Around the Bloc: Around the Bloc - Romanian Cabinet Ministers Bounced as EU Presidency Nears
Justice commissioner visits Bucharest to drive home serious concerns over government’s steps to blur the separation of powers.
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Justice commissioner visits Bucharest to drive home serious concerns over government’s steps to blur the separation of powers.
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The industrial development policy focusing on heavy industry, mainly the steel and machine-construction branches, was a characteristic feature of the socialist-type political systems of Eastern Europe. Its notable consequence for the system of human settlements translated into forcible urbanisation, but only insofar as quantity was concerned (artificial multiplication of towns and of the town population). As industrial units set up, some villages, functioning as dormitories, would be turned into towns: other would be integrated into the urban administrative territory; on the other hand, some dominantly rural residential districts would be attached to the town and a new type of settlements, connected with the construction of big industrial estates, would be built on empty terrain. As a result, a new type of town-integrated settlements would emerge, but the quality of their urban-type infrastructure falls far below that of traditional centres. Their individual character is marked by a fluctuating evolution, in the majority of cases much closer to countryside, that is, decreasing population and growing vulnerability connected with the units they had been engendered by. Considering the foregoing, we could say that these settlements, now part of the town, represent a distinct, intermediary category between the urban and the rural system and should be designated as such. The state capital determines a specific organisation of the state territory, as materialised in a certain pattern of communication routes and a specific layout of the other urban nuclei with macroterritorial functions. Bucharest’s peripheral position within the national territory calls for the decentralisation of its functions concomitantly with remote regional metropoles becoming more important as spatial structuring nuclei. Bucharest’s high degree of hypertrophy compared to the second city in the urban hierarchy, together with its distinct position within the Romanian urban system, asked for a distinctive organisation of its built-in area as early as the beginning of the 20-th century.
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The article analyses site-specific artistic practices at the Tallinn Art Hall at the beginning of the 1990s. Focusing on projects by Group T and George Steinmann, the text investigates what kind of art the institutional art space made possible and how artistic interventions redefined architectural and discursive space and the institution’s identity. The different artistic positions revealed different attitudes towards constructing community and contributed to the emergence of the public sphere in very different ways.
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Billion-dollar purchases are escalating, and not all of the added value is military-related.
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Regarding the contemporary role of mass media, especially television, and rising allegations of trivialization of the political life it is worth to consider how these opinions are justified. It evokes the question whether we are dealing with a situation in which public debate through the media seems to be based not on rational and logical conclusions, but on the competition, whose participants focus exclusively on creating their own images and pursuing symbolic politics. These trends cause that democracy evolves towards mediocracy, and the nineteenth-century ideologies lose their attraction to the simple message, free of thought. This phenomenon is considered in this paper in the meme theory context. The theory, introduced by Richard Dawkins, refers to a unit of cultural transmission, and in politics can be interpreted as short, blunt message, image or symbol, catchy enough to take over the imagination of the recipient. It is characterized by aggressive persuasion, apparent ambiguity and it is aimed to falsify the reality. Besides, its emotional assessment excludes any rational debate. It seems interesting, therefore, the trend of contemporary democracy, and question whether the public debate limited to an exchange of simplified, emotional arguments involves the danger of civil society erosion.
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The processes of sports globalization and development are parts of the global sport nowadays. The current trends are focused on specific cultures. Sport and media are interdependent parts of the global system. In this article we tackle the culture media - sporting goods production, the sporting goods form and content, the media and political and economic aspects of consumption series.
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History shows that developments in society and education are consensual, which means that substantial global and national changes utterly impose the occurrence of significant changes in the educational field as well. In depth transformations at society level and the dynamics of these transformations require the construction and reconstruction of educational paradigms, the provision of educational solutions that successfully meet the challenges of the contemporary world. Thus, educational policy directions are designed and reviewed according to imperatives, demands and challenges of the contemporary world and want to be "answers" to the major issues at a societal level.
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Community, its perception and understanding constitutes one of the elements, or one of the aspects, of society formation. The foundation of the constitution of community as such is the process of establishing broadly understood security at its base. The limits of security, its scope and semantic content determine the boundaries of the community. Michael Foucault will treat the process of establishing security as an element of the structure of power and the mechanisms of its functioning, emphasizing the process of separation of such understood security from disciplinary mechanisms. Transformations in this sphere are a kind of semantic revolution the consequence of which is a change of understanding community as such.
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The industrial serious failure causes huge losses within the natural environment and the life of people and animals. The city of Starogard Gdański, in which the Pharmaceutical Plant Polpharma S.A. is located must put great emphasis on well-trained services of the city and the system of the crisis management. It is necessary because it is a plant classified as a high risk of a serious industrial failure and the production technology is mainly based on the use of dangerous substances. Therefore, it is worth considering the question of the extent the services and the crisis management system of the city of Starogard Gdański are prepared in serious accident in Polpharma S. A.
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The United Nations can be a proof of the integration capacity of humanity but at the same time a mirror of vertical and horizontal problems. It is a sensitive organization for the global collective security system, which is often subject to criticism. It results from the critics' failure to fulfill their universal destiny, especially in the existential issue of security. The reasons for the alleged UN indolence should be seen in the structural and functional aspects of its organization and procedure. An important issue implicating a certainUN condition is a kind of dualism of provenance of the organization's destiny, based on one hand on responsibility for the fate of the world, on the other hand the tendency to influence its fate by the main states of the so-called "five" of the UN Security Council. In the context of the above observations, the specifics of the presence of the Russian Federation as one of the playmakers will be analyzed.
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Once it was the collective unconscious. Gustav Jung and his friend, Mircea Eliade, looked into the archetypes embedded in the people’s unconscious whose contents they filtered through conceptual frames meant to reveal huge analogies. The history of religions, the unconscious revealed in dreams, mythical archetypes, religious scripts connecting present ritual to the event illo tempore out of which creeds and beliefs emerged and spread to races other than those originating them. Today there are institutional bodies of the European Union whose politics is the cultural unification of the member states but the actors in this process no longer turn a blind eye upon diversity and essential differences. Unlike the priority of a colonizing Self over the Other in the full bloom of modernism, the politics of difference that set on after the war reversed the relationship, prioritizing the Other. Not as a complete alterus, however, an unfathomable stranger, but, as Ricoeur says, soi-même comme un autre. The self that comes out of itself to meet the other as target of connectivity. Myths, legends, are no longer considered to be commonly shared as a given by various nations, they are instead appropriated through acculturation, socialization. We are shareholders of a patrinony which is essential in shaping our identity. It is our legacy stored in the fertile land of the collective imaginary in which we take roots. Nowadays the dynamics of Identity is set between national and international, unity and diversity, losses and gains, games of power and globalization. European Identity becomes an open-work, a work in progress of which we are all part of. We become the masons of our own construction of identity.
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The article presents the regional dimension of the Bulgarian security policy. This wasdone on the basis of the newly created Three Seas Initiative. The priorities of theBulgarian security policy under this initiative were presented, as well as within theframework of Euro-Atlantic integration. Presented are the opportunities and threatsthat stand before the Three Seas Initiative, showing its potential and the involvement ofBulgaria in the implementation of the project. The aim of the article was also to answerthe question about the role and importance of the above-mentioned initiative forBulgarian politics and what role regional cooperation plays in foreign policy and securitypolicy of contemporary Bulgaria. The conducted analysis led to the conclusion that themain direction in politics is Euro-Atlantic integration. It is within this priority thatBulgaria partially implements tasks related to regional policy. Regional cooperation isintensified. There is potential for better cooperation within the framework of the ThreeSeas.
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The article describes the state policy to protect the family as the basic unit of society. The analysis is made to the Polish Constitution and the amended provisions of the law on preventing domestic violence and the resulting tasks for the administration of justice, state and local government. The author has also developed a scheme of the organizational structure of public administration, implementing the tasks of combating domestic violence.
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In the period from 1809 to 1917, in which Finland as part of imperial Russia had the status of an "autonomous Great Dukedom", the strategic interests and safety policy of Russia, as well as Russia’s position in international crises, influenced the destiny of Finland, its position and its special status within the frame of the Russian empire. Three phases of Finno-Russian relationships can be observed in the period 1809— 1917. The first phase (1809— 1860) is characterized by loyalty towards Imperial Russia, us well us by the Russian opposition against the growth of national tendencies and the crushing of the national movement in Finland The regime of Alexander II characterizes the second phase (1855 to 1881) of the Finno-Russian relationships. This period is marked by a certain liberalization and progress in all areas, especially in that of the economic and political rule over Finland. Alexander II consented to a revival of constitutional government. Towards the end of the 19th century the third phase has its beginning; all aspects of Finnish autonomy are reduced. The imperial government is undertaking measures towards a Russification of Finland. The revolution in Russia and the overthrow of the tzarist regime in 1917 opened the perspective towards the inevitable implementation of a full national independence for Finland. The proclaiming of the independence of Finland and its de jure recognition by the new Soviet government took place towards the end of December 1917.
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Policy communities play an important role in Yugoslav politics but their influence in a specific instance remains contingent upon the willingness of political generalists to listen. Community of specialists on worker migration abroad developed as the migration assumed significant proportions. This community defined the nature of the problem on the intellectual basis of the 1965 economic reform and the manner i which generalist elites subsequently addressed the issue. As Croatian nationalists and Tito linked migration to the larger political crisis of the early 1970s, migration entrepreneurs injected these proposals into subsequent policy. In this sense, policy making in Yugoslavia takes place by garbage can« processes, as well as by "rational" problem-solving. As an issues becomes a recurring agenda item, policy communities become fragmented an lose their vigor. The immediate problems have been clearly addressed in the policy security driven measures have become a set of entitlement programs in a variety of bureaucracies throughout the government. But the issue of migration, itself, has withered away as generalist turned to new problems, funding for research has declined, and the activities of the community have been routinized and ritualized. Advocates of migration-as-economic reform remain as active as funding will allow: in order to find a more complete hearing, they have migrated to a now-burgeoing policy community on private sector small business.
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The article questions the elements of ethnology’s ethical capacity, with the special focus on the research and presentations of historical culture of clothing and folk costumes. All disciplines in the area of humanities share the dilemma of the restorer’s stratigraphy, which implies ethical statements. In addition, the significance of craftsperson’s ethical capacity and especially of the folk costume, is embedded in the roots of ethnology. These formative circumstances of ethnology, inherited together with the definition of the research subject, do not appear as aggravating circumstances to be removed in the present time, but as epistemological and methodological qualifications for future research. Guided by Lou Taylor’s analysis, previous relations between science and power are problematized through the depolitzation through self censorship and the avoidance of stratigraphic analysis of cultural processes. Ethical connotation in ethnological work represents a disciplinary advantage and provides a promising interpretative path.
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