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Vol. 6 No. 1 (2024)
Journal of Romanian Studies, 6, No. 1 (2024)
Editors: Jill Massino, Narcis Tulbure Book Review Editor: Iuliu Rațiu Assistant Editor: Iemima Ploscariu
Contents
Jill Massino, Narcis Tulbure (pp. 1-4)
Articles:
Eduard Baidaus
(pp. 5-26)
This article examines the fate of Soviet refugees who fled collectivization and the famine by focusing on the residents of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR) who attempted to cross the Soviet–Romanian frontier during the late 1920s–early 1930s. The article discusses their lives in the USSR prior to their flight, their perilous journey across the border, and their experiences in Romania.
Răzvan Roşu
Beyond Nationalism and State Authorities: Voices of the Moți Colonists from the Carei Area
(pp. 27-45)
Following the creation of Greater Romania and the Hungarian–Romanian War in 1919, the Romanian state decided to colonize the new Hungarian–Romanian border with ethnic Romanians. Among other ethnic Romanians from the Apuseni Mountains and Maramureș, the authorities considered the Moți the most suitable settlers. This article examines this process by focusing on the Moți colonies in the Carei region, situated in northwestern Romania. In contrast to most research on the topic, which has relied exclusively on written sources from archives and newspapers, examining colonization from the perspective of state authorities, this article explores the topic from the perspective of the settlers themselves. Drawing on oral histories with the Moţi, it examines the challenges they faced in adapting to their new environment, their relationships with other ethnic groups, and their negotiations with state authorities. By analyzing oral sources alongside official and elite sources, it provides a more nuanced portrait of colonization that showcases the voices of ordinary people.
Bronwyn Cragg
Letters from Exile: Canadian Media, the Romanian Diaspora, and the Legionary Movement
(pp.47–70)
This article traces the post-Second World War immigration of Romanians to Canada, and addresses themes of self-identification versus outside perception, national identity, and myth-making in the Romanian-Canadian community. It subsequently documents the scrutiny faced by the Romanian diaspora for supposed links to the interwar Romanian far-right Legionary Movement. Beginning in the 1950s, Romanian exiles in Canada forged their own community organizations, churches, and media, in which a unique synthesis of national identity and far-right politics was promoted, placing these new immigrants at the center of intracommunity and inter-ethnic conflict. Following the release of the Deschênes Report on war criminals living in Canada in 1986, as well as a series of unsolved terrorist attacks, Romanian-Canadians were subject to investigations by the mainstream Canadian media for potential involvement in far-right organizing. In the years since the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, significant strands of the Romanian diaspora in Canada have continued to embrace historical figures of the Legionary Movement, synthesizing a diaspora identity flavored by anticommunism, radical right politics, and (ultra-) nationalism well into the post-communist period.
Keith Harrington
(pp.71–94)
The Popular Front of Moldova (PFM) was a sociopolitical movement in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic that spearheaded several initiatives that helped dismantle Soviet power in Moldova. However, the group’s pan-Romanian position created deep divisions within Moldovan society. Drawing on extensive archival research, this article explores how local branches of the PFM, officially known as coordination committees, sought to reshape local politics between 1989–1992. I examine the composition of these coordination committees, their policy initiatives, and their relationship with local authorities, which varied according to geographic and demographic factors. I argue that the group’s hard-line position eventually caused it to lose support across Moldova, including in regions where the PFM had initially been immensely popular.
Mihai S. Rusu
(pp.95–121)
Besides being canonized as Romania’s “national poet,” Mihai Eminescu was hailed as the “complete man of Romanian culture” and the “absolute Romanian,” among a profusion of
encomiastic praises. Eminescu was immortalized in myriads of ways, from the most solemn and official (e.g. state-run rituals) to the most prosaic and banal (e.g. banknotes). In this article, I investigate the spatial dimension of Eminescu’s memory by charting the commemorative landscape defined by toponymy and public monuments honoring the national poet in Romania. Particular attention is given to Eminescu’s presence in urban street nomenclature and its regional distribution across the country. Drawing on several datasets of spatial information, I use statistical modeling techniques to examine the factors underpinning Eminescu’s memorial namescape. Employing logistic regression analyses, the article highlights an uneven geography of Eminescu’s memory and points out the variables structuring its particular spatial patterning.
Source Translation:
Dumitru Lisnic and James A. Kapaló
(pp. 231–241)
Vladimir Solonari
Philippe Henri Blasen. La “primauté de la nation roumaine” et les “étrangers”: Les minorités et leur liberté du travail sous le cabinet Goga et la dictature royale. Cluj-Napoca: Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, 2022. 408 pp.
Gheorghe Gelu Păcurar
Oliver Jens Schmitt. Biserica de stat sau Biserica în stat? O istorie a Bisericii Ortodoxe Române: 1918–2023. București: Humanitas, 2023. 457 pp.
Simona Drăgan
Annemarie Sorescu-Marinković, Mihai Dragnea, Thede Kahl, Blagovest Njagulov, Donald L. Dyer, and Angelo Costanzo, eds. The Romance-Speaking Balkans: Language and the Politics of Identity. London: Brill, 2021. 260 pp.
Andrei Cușco
Svetlana Suveica. Post-Imperial Encounters: Transnational Designs of Bessarabia in Paris and Elsewhere, 1917–1922. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022 (Südosteuropäiche Arbeiten, 167). 509 pp.
Roland Clark
Dorina Dragnea, Emmanouil Ger Varvounis, Evelyn Reuter, Petko Hristov, and Susan Sorek, eds. Pilgrimage in the Christian Balkan World: The Path to Touch the Sacred and Holy. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023. 300 pp.
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2023)
Journal of Romanian Studies, 5, No. 2 (2023)
Editors: Svetlana Suveica, Jill Massino, Iemima Ploscariu
Guest Editors: Iuliana Cindrea-Nagy, Roland Clark
Contents
Iuliana Cindrea-Nagy, Roland Clark
(pp. 123-130)
Articles:
Constantin Bărbulescu and Roland Clark
(pp. 131-154)
The present study attempts to capture and explain a somewhat paradoxical theme: the way in which the national ethnology of the nineteenth century “ignored” the peasant world. Why did a science dedicated to the peasant world ignore the “voices” of peasants for a long period of time? Throughout the nineteenth century the ethnologist’s agenda did not overlap at all with that of the peasant in front of him: the urban researcher was interested in folk literature, music, dance, and dress, while the peasant wanted to talk about rural poverty and its causes. The ethnologist was engaged in building the national, while the peasant spoke about the social. Their discourses simply did not intersect. Changes did begin to happen at the beginning of the twentieth century: peasants began not only to be asked but were also listened to. Ovid Densusianu was responsible for this paradigm shift, redefining folklore during the first decade of the century. He was followed by the sociological monographic school, represented here by the work of Henri H. Stahl.
George Andrei
(pp. 155-180)
In the interwar period, forestry emerged as a powerful tool through which state institutions attempted to shape social and natural environments in rural Romania. This article evaluates how criminality, poverty, surveillance, exploitation, and labor intersected in Romania’s forests through the figure of the forest ranger, responsible for a range of tasks from managing forest ecology to serving as the state’s representative in the woodlands. Using a microhistorical approach, the article recounts the story of a Zlatna ranger investigated for theft in the late 1920s. His story and the individuals involved offer important insight into the asymmetrical power relations and local social factors that negotiated the forests’ legibility. Rangers served as part crucial asset, part embarrassing liability, existing in a liminal space between the state and local society. Through local forestry agents, their informal networks, and the “involuntary monitors” these invariably created, state forestry officials had valuable points of contact with rural society. This article demonstrates the value of rural perspectives in historical studies, challenging prevailing notions that conceptualize rural people as simple, irrelevant, or singlemindedly opposed to the encroachment of the modern state.
Philippe Henri Blasen
(pp.181–203)
The paper discusses the social, political, and economic situation in the northern Moldavian small town of Mihăileni, based on interviews recorded by the local police. This extraordinary source provides a unique insight into a variety of local opinions and the daily life of rural residents during 1938, the year when Carol II established a new regime, the so-called “royal dictatorship,” and when Romania suffered from the impact of the Czechoslovak crisis. The locals’ statements suggest that they embraced the new regime and that they approved of the new 1938 Constitution. However, they also reveal disgruntlement over the authorities’ inadequate action regarding the difficult economic situation, and expose the hardships which the peasants, related professionals, and poor people endured.
Adriana Cupcea
(pp.205–219)
The aim of this article is to explore religiosity in an urban Turkish Muslim Roma community from the Dobruja region of Romania. The article is based on fieldwork research consisting of semi-structured interviews, life histories, and participant observation in the post-socialist town of Medgidia. The research is an emic study which seeks to describe the representations of Turkish Muslim Roma in Medgidia and the way they understand, negotiate, and practice Islam. I draw on Arolda Elbasani and Olivier Roy’s definition of religiosity as the way an individual believer experiences his or her relationship to religion and faith. Considering Islam an essentially emotional category, I investigate what Turkish Muslim Roma in Medgidia feel it means to be Muslims, the dynamics of their agencies within their environment, and the emotional elements of their personal narratives. I observe how they perform identity to maintain a certain coherence between their autobiographical selves and the environment in which they live.
Source Translation:
R. Chris Davis
(pp.221–230)
(pp. 231–241)
Irina Marin
Dennis Deletant, In Search of Romania. A Memoir. London: Hurst, 2022. 318 pp.
Ioana Luca
Valentina Glajar. The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller: A “File Story” of Cold War Surveillance. Rochester: Camden House, 2023. 294 pp.
Florin Anghel
Andrei Ursu, Roland O. Thomasson, în colaborare cu Mădălin Hodor. Trăgători și mistificatori. Contrarevoluția Securității în decembrie 1989. Iași: Editura Polirom, 2019. 423 pp.
Dana S. Trif
Noțiuni de drept internațional maritim și fluvial (1915). Ediție îngrijită de Adrian-Bogdan Ceobanu și Constantin Ardeleanu. București: Editura Militară, 2022. 201 pp.
Vol. 5 No. 1 (2023)
Journal of Romanian Studies, 5, No. 1 (2023)
Editors:
Svetlana Suveica, Jill Massino, Iemima Ploscariu
Contents
Svetlana Suveica, Jill Massino
(pp. 1-3)
Articles:
Maria Bucur
The Vanishing Invalid: Visual Representations of Disabled Veterans in Interwar Romania (pp. 5-25)
In Romania after World War I, visual representations of disability became both a necessity and a problem for developing a vocabulary to describe the everyday experience of more than 200,000 disabled veterans who lived in nearly every town and village. By exploring the history and signification of the Last Grenade monument in relation to other visual representations of disabled veterans, the author teases out how disability came to be understood in public discourse, performance, and policy both for those who returned home as visible “invalids,” as well as those who could hide disabilities or those who did not experience them.
Sonia D. Andraș
From Monitorul Oficial to Calea Victoriei: Decoding 1930s Bucharest through Women’s Fashion (pp. 27-54)
This paper explores the contrasts between the draconic taxation policies affecting garment production, dissemination, and intake in 1930s Romania and the concurrent glamour displayed by fashion-consuming women in public spaces in Bucharest. The focus is on the relationship between the Romanian state and the idea of fashionability represented by the flâneuses promenading Calea Victoriei. This paper employs visual and written text analysis to determine the commonalities in messaging and language used in the literature related to women’s fashion in interwar Bucharest. The sources range from fiction and non-fiction interwar books, illustrated and glossy periodicals, photographs, and postcards from the author’s personal collection. This research is built on the interdisciplinary model of fashion studies, borrowing methods from semiotics, cultural, fashion, and Romanian studies. Through the lens of fashion, the aim is to decode the negotiations between state authority agendas and women’s wish for prosperity and modernity.
Liviu Bordaș
On the Ḥadīth Corpus of Mircea Eliade: Preliminary Notes and an Open Gloss
(pp. 55-71)
The article is an introduction to the text of Mac Linscott Ricketts’s research interviews with Mircea Eliade, between 1981 and 1984 (with a supplementary conversation with Christinel Eliade dating from 1986). The editor’s note is preceded by an overview of the corpus of Eliade’s interviews and followed by a gloss on two of the less discussed radical criticisms of Eliade during the years 1985–1994, whose authors are referred to in the text of the interviews. In conclusion, it argues that the possibility of such diametrically opposed constructions of a “hidden” Eliade calls for a contextual examination of all the “reconstructions” which claim either to denounce or to annex him.
Source Translation:
Liviu Bordaș
Mac Linscott Ricketts: Encounters with Mircea Eliade (pp. 73-103)
Ion Luca Caragiale (1852–1912) is best known as the leading Romanian dramatist from the nation-building period at the end of the nineteenth century. Caragiale also wrote satirical sketches on social issues of his day, capturing the appearance of new social types and issues of identity and alterity. The following two sketches, published in the Bucharest newspaper Universul in 1899 and 1909 respectively, not only offer entertaining snapshots of cultural formations but also anticipate more formal analyses of modern Romanian society in the making.
Book Reviews (pp. 105-120)
Gheorghe Gelu Păcurar
Maria Bucur. The Nation’s Gratitude. World War I and Citizenship Rights in Interwar Romania. New York: Routledge 2022. 238 pp.
Constantin Ardeleanu
Alex Drace-Francis. The Making of Mămăligă. Transimperial Recipes for a Romanian National Dish. Budapest: CEU Press 2022. 226 pp.
Alyssa Grossman
Raluca Mateoc and François Rüegg (eds). Recalling Fieldwork: People, Places and Encounters. Zürich: Lit Verlag, 2020.256 pp.
Christene d’Anca
Alexandra Chiriac. Performing Modernism: A Jewish Avant-Garde in Bucharest. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2022. 232 pp.
Book Essay:
Letitia Guran
FEM: Revelation as a Path to a New Kind of Feminism
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2022)
Journal of Romanian Studies, Vol. 4 No. 2 (2022)
Special issue: Rhetorical Strategies and Political Engagement in Post-1989 Public Discourse
Editors:
Peter Gross, Svetlana Suveica, Claudia Lonkin
Guest Editors:
Bogdan Ștefănescu and Noemi Marin
Contents
Guest Editors’ Note
Introduction: Rhetorical Strategies and Political Engagement in Post-1989 Public Discourse in Romania (pp. 151-163)
Articles:
Andreea Deciu Ritivoi
Surviving on Soy Salami: Dissidents, Exiles, Prisoners, and the Rhetoric of Affect in Post-communist Romania (pp. 165-186)
After decades of being seen, or rather heard, through Radio Free Europe as moral and political authorities preserving Romania’s values and hopes from abroad, exiles of the Cold War had a disappointing political career in the postcommunist transitional society. The main figures hailing on behalf of historic pollical parties failed to win the election in 1990, and failed to convince the electorate that they could lead them to freedom and democracy. The former dissidents who had lived overseas likewise did not manage to become opinion leaders, at least not compared to local intellectuals, and eventually damaged each other’s reputation in public fights and scandals. Why weren’t these exiles, once so full of promise for a democratic future in Romania, more impactful? The answer may point to their systematic undermining orchestrated by the neo-communist power brokers of the transitional era. Yet the answer is rather more complicated, one that this paper offers by focusing on the rhetoric of the early postcommunist decade and its emphasis on the shared deprivation experienced under communism. The slogan built around hunger—“who ate soy meat with us”—was part of a larger effect of political survivalism that viewed exiles as outsiders. I show that the contest of moral superiority, pitting those who had been imprisoned against those who had fled, fed a rhetoric of suffering that would eventually marginalize the exiles and any political contribution they could have made after 1989.
Andrei Nae
The Pure Romanian: (Re)writing Romanian National Identity in Dan Puric’s Romanian Soul (pp. 187-200)
This paper investigates Romania’s auto-image as described by Dan Puric in his book Suflet Românesc (Romanian Soul). By employing imagology, this article first shows how Romanian national identity is constructed in opposition to Western culture and modernity. And by drawing on imagology and Hayden White’s approach to historiography, I provide a discursive analysis of the Romanian auto-image provided in the text. I show that Puric’s writing of Romanian national identity is a Romantic one rendered in the anarchist mode. The author alleges that Romanians are born with a “Romanian soul,” which guarantees their adherence to a Christian Orthodox worldview, one to which Western culture and modernity are inimical. The dominant metaphor used to represent Romanianness is the folktale, whose main traits—being set in illo tempore, a focus on a stark moral antithesis between good and evil where the former prevails, and favouring intuition over reason—are allegedly shared by “pure” Romanians. After revealing the pillars of Romanianness in Puric’s view, I trace the intellectual and cultural continuities between his Romanian auto-image and Romania’s far-right views on nation and nationhood, as well as the national communist view on Romanianness. As far as the former is concerned, I highlight the structural similarities between Puric’s nationalism and anti-Semitic discourse. With respect to the latter, I draw attention to Puric’s reliance on two of the several national communist myths identified by Romanian historian Lucian Boia: the myth of continuity and the myth of conspiracy. Puric’s book dovetails with national communist discourse by postulating the alleged continuity between the peoples and cultures that have existed in Romania’s current geographic location across the centuries and retains its communist fears of foreign conspiracy.
Gheorghe Andrei
Rhetoric and the politician’s political style are some of his/her most important tools and the technological and media revolution, mobile devices and social networks, have further emphasized their importance. The social networks help politicians to target a very circumscribed audience with their rhetoric, while mobile devices enable them to retain contact with their supporters and to exhibit their political style, in this instance populism. The article examines the speeches of the leader of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians Party (AUR), a new national-populist Romanian party, through the perspective of Chaim Perelman’s New Rhetoric and the populist style. The theory developed around the concept of fake news was also used in the development of the argument. According to this theory, the latest developments in the communication industry boosted the fake-news phenomenon, which, in turn, helped the populist leaders. The article is divided into four parts, each part addressing the theory around the new rhetoric; the theory of political style, i.e. populism; the qualitative case study; and the conclusions.
Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield
The Rhetoric of Inner Freedom: Possibilities and Impossibilities for Dissent in Post-1989 Romania (pp. 215- 227)
The well-known “resistance through culture” practiced by the philosophers of the so-called Păltiniş school in the last decade of communism sought to educate a group of men (and they were all men) in the cultural values necessary for the “regeneration” of Romanian society. The remembrance of these values was premised on the notion of “inner freedom,” an undertheorized yet familiar appeal of dissidents under conditions of repression, as it is even today. But politically, the ontology of “inner freedom” is questionable. It presupposes a metaphysics of the autonomous subject which is problematic for dissent, in that it contends that freedom of thought is possible without freedom of expression, an argument which favours quietism and may perhaps induce self-censorship or even complicity. Indeed, Herta Müller charges Gabriel Liiceanu, a leading member of the Păltiniş school, with not speaking out in order to maintain an advantageous position within the system of repression. Jean-Paul Sartre goes further in his critique of “inner freedom”: he calls it a “hoax.” George Orwell calls it a “fallacy.” For Hannah Arendt, it is derivative. I am in broad agreement with these positions. Furthermore, I argue that a conception of culture premised on the values of inner freedom and “‘not speaking out” is a conception of culture in which corruption is harbored within the concept. “Not speaking out” is conducive to and constitutive of corruption, so rife in Romania and other ex-communist societies after 1989, and hence part of the problem rather than of the solution, in ways which I demonstrate. However, I wish to put forward another conception of inner freedom, a non-metaphysical one, a positive conception for dissent today. Namely inner freedom as a rhetorical construct. Not an immaterial space which is presupposed in order to found dissent, but one which is materially formed by dissent. Arguing for inner freedom to be seen as a rhetorical response rather than a metaphysical presupposition involves showing that inner freedom is dependent on language.
Source Translation:
Alex Drace-Francis
Ion Luca Caragiale, ‘Identity‘. First published as ‘Identitate’ (Universul, Bucharest, 27 April 1909). (pp. 229-236)
Ion Luca Caragiale (1852–1912) is best known as the leading Romanian dramatist from the nation-building period at the end of the nineteenth century. Caragiale also wrote satirical sketches on social issues of his day, capturing the appearance of new social types and issues of identity and alterity. The following two sketches, published in the Bucharest newspaper Universul in 1899 and 1909 respectively, not only offer entertaining snapshots of cultural formations but also anticipate more formal analyses of modern Romanian society in the making.
Book Reviews (pp. 237-249)
Mădălina Diaconu. Ideengeschichte Rumäniens. Paderborn: Brill/Ferdinand Schöningh, 2021. 346 pp.
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2022)
Journal of Romanian Studies, 4, No. 1 (2022)
Editors: Peter Gross, Svetlana Suveica, Claudia Lonkin
Contents
Editors’ Note (pp. 1-2)
Essay:
Lucian Boia
Briefly, About History (as I see it) (pp. 3-6)
Articles:
Victor Taki
Russophilia and Madness in Nineteenth-Century Romania: The Case of Michel Anagnosti (pp. 7-36)
This article examines the political writings of Michel Anagnosti, a French-educated Wallachian intellectual and publicist who came of age during the period of Russian hegemony in the Romanian principalities in the 1830s. Although Anagnosti was at first critical of Russian policies, the subsequent evolution of his political views placed him increasingly at odds with the “Fortyeighters”—the participants of the 1848 revolution in Wallachia that was suppressed by the Ottomans on Russia’s insistence. Whereas modern Romanian nationalism crystallized during the 1840s and the 1850s under distinctly anti-Russian slogans, Anagnosti evolved in the opposite direction and became an exponent of pro-Russian attitudes in the Romanian press of the 1860s and 1870s. Anagnosti’s unorthodox perspectives contrasted with the ideology of the “Fortyeighters” to the point of earning him the reputation of a madman and explaining his posthumous oblivion. An examination of Anagnosti’s oeuvre not only sheds light on a neglected figure of the Romanian intellectual life of the nineteenth century, but also provides an insight into the process of constructing the political mainstream in an emergent nation-state by associating critical and unorthodox perspectives with unreason.
Cosmin Koszor-Codrea
This study explores a neglected episode in the history of Romanian encounters with racial classification theories before and during the mid-nineteenth century. The study begins with a brief historiographic discussion and illustrates the recent debates concerning definitions of the origins of scientific racism, as portrayed by Stephen Jay Gould and Nicolaas Rupke. Accordingly, this paper identifies three suggestive case studies (Iacob Czihac, Iuliu Barasch, and Dimitrie Ananescu) that might shed some light on the intellectual roots of racial classifications in Romania. Placing this investigation amongst emerging studies of the popularization of science, this paper argues that naturalists and physicians alike, trained and influenced by the German tradition of Naturphilosophie, expressed their authority in reproducing and diffusing racial classifications and gendered concepts of reproduction.
Valeria Chelaru
This article tackles the “thorny issue” of Bessarabia’s integration into Greater Romania. A former gubernia inside the Russian Empire for approximately one century, the population of this region, located between the Rivers Prut and Dniester, displayed reluctance to unite with Romania. The paper analyzes the sociopolitical environment that led to the union with the Kingdom of Romania in 1918; it then reassesses the policies of homogenization carried out by the Romanian state during its aggressive nationalization campaign and Bessarabia’s reaction to them. Bessarabia’s reunion with its historical sister provinces in 1918, as well as the entire period throughout which the region was part of Romania, is still a highly politicized subject. This article stresses the response of people of different identities to the reconfiguration of the center-periphery relationship, and to Romania’s mission to consolidate a “nationalizing state.” It therefore emphasizes the asymmetry between the aspirations of the center and those of the Bessarabian populations.
Dorina Roșca
In Search of a Lost Market: The Features of Moldovan Capitalism Today (pp. 83-103)
The nature of post-Soviet Moldovan capitalism has hardly been discussed since the uncritical adoption of neoclassical economic theory by both local scholars and non-academic experts from NGOs. Most analyses are framed by theories that appear to be forcibly grafted onto empirical facts, reflecting other logics of functioning that characterize Moldovan capitalism. This article argues for viewing the Moldovan economy through, following Polanyi, the “logic of reciprocity”. In Polanyian terms, the form of economic integration based on reciprocity refers to an institutional structure—norms, practices, rules, etc.—that facilitates reciprocal informal economic and social exchanges. I argue that reciprocity characterizes, and can be observed through, monetary and in-kind transfers from Moldovan emigrants abroad. Many everyday, informal Moldovan socioeconomic exchanges and consumption practices operate based on local moral and social rules. Moreover, the logic of reciprocity coexists and interacts with Moldova’s oligarchic political economy, thus defining the dynamics of Moldovan capitalism.
Angela Lumezeanu, Judit Pál, and Vlad Popovici
Historical Data Grinder 2.0 (pp. 105-121)
Historical Data Grinder (HDG) is an EAV database model designed to store and aggregate historical information regardless of geographic space, chronological period, or topic of interest. The source code of the database is available open source at: https://github.com/angelalumezeanu/hdg_structure. This paper details the specificities of HDG within the framework of other digital tools focused on the history of Romania, describes the updates brought by version 2.0, and highlights its advantages compared to traditional relational databases. To exemplify the latter, it presents the procedure for ingesting a major data set: members of the Hungarian parliament elected in the Transylvanian constituencies between 1865–1918. The data set is available for the general public, along with other information from HDG, at www.hdgrinder.ro.
Source Translation:
Roland Clark
Excerpts from Gala Galaction, Journal, vols. 5–6 (Bucharest: Editura Albatros, 1996)
Grigorie Pișculescu (1879–1961), better known by his literary pseudonym Gala Galaction, was one of the most prominent Romanian writers and church figures in the twentieth century. In his short stories, novels, and newspaper articles, Galaction developed an idiosyncratic style that integrated Eastern Orthodox themes and imagery into the lives of his characters, most of whom were peasants or working class. Unlike most religious writers in early-twentieth-century Romania, who were committed ultranationalists, even fascists, Galaction was a socialist who believed that defending the rights of the poor constituted a central Christian duty. As a result, he became valuable to the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) after the Second World War. Written over a 57-year period, his journal provides unique insights into major changes in Romanian religion, politics, and society that took place during the twentieth century. In these excerpts he writes about being courted—and manipulated—by the PCR because of his celebrity status.
Vol. 3, No. 2 (2021)
Journal of Romanian Studies, 3, no. 2 (2021)
Special issue: Media and Communication
Guest editors: Raluca Radu and Ioana A. Coman
Editors: Peter Gross, Svetlana Suveica, Iuliu Raţiu
Notes from the Editors (pp. 11-13)
Essay
Digital Revolution and De-Institutionalization in Central and Eastern Europe (pp. 15-20)
Paolo Mancini
Articles
Post-Communist Media Freedom and a New Monopoly on Truth (pp. 21-38)
Andrei Richter
The author suggests a set of legal instruments to enable freedom of the media in East, Central and South-East Europe. The failure to introduce and fully implement these instruments has led to the governments’ increased grip on the media and information flows. Additional possibilities to limit freedom of information have been provided by the current global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The article argues that the media capture in parts of the region leads to an establishment of a state monopoly on information and eventually to a monopoly on truth.
Public Opinion, Mass Media, and Foreign Policy of the Republic of Moldova: Between the Two Realms (pp. 39-62)
Alla Rosca
This paper examines public opinion among Moldovans regarding their country’s foreign policy and the role the mass media play in its formation. A logistic regression analysis indicates that trust in the Russian media that are present in Moldova strongly correlates with foreign policy opinion and trust in foreign leaders. Media consumption did not correlate significantly with any foreign policy decisions. In addition, the findings show a strong correlation between political preference and foreign policy opinion. The overall results support the Almond-Lippmann consensus that public opinion is volatile and does not have structure or coherence.#
Striving and Surviving: Romanian Journalism on the Quest for Funding Models (pp. 63-80)
Marius Dragomir, Manuela Preoteasa, Dumitrița Holdiș, Cristina Lupu
During the past decade, Romania’s media market has been experiencing massive shifts, particularly when it comes to its funding models. As elsewhere, these changes were triggered to a large degree by technological advances. The financial health of Romania’s media was also affected by local factors, including business practices, changes in government spending and media consumption patterns. This article describes the key trends in journalism funding in Romania in recent years and takes stock of the impact that the Covid-19 crisis is having on the industry’s financial health to understand the salient fi-nancial threats and opportunities that the country’s independent journalism is likely to face in the near future.
Romanian-language Conspiracy Narratives: Safeguarding the Nation and the People (pp. 81-109)
Onoriu Colăcel
The article investigates Romanian-language conspiracy narratives as tell-tale signs of foreign media influences and culture-bound knowledge claims. News and opinion samples are considered in order to analyze conspiracy theorizing in the commercial media of Romania and the Republic of Moldova. Conspiratorial discourses are traced to tropes and trends in the Romanian literary culture. They permeate conspiracy thinking across public discourses about the nation. The findings suggest that anxieties over the wellbeing of the country and its people are underlying local conspiracism. Ultimately, they tie in with concerns central to Romanian-language cultures.
Measuring Pseudoscience in Online Media: A Case Study on Romanian Websites (pp. 111-128)
Radu Silaghi-Dumitrescu
Abstract: To limit the negative effects of pseudoscience in public discourse, it may be useful to classify/quantify the occurrence of pseudoscientific topics – so that sources of such discourse may be effi-ciently identified and addressed. Here, the occurrence of 15 topics representative of pseudoscientific subjects is analyzed in a set of online mass-media pages in Romanian language. Correlations are found between some topics, yielding two main sets, centered on threats either to life/health or to identity/existence. The latter set appears innate to Romanian-language media, whereas the former do not. None of the 15 pseudoscience terms, nor their average or their total occurrence, correlate with the number of views of the respective websites – thus suggesting that pseudoscience alone is not a predictor of commercial success in Romanian-language online media.
Media Sources and Dissidents in the Romanian Revolution of 1989 (pp. 129-143)
Lucian-Vasile Szabo
This study highlights the way in which the media, particularly foreign outlets, contributed to Romania’s regime change in December 1989. Both news and the opinion articles and broadcasts appearing in the foreign Romanian language media are analysed, with a focus on broad- casts made from countries contiguous to Romania, as some of them could be received by its citizens. The study also examines the protest movement that began in Timisoara, correlated to the stances taken by a number of Romanian dissidents in and outside the country against Nicolae Ceauşes- cu’s dictatorial regime and in support of fundamental rights and liberties. Despite the terror, the hunger and widespread shortages, and in spite of the regime’s extremely harsh repressive measures, there were always indi- viduals who raised their voices against abuses. Their messages were picked up and amplified by the media outside the country. This was a difficult process, sometimes marked by errors and confusion. Nevertheless, the for- eign media, accessed clandestinely, by played an important role in chang- ing the course of history in December 1989.
Romanian Journalists’ Perception of Freedom of the Press and the Role Played by the Media in Countering Fake News (pp. 145-164)
Antonio Momoc
Abstract: This study is a preliminary investigation into the Romanian journalists’ perception of the role that newspeople play in identifying and fighting fake news. Prominent Romanian journalists were asked about the challenges of media digitalization, editorial independence during the economic crisis, how newsrooms relate to the fake news phenomenon, why they believe that some news websites are misinfor-mational, their own trust in the media, and journalists’ responsibility regarding media education, fact-checking, and countering fake news.
REVIEWS
Socialism under Scrutiny: Juggling Time, Planned Economy, and Heritage (review by Dana Domșodi) (pp. 165-168):
- Alina Cucu. Planning labour. Time and the foundations of industrial socialism in Romania. New York: Berghahn Books 2019. 246 pp.
- Emanuela Grama. Socialist Heritage: the Politics of Past and Place in Bucharest. Bloominton: Indiana University Press 2019. 247 pp.
James Kapaló and Tatiana Vagramenko eds. Hidden Galleries: Material Religion in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe. Zurich, LIT Verlag, 2020, 104 pp. (review by Roland Clark) (pp. 169-170)
Călin Cotoi. Inventing the Social in Romania, 1848–1914: Networks and Laboratories of Knowledge. Leiden: Brill, 2020. 278 pp. (review by R. Chris Davis) (pp. 171-173)
Ágoston Berecz. Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries. The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. 350 pp. (review by Anca Șincan) (pp. 175-176)
MAC LINSCOTT RICKETTS AT 90
Unexpected Encounters and Turnin Points (pp. 177-180)
Mihaela Gligor
Tribute for Mac Linscott Ricketts at 90 (pp. 181-183)
Doulas Allen
Encounters with Mac Linscott Ricketts and Mircea Eliade (pp. 183-191)
Liviu Bordaș
A Destiny on a Barricade (pp. 191-192)
Sebastian Doreanu
Mac Linscott Ricketts’ Translation of Eliade from Romanian into English (pp. 193-208)
Bryan Rennie
Vol. 3, No. 1 (2021)
Journal of Romanian Studies, 3, no. 1 (2021)
Editors: Peter Gross, Svetlana Suveica, Iuliu Raţiu
Dennis Deletant
Keith Hitchins (1931-2020) (pp. 9-10)
Articles
Roland Clark
The Shape of Interwar Romanian History (pp. 11-42)
This article reviews some of the major frameworks that histori- ans use to tell the stories of interwar Romania, asking why they became pop- ular and how useful they are in the twenty-first century. It examines the problems of periodization and the placement of the nation-state at the cen- ter of Romanian history, then traces the evolution of four major framing narratives: (1) the problems of a small state; (2) the collapse of democracy; (3) the march of progress; and (4) the consequences of state-building and centralization. Such approaches give the impression that interwar Romania was an intolerant, chauvinistic society that marginalized anyone who was not male, Orthodox, and ethnically Romanian. The best new histories, how- ever, not only uncover alternative, suppressed narratives but also reveal how people were able to live and sometimes thrive in a society as diverse as interwar Romania undeniably was.
Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu
The Romanian Orthodox Church and its Financial Dealings in Post-Communism (pp. 43-64)
This article introduces the main sources of revenue and wealth of the dominant Romanian Orthodox Church as subventions from the state, the restitution of assets confiscated by the communist authorities, donations collected from various groups and individuals, money obtained for services and religious artifacts offered to believers, and other revenue-generating activities. It then discusses two instances in which the Orthodox Church has come under attack for the way it collects and uses money, the contributions it receives from the reserve fund of the government and the church’s efforts to finance the building in downtown Bucharest of a monumental national cathedral. Finally, the article tests the degree of secularization in Romania, based on the observations of José Casanova and Vyacheslav Karpov, to measure if and how much the country has secularized, especially in light of the economic and financial aspects of church activity presented here.
Valeska Bopp-Filimonov
Shaping, Questioning, Contradicting “Bad Communism:” Aspects of Generational Memory in Romania after 1989 (pp. 65-84)
Families in Romania, I was told when presenting my research topic in front of Romanian audiences in 2005, would not openly discuss the socialist past, neither within the family nor with a foreign researcher. My research—based on interviews with Romanian families—confirmed that different age groups remembered communism not only differently (which is to be expected due to variation in cohort and life experience), but also sep- arately, and rarely shared their memories. Instead, what all interview ac- counts had in common was the extensive examination of the overall nega- tive public discourse on “bad communism.” This paper presents the respond- ents’ particular strategies of examination, expanding our understanding of how the historical consciousness of a society in transition can be analyzed and understood. Of particular interest is how respondents reflected upon the socialist past, which came to an end in 1989.
Amelia Miholca
Re-envisioning Cubism in Romanian Avant-Garde Magazines (pp. 85-112)
Art historians and literary scholars have written little about the relationship between Cubism and the Romanian avant-garde. This paper seeks to remedy this oversight by analyzing images of cubist paintings and theoretical texts about Cubism, published by the Romanian avant-garde mag- azines Contimporanul and Integral, the platforms for the Romanian avant- garde and the magazines containing the most cubist art in the early to mid- 1920s. The considerable amount of cubist artworks, via photographic repro- ductions, in Contimporanul and Integral point to a serious engagement with Cubism on behalf of Romanian avant-garde artists. Specifically, artists and magazine editors Marcel Iancu of Contimporanul and M.H. Maxy of Integral exalted Cubism’s prominence in the formal development of avant-garde art while producing cubist still lifes and portraits, akin to the cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Their unusual turn to Cubism at the stage of the movement when critics and artists began to see Cubism as out-of-date signifies not only the stylistic hybridity of the Romanian avant-gardists but also their willingness to traverse the space between avant-garde and modern art as they sought to conceptualize their integralist art.
Radu Pârvulescu
The Romanian Judicial Professions Database: An Open-Source Tool for Researching the Romanian Legal System (pp. 113-120)
Justice is a perennial topic in scholarship on Romania, from so- cialist legality, through transitional justice, and to anti-corruption studies. Systematic study of law and justice has been stymied, however, by lack of basic information: who was doing what, where, when, and how? To begin to address this shortcoming, this brief article introduces the Romanian Judicial Professions Database, a new, open-source tool which provides yearly, indi- vidual data on 10,000 judges, 6000 lawyers, 5500 prosecutors, 3000 nota- ries public (notari publici), and 1000 bailiffs (executori judecătoreşti), in some cases going back to the 1970s. The database can be downloaded at https://osf.io/gfjke/ and supporting software is available at https:// github.com/r-parvulescu/ro_judicial_professions.
Book Reviews
Constantin Iordachi. Liberalism, Constitutional Nationalism, and Minorities: The Making of Romanian Citizenship, c. 1750–1918. Leiden: Brill, 2019. 682 pp. (review by Mara Mărginean) (pp. 121-124).
Sabrina P. Ramet. Interwar East Central Europe, 1918–1941: The Failure of Democracy-building, the Fate of Minorities. New York: Routledge, 2020. 331 pp. (review by Francesco Magno) (pp. 125-126).
Dorina Roșca. Le grand tournant de la société moldave. “Intellectuels” et capital social dans la transformation post-socialiste. Paris: Presses de l’Inalco, 2019, 359 pp. (review by Petru Negură) (pp. 127-130).
Vol. 2, No. 1 (2020)
Journal of Romanian Studies, 2, no. 1 (2020)
Editors: Peter Gross, Diane Vancea, Iuliu Raţiu
Articles
Alexandra Chiriac
Ephemeral Modernisms, Transnational Lives: Reconstructing Avant-Garde Performance in Bucharest (pp. 9-34)
During the mid-1920s Bucharest became home to the Vilna Troupe, an ensemble formed in Vilnius in 1915 and famed for its ground-breaking Yiddish-language productions that toured all over the world. Its collaborations with the Romanian artist M. H. Maxy are the subject of this essay, which demonstrates the experimental nature of several productions that took place in Bucharest during this period. New research material from sources on both sides of the Atlantic makes it possible to reconstruct the outputs of this richly innovative partnership to a much greater extent than before, demonstrating that the vitality of avant-garde theatre in Bucharest has been heretofore underestimated by scholars, its existence obscured by the ephemerality of the performative and by its unwieldy transnational trajectory. An earlier version of this essay won the Graduate Student Essay Prize offered in 2018 by the Society for Romanian Studies.
Petru Negură
Compulsory Primary Education and State Building in Rural Bessarabia (1918-1940) (pp. 35-58)
This article examines the way in which public primary education was established in rural Bessarabia during 1918-1940. The imposition of mass compulsory education resulted from an unequal relationship of power between the state education authorities and the village population, which at times conflicted and at other times negotiated with each other. This process was crucial for the expansion of the state in rural areas and the development of citizenship among the civilian population of what was at the time a new Romanian province. Yet, primary schooling did not succeed entirely, due to the resistance of the rural population, the indetermination of state agents, and the lack of institutional infrastructure.
Vladimir Solonari
Record Weak: Romanian Judiciary in Occupied Transnistria (pp. 59-82)
This article explores the role of the Romanian judiciary in occupied Transnistria in 1940-1944. Based on a wide array of sources from American, Israeli, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Moldovan archives, the article focuses on the role of the judiciary in the fight against official corruption and administrative abuse, enforcement of legal norms in the fight against pro-Soviet guerrilla groups, and curtailment of violence against Jews. In these areas the Romanian judiciary had a weak record. Not only did they fail to fight official corruption and administrative abuse effectively, but Romanian prosecutors and courts were notoriously corrupt themselves. While military magistrates on duty in Transnistria refrained from imposing harsh sentences on suspected partisans, they looked another way when gendarmes murdered partisans under the pretense of attempted escape. Romanian prosecutors sometimes investigated the illegal appropriation of Jewish possessions by the guards, they never concerned themselves with their mass murder.
Delia Popescu
A Political Palimpsest: Nationalism and Faith in Petre Țuțea’s Thinking (pp. 83-108)
This article examines the political thinking of Petre Țuțea, a noteworthy public figure in post-1989 Romania. I develop Țuțea’s views as a significant instance of a reconstructive nationalist imaginary “for all seasons”: a radical religious ethno-nationalism that both transcends its pre-communist roots and conceals its continuity during communism in order to be recast as a suitable post-communist alternative. Țuțea samples radicalism on both sides of the political spectrum and ultimately embraces the mystical, elitist, nationalist ideology that distills the protochronic nuance of much of Romanian political life.
Cynthia M. Horne
What Is too Long and When Is too Late for Transitional Justice? Observations from the Case of Romania (pp. 109-138)
Nearly 30 years after the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime, what is too long and when is too late to use public disclosures about secret police complicity in the past to influence the composition of public office holders in the present? This article examines Romania’s public disclosure measures from 2010 to the present, drawing on the reports of the secret police file repository agency—the C.N.S.A.S.—in order to better understand the temporal parameters surrounding their continued use. First, the article shows that despite contentions that there are no more spies left to unmask, Romania’s vetting process continues to disclose the collaborator backgrounds of current political candidates, at both the national and local levels, and individuals being considered for appointments in high-ranking political and social institutions. Second, contrary to expectations that citizens might be too fatigued with the public disclosure process to consider them politically salient, citizen engagement with their personal files remains robust. Together, these findings suggest that preconceived temporal parameters for this type of transitional justice measure might have underestimated the duration of its utility and political relevance.
Brindusa Armanca and Peter Gross
Searching for a Future: Mass Media and the Uncertain Construction of Democracy in Romania (pp. 139-162)
To date, Romania’s democracy and the news media’s professionalization have not met indigenous and foreign expectations, as both have failed to assume their social responsibility. The persistent crisis in ethics, enveloped in the illiberal culture and political culture, is victimizing democratization and the media’s independence and professionalization and, thus, their ability to serve the still ongoing democratic transformation. This article chronicles the crisis, its causes and outcomes. Finally, it concludes that the country’s emerging civil society, coupled with the small groups of independent, professionalizing media and journalists are the key to the country’s liberal democratic future.
Book Reviews
Ionuț Butoi, Mircea Vulcănescu. O microistorie a interbelicului românesc.
(Review by Emanuel Copilaş)
Henry P. Rammelt, Activistes protestataires en Hongrie et en Roumanie.
(Review by Dana S. Trif)
Vol. 2, No. 2 (2020)
Journal of Romanian Studies, 2, no. 2 (2020)
Special issue: Law, History and Justice in Romania. New Directions in Law and Society Research
Guest Editors: Mihaela Șerban and Monica Ciobanu
Editors: Peter Gross, Diane Vancea, Iuliu Raţiu
Articles
Mihaela Șerban and Monica Ciobanu
Law, History and Justice in Romania. New Directions in Law and Society Research (pp. 9-23)
This special issue of the Journal of Romanian Studies examines law as a social institution and the ways in which it intersects with the larger social, historical, political and economic world. While the articles included here mostly explore the intersections between law, history, and justice, they consciously reject positivist and doctrinal analyses of law and an understanding of law as primarily a (repressive) instrument of the state. Instead, we focus on “living law” and the complex interactions between law and social issues, including how law is created, interpreted and implemented, and how individuals and organizations live, shape and evade it in everyday interactions within and outside of the state. We also want to situate this flourishing area of research not only within broader fields, such as transitional justice and legal history, but also in the expansive law and society tradition that has been open to interdisciplinary legal research worldwide, but is perhaps less well known in Romania.
Cosmin Cercel
Reversing Liberal Legality: Romania’s Path to Dictatorship, 1930-1938 (pp. 23-52)
Romania’s anti-liberal turn at the end of the interwar period is a useful case study for analysing the dissolution of the liberal nomos fostered by the Versailles arrangements against the background of the authoritarian takeover in Europe. In this article, I explore the legal and constitutional mechanisms at the core of the instauration of King’s Carol II dictatorship. I propose to do so by mapping the reconstruction of the concepts of legality and authority within the political and legal processes seeking to contest, challenge and ultimately reverse the liberal features of the constitutional armature of the Romanian state. Drawing on jurisprudence, political theory, and constitutional history, I seek to unearth the ideological underpinnings of this regime of power and to reflect on the nexus between law and anti-liberal projects of state-building at the end of the interwar period.
Ştefan Cristian Ionescu
Perceptions of Legality during the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944 (pp. 53-80)
This article examines how legality was perceived by the highest officials of Romania’s pro-Nazi Ion Antonescu regime and by a group of intellectuals (mostly jurists) closely connected with the judiciary. For Antonescu, legality meant a new type of authoritarian understanding of the role of the law in a state and its subordination to the will of the ruler; for him, legality mainly had an instrumental role. He understood his power to be discretionary and, usually, not bound by the extant law, even though he sometimes referred to the idea of constitutional order (a convenient source of legitimacy). Intellectuals, including jurists, harbored a diversity of opinions regarding legality. Some jurists supported the regime’s authoritarian legalism, or at least accepted it, while others, especially those with a more democratic mindset or belonging to minorities, perceived legality differently than Antonescu, and favored a liberal democratic version of legality involving the rule of law.
Mihaela Şerban
Litigating Identity in Fascist and Post-Fascist Romania (1940-1945) (pp. 81-108)
This paper examines legal mobilization and resistance to efforts through law to delineate ethnic identities during World War Two in Romania. Anti-Semitic legislation adopted under the fascist regime attempted to create and classify Jewish identity, while the end of war legislation formally reversed all discriminatory statutes and decrees and more broadly banned all inquiries into the ethnicity of Romanian citizens. Under both legal regimes, one’s identity, whether de jure or de facto, was decisive for repressive state policies that targeted Romanian citizens based on their ethnic identity. The concept and content of ethnic identity, however, were far from a clear matter. I explore in this paper how the local administrative court in the city of Timişoara (both first instance and appeal) constructed ethnic identity based on the wartime racial legislation, and how the court continued to apply this judge-made identity to the newly disfavored groups, primarily Germans, at the end of the war.
Monica Ciobanu
Writing History Through Trials: The Case of the National Peasant Party (pp. 109-134)
This article provides a comparative account of two criminal trials that addressed the role played by the National Peasant Party (PNŢ) in national history. The focus is on the ability of legal trials to construct historical narratives. The first was conducted in 1947 by the newly-established communist regime and resulted in the legal ban of the party. In 2015, the narrative was entirely reversed in court. The PNŢ was presented as a fully democratic actor. Alexandru Vişinescu – a former commandant of the Râmnicu-Sărat prison where prominent party leaders were subjected to repression – was sentenced for crimes against humanity. The sharp differences between these two legal proceedings – a Soviet-style show trial versus legal action that was oriented to providing some redress for the victims of communism – is emphasized. But the conclusion is that criminal trials in general fall short in providing historical lessons and that retrospective justice does not necessarily produce reconciliation or accountability.
Emanuela Grama
Restitution Reversal or “Re-nationalization”? An Analysis of Law, Property, and History Through the Case of the “Szekely Mikó” High School in Transylvania (pp. 135-164)
In 2002, the Reformed Church in Transylvania requested the retrocession of the Reformed Szekely Miko high school in Sf. Gheorghe/ Sepsiszentgyörgy, Covasna’s capital city. The state restitution commission at that time approved the return. In 2012, a court invalidated the initial restitution decision, accused the members of the former commission of fraud, and requested that the Church return the building to the city authorities. A close reading of the legal arguments that each party employed to justify or reject the restitution reveals competing temporalities of law and visions of history. This paper analyzes the long and tense debates around this case of property restitution – reversal, to further explore several interconnected phenomena: broader ideologies about the relationship of historical, ethnic, and property rights in contemporary Transylvania; the political mobilization of Romania’s ethnic Hungarians around property restitution; the ways in which negotiations around property propelled more conservative elites to the leadership of Transylvanian Hungarians and enabled them to strengthen their ties with their kin-state, Hungary.
Simona Livescu
Institutional Memories and Transgenerational Dynamics: The House of Terror and the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance (pp. 165-194)
This article provides an insight into the twenty-first century politics of institutionalized memory in two former communist countries, Romania and Hungary, as illustrated by their respective human rights memorial museums’ practices of documenting communist era abuse. After discussing the ways in which the two museums under consideration here inscribe themselves into the red and dark tourism phenomena, the article focuses on acts of over-remembering and misremembering that affect the politics of museal representation, highlighting the emotional communities created by these museums as well as the incomplete representation of the victim-victimizer rapport. In doing so, the article argues that institutionalized museal interventions into recent collective national and regional memories are representative of the still undecided legacy of communism in East and Central Europe.
Dragoş Petrescu
Law in Action in Romania, 2008–2018: Context, Agency, and Innovation in the Process of Transitional Justice (pp. 195-218)
This article tackles a hitherto-unnoticed innovative mechanism of transitional justice. Creatively interpreting the legislation, CNSAS, the institution dealing with the former secret police files, gradually transformed itself from a vetting agency into a fact-finding commission. While the law restricted the meaning of collaboration, CNSAS produced an open-access electronic database including digest versions of the screening process and providing quick access to excerpts from secret police documents. This repository demonstrates the multifaceted nature of collaboration, the wide variety of information gathered and the complicity of individuals originating from all social, cultural, and professional backgrounds. The e-database created by CNSAS offers not a simple list of wrongdoers, but evidence of wrongdoings according to rule-of-law principles. In brief, this registry of shaming represents a para-legal mechanism of transitional justice, which allows moral judgement, promotes transparency, and legitimizes the mission of CNSAS in fostering democracy by widely illustrating what democracy is not.
Book Reviews
Marian Voicu, Matrioşka Mincinoşilor: Fake News, Manipulare, Populism.
(Review by Peter Gross)
Matei Călinescu and Ion Vianu, Scrisori din exil: corespondenţă inedită.
(Review by Iuliu Raţiu)
Vol. 1, No. 2 (2019)
Journal of Romanian Studies, 1, no. 2 (2019)
Special issue: Romania and the Paris Peace Conference (1919). Actors, Scenarios, Circulation of Knowledge
Guest editor: Svetlana Suveica
Editors: Lavinia Stan, Margaret Beissinger, Radu Cinpoeş
Articles
Svetlana Suveica
Introduction: Romania and the Paris Peace Conference (1919). Actors, Scenarios, Circulation of Knowledge (pp. 9-26)
Lucian Leuștean
Romania, the Paris Peace Conference and the Protection System of “Race, Language and Religion” Minorities—A Reassessment (pp- 27-46)
In 1919, Ion I. C. Brătianu, the Romanian Prime Minister and head of his country’s delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, vehemently op‐ posed the establishment of a system of minority protection and preferred to resign rather than agreeing to sign the treaty by which the Romanian state accepted such obligations. Romania was finally a founding member of the League of Nations and a participant from the very beginning in the protec‐ tion system of the minorities “of race, language and religion” endorsed by the organization. In spite of the genuine enthusiasm that the leaders in Bu‐ charest showed to the general targets of the League, the issue of minorities’ protection remained a delicate subject. Romanian and foreign historians dealt extensively with this topic, but a fresh view based on new archival findings and a balanced approach is necessary.
Gavin Bowd
Between France and Romania, between Science and Propaganda. Emmanuel de Martonne in 1919 (pp. 47-64)
In the aftermath of the Great War, the geographer Emmanuel de Martonne, who began his scientific work in Romania and was a vocal advocate of that country’s intervention in the conflict, placed his knowledge and prestige at the service of redrawing the frontiers of what would become Greater Romania. This article looks at the role of de Mar‐ tonne as traceur de frontières during the Paris Peace Conference, notably his manipulation of ethnic cartography. At the same time, as this partisan use of “science” shows, de Martonne is also a propagandist for the Roma‐ nian cause and post‐war French influence. Thus, his confidential reports on the “lost provinces” of Transylvania, Banat, Bessarabia and Dobrogea must be seen in parallel with his published interventions and the place he occupies in a wider Franco‐Romanian lobbying network. During the sum‐ mer of 1919, de Martonne’s participation in a French mission universi- taire to Romania plays a diplomatic role at a delicate stage of the Paris negotiations. The fate of his scientific interventions is also subject to the vicissitudes of the war’s aftermath and to the weight of lobbies hostile to Romanian territorial claims, notably on Hungary and Russia, two coun‐ tries plunged into civil war.
Doina Anca Cretu
Humanitarian Aid in the “Bulwark Against Bolshevism”: The American Relief Administration and the Quest for Sovereignty in Post‐World War I Romania (pp. 65-88)
Abstract: This article examines the diffusion of humanitarian assistance via the American Relief Administration (ARA) in Romania immediately after World War I. This exploration is articulated around two “arenas” of the as‐ sistance process. First, it follows the initial behind‐the scenes negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference and subsequent diplomatic tensions around the conditions of aid. Second, it addresses the practices and meaning of ARA’s assistance beyond Paris, on the Romanian ground. This analysis shows that post‐war destruction, social vulnerability and fear of anarchy and Bolshevism enabled the Romanian leadership to seek and access ARA’s humanitarian aid. Romanian state officials of the time contested ARA’s con‐ ditional humanitarianism, seeing it as a challenge to economic and political autonomy. Ultimately, the quest for sovereignty defined by the Greater Ro‐ mania project informed the state leaders’ reception of American humani‐ tarian agendas and efforts after World War I.
Svetlana Suveica
Against the “Imposition of the Foreign Yoke”: The Bessarabians Write to Wilson (1919) (pp. 89-112)
This article discusses the little‐known effort of the “Bessarabian delegation” in Paris against the recognition of the 1918 union of the region with Romania. During the Paris Peace Conference, representatives of the former Bessarabian elite worked along with Russian political émigrés and diplomats to gain Allied support for the anti‐Bolshevik campaign and the recognition of Russia’s interest in her former Western gubernias, including Bessarabia. While planning Bessarabia’s return to Russia, the Bessarabians claimed that allowing the inhabitants to express their will through a plebi‐ scite was the only “just” solution for the territory contested by Russia and Romania. The three appeals, addressed in 1919 to the American President, offer “evidence” of the Romanian regime’s abuses in the region, the failure of the American Relief Association in Romania to reach Bessarabia, and the unfair and abusive character of the food distribution in the poorest Roma‐ nian region. While appealing to issues of high sensitivity for the Americans, the “Bessarabian delegates” hoped to persuade the American delegates to reject a decision over Bessarabia that legitimized Romania’s rights over the territory, and back Russia’s interest in the region instead.
Gábor Egry
Made in Paris? Contested Regions and Political Regionalism during and after Peacemaking: Székelyföld and Banat in a Comparative Perspective (pp. 113-134)
After World War I, when boundaries were redrawn in Europe, two territories were contested. Székelyföld, the eastern‐most part of the de‐ funct dualist Hungary, was predominantly inhabited by Hungarians. Banat, which was to become a borderland of Greater Romania, was home to four significant ethnic groups (Serbian, Romanian, German and Hungarian) and a thriving Jewish community. These historically distinct regions were united with Hungary after the Settlement (Ausgleich) in 1867, but when borders were redrawn they were portrayed as specific entities within distinct na‐ tional spaces. This article compares how different state and non‐state ac‐ tors capitalized on the distinct nature of Banat and Székelyföld, how differ‐ ent types of arguments were deployed, and how proxies for a plebiscite (na‐ tional councils, mass assemblies and demonstrations, deputations and memoranda to the Paris Peace Conference) were used to sway the decision to include these regions in Hungary or Romania. These efforts were part of a broader repertoire championing national goals, but in both cases the his‐ torical peculiarities and the pre‐1918 local social realities fueled regional identities that were distinct from Transylvanianism. The symbolic recogni‐ tion of these regions as the most authentic Hungarian and Romanian ones during the mobilization of the masses around the Peace Conference rein‐ forced Banat and Székely regionalism, which was then used by rival Hun‐ garian and Romanian nationalist politicians to question the other nation‐ ality (distinguishing Székelys from Hungarians or emphasizing the loyalty to Hungary of certain Banat Romanian groups before 1918) leaving the Banat and Székelyföld entangled with different varieties of nationalism.
Florian Kührer‐Wielach
“A Fertile and Flourishing Garden.” A Political Assessment Ten Years after Versailles (pp. 135-152)
The present study examines reflections on the institutional and mental unification process of “Greater Romania” ten years after it was recognized by the Peace of Versailles and the subsequent treaties of Saint‐Germain‐en‐Laye (1919) and Grand Trianon (1920). A first section outlines the relationship between the government and the opposition or the struggle for the future design of state and society. The second section subjects the paradigmatic text “10 Years of Greater Romania” by the important Transylvanian politician Alexandru Vaida‐Voevod (1872–1950) to critical discourse analysis with a focus on the interplay between discursively awakened hope and real‐political disillusionment, which led to a sustained loss of faith in the possibility of realizing a democratic, pluralist society.
Review Essay
George Kordas
Antisemitism, Holocaust and Memory in Eastern Europe: Romania from the Peasant Revolution until Today
Book Reviews
Roxana Bratu, Corruption, Informality, and Entrepreneurship in Romania.
(Review by Clara Volintiru)
Mircea Vasilescu, Cultura română pe înțelesul patrioților.
(Review by Cătălin Constantinescu)