ESP has evolved a lot in our country, starting from its spread at the academic level and continuing with an increased demand on behalf of the professionals working for different international entities. Structured in five sections, the paper intends to present the background of ESP in general, focusing on the needs analysis of the learners, their motivational factors and expectations and continues with enhancing the language skills necessary for both teaching and learning ESP. A review of the materials and textbooks used throughout years is also brought into discussion in order to highlight how much the learning process has evolved. Of all the branches of ESP, special emphasis is offered to Business English as well as to Technical English and English for medical professionals. Undoubtedly, when it comes to ESP in general, the goal of any teacher/trainer is to select the proper materials which meet both the needs and expectations of their learners.
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Place: Craiova (Romania), University House; Date: 19-20 March 2021
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Between 1948 and 1968, an article in the Penal Code allowed the trial and sentencing of minors for political reasons in the regime intended for adults. Convicted teenagers were also used for work, in factories attached to some of the penitentiaries, as well as in forced labour camps and colonies until exhaustion. Between 1948 and 1952, Târgșor prison functioned as a "children's prison". Since 1952, the Romanian communist system has created a network of triage centres and re-education colonies for minors over 11 years old, who committed crimes, including those "who did not properly respect the regime of popular democracy". These spaces provided, in addition to work, the schooling of convicted students. In reality, schooling was non-existent, as were other rights, such as food, visits, packages.
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In June 1921, the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) adopted a decision on the first general purge of the party and for the period August 1 — October 1. The party organizations set as a goal to free themselves from all “clinging” members who pursued selfish material or other interests. The subject of the study is the analysis of the organization, conduct, and results of the purge in the Vyatka provincial organization of the party, as well as a socio-psychological portrait of those expelled after the purge. The work uses archival sources and the principle of historicism, methods of historical institutionalism, and case studies. It turned out that the purge took place at a later date, from September to November 1921, which indicated both the weakness of party discipline and low level of party organization. The number of excluded and expelled members was much more than in the whole country, which was due to the non-proletarian composition of the organization, the crisis at the beginning of the NEP, and the nature of the attitude of peasant communists to NEP. The main result of the purge was an increase in more disciplined and executive party members who believe in the ideals of communism. Nevertheless, the purge did not reach its goal, since the crisis in the party organizations of the province kept growing. In the 1922–1924, many county-level organizations whose members were purged found themselves in a state of deep disintegration and were again subjected to purges.
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This article seeks to shed light on the diary of Maksim Ivanovich Starostin (1902–1948), First Secretary of the Murmansk Provisional Committee of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Murmansk Defense Committee, and written during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945). As a colonel and later major-general, Starostin was a member of the Military Council of the Soviet Northern Fleet and the Military Council of the 14th Army, which conducted the defense of the Kola Peninsula. He travelled during both summer and winter to inspect the conditions of the soldiers at the front, at the same time working intensively to provide the city of Murmansk with building materials and food supplies. Starostin also played an important role organizing the fishing industry. A particular challenge that demanded much of his attention was the unloading of Allied vessels delivering equipment and goods of critical importance for the Soviet Union’s struggle against Nazi Germany. A significant problem in this regard was a lack of available manpower. Effective supervision of personnel was regarded by Starostin as a key to success. In many respects he was an ideal party leader, loyal to the political leadership of the country, but at the same time independent and not afraid to criticize decisions made at higher levels. Despite this, however, on the 14th of April 1945 the Party Central Committee elected to transfer Starostin to Moscow, only weeks before victory. As a consequence, Starostin was prevented from celebrating Victory Day in Murmansk, a city to which he had given all his strength during the Great Patriotic War. Perhaps Starostin, in the eyes the Stalinist leadership, had become too powerful and independent to be left alone in the High North.
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This paper discusses the various manifestations of children as protagonists in Romanian socialist cinema, and particularly those present in the juvenile detective movies of that time. Several productions of the socialism cinema industry had children as their main heroes and the movies discussed here were deploying tropes and narrative strategies specific to the global genre of boy detectives. The analysis uses examples that range from written texts, books or cartoons, to films and television series, as these cultural products were exploring not only childhood, but also a particular behaviour of young children and teenagers. They are considered to be relevant for understanding the transformations in Romanian society, as the socialist regime was creating an educational environment for children according to the dominant ideology, the narratives were exploring the resources of a wider genre.
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Based on unpublished archival material and recent literature, the author researched the life and work of Dr. Lav Znidarčić, a Catholic worker, Croatian prisoner and longtime president of the Great Crusade, the leading Catholic organization in the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He was the president of the Great Crusade (VKB) in the period from 1942 until 1945, when he was elected and then confirmed by the Archbishop of Zagreb, Dr. Alojzije Stepinac. He was the president of the VKB until the dissolution of the organization in 1945, but even after that he secretly led the organization until 1993, when the chairmanship of the organization was taken over by prof. dr. sc. Petar Kraljevic. Dr. Lav Znidarčić, was born on August 14, 1918 in Split to a traditional Catholic family. Even though they were raised Christian, one part of his family accepted Marxist ideology and an atheistic worldview. From the earliest youth, Lav Znidarčić was a part of the Eagle Organization, in which he became an active member in 1926. After the Six-January Dictatorship banned his work in 1929, he became actively involved in the founding and work of the Crusader Organization in January 1930. During the Second World War, he proved to be a wise and pragmatic leader of the Great Crusade and consistent and loyal to the idea of the blessed Ivan Merz on the non-partisanship and non-politics of the Crusade, which he consistently advocated until his death. Due to his social engagement after the Second World War, he was arrested and condemned several times by the communist authorities, but this did not sway him in his work and he remained completely consistent with the idea of the Blessed Ivan Merz and Catholic Action.
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