Abstracts for Dilema veche no. 238

Mircea Vasilescu
The twelwth country
Recently, the France Presse news agency related that Romania had one of the fastest growing gross domestic products in Europe in the previous year – an opportunity for some of the members of the government to boast about their supposed achievements. Mircea Vasilescu comments on how realistic this figure is, and if it has any real impact on the everyday life of the Romanians.

Luca Niculescu
Emergency assembly
The war in Georgia changed the relations between Russia and the European Union significantly. How will Romania be affected by this new political context, and what role can it play?

Sever Voinescu
The feminine mystery of democracy
Sever Voinescu analyzes the hottest recent topic regarding the American electoral race: the appearance on the political stage of Sarah Palin. In his opinion, the governor of Alaska is a good choice not necessarily because she appeals to the feminine or the conservative electorate, but mainly because her presence will add to the complexity of the American political game.

Florin Dumitrescu
Autochthonism in branding and advertisement
An analysis from the viewpoint of somebody working in the advertising industry – Florin Dumitrescu: over the last years, the advertisement campaigns involving elements of the native, traditional Romanian culture have become fashionable and successful.

Interview with Sergiu Nedelea, sommelier:
"The wine, between magic and industry"
More and more people in Romania enjoy the pleasures of luxury life, including the opportunity to appreciate a good wine. Sergiu Nedelea, one of the best known sommeliers in Bucharest, speaks about the tradition and the present of his profession.

Weekly dossier: The true story of the pink pony

Recently, the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York organized a street art event called "Freedom for lazy people", whose most controversial element exhibited was an object in the shape of a pink pony with a swastika on its back. In spite of the fact that the exhibition was appreciated by the American public, it triggered a whole debate in Romania, both in the political and the intellectual sphere, about which form of art can be representative for a country and consequently should be financed by the state.

Corina Suteu
Cultural diplomacy without complexes
The first person targeted by the critics was Corina Suteu, the director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York. In this article she explains the reasons why she supported the exhibition "Freedom for lazy people".

Andrei Codrescu
The Romanian pony is neighing
Andrei Codrescu – writer, poet and journalist, a personality well-known both in Romania and the US where he is a presenter on the national public radio – denounces the hypocrisy of those who criticized the exhibition. Some of those who now pretend to be scandalized by the pink pony used to be officially involved in Ceausescu's nationalistic propaganda and they often exhibited a xenophobic and anti-Semitic discourse.

Magdalena Boiangiu
Far away from the school books
In the context of the "pink pony scandal", Magdalena Boiangiu comments on the relation between art and political power in recent history, and how the former was used as a tool by different political regimes. "Which form of art is representative for a country/community?" is ultimately a question which answer does not belong to art, but to ideology.

Abstracts for Dilema veche no. 239

Andrei Plesu
Three days in Lisbon
Andrei Plesu paid a short visit to the capital of Portugal as a guest of the Hague Club – an opportunity to share a few thoughts about the city, its architecture, its past and present, but also some further considerations about international politics.

Mircea Vasilescu
The new minister of education in Romania: God
The fifteenth of September is the start of the school year in Romania. As always, the authorities seem to be poorly prepared for the event and thousands of schools will receive their pupils in the same bad states as in previous years. The Minister of Education reassures us that the situation will improve at some point, "by God's will". The editor-in-chief of Dilema veche analyses the inability of the Government to deal with the problems of the education system.

Sever Voinescu
Good news from Iraq
The news we can hear daily about the war in Iraq range from contradictory to bad. Yet Sever Voinescu argues that the situation is on the right path – one proof being the decrease of al-Qaeda's influence in the country.

Victoria Stoiciu
The wells of Bessarabia
In Bessarabia (the Republic of Moldova), digging wells is a traditional occupation and the people who do it are respected by the whole community. Victoria Stoiciu recounts what is left of this tradition today, in a new social context, when many Moldavians emigrated to work in the West.

Adina Popescu
The tax, the coupon, the counter, and other bureaucratic adventures
In recent years the sale of cars has increased spectacularly in Romania. However, the bureacratic procedures one has to go through to buy and register a car are still long and humiliating. Adina Popescu recounts her own experience.

Andrei Ciurcanu
Vacaresti, a world of the past
In 1988, Ceausescu ordered the demolition of the houses in Vacaresti – a suburb of Bucharest – as a part of what he called "systematization" – the destruction of the old houses and their replacements with new, communist-style blocks of flats. Twenty years later, the inhabitants of Vacaresti are still waiting for their rights to property to be restored.

Weekly dossier: For love of the country

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
Patriotism as a problem
Do we still need patriotism today? Alina Mungiu-Pippidi – Professor at the Hertie School of Government in Berlin – argues that patriotism, a concept completely different from nationalism, is viable in Eastern Europe as long as we have common projects to accomplish.

Cristian Ghinea
Romanian patriots or European patriots?
How can we reconcile our old national identity with the new, European one? Or is such a project possible? How can we measure the degree of our "Europeanization"? Cristian Ghinea tries to find some answers.

Paul Cernat
Dirty bathwater
The rabid nationalistic discourse of Ceausescu's years compromised the idea of patriotism for many Romanians. Paul Cernat points out the risk of throwing the baby – patriotism – out with the bath water – the remnants of this irrational discourse in the public sphere.

Abstracts for Dilema veche no. 240

Mircea Vasilescu
On a European Parliament
What is the role of the European Parliament and what does it mean to European citizens?

Vintila Mihailescu
Country branding
The author tries to find out how we can build our country brand

Andrei Pippidi
Bucharest during the Second World War – a French testimony
The author reminds us of the atmosphere during the Second World War as perceived by the head of the French Institute in Bucharest at the time, Jean Mouton, who wrote a diary.

Anca Manolescu
Fundamentalists and the Holy Text
The way in which fundamentalist approach and interpret the holy texts.

Teodor Baconsky
Pope visiting Paris
The importance of Pope Benedict's visit in Paris.

Tudor Calin Zarojanu
The limits of a free press
Journalists not being able to write about the owners of the press holdings they work for.

Stela Giurgeanu
Living behind bars
A tough report on life in Rahova State Penitentiary.

Madalina Schiopu
Siberian meetings, Romanian movies
A documentary film festival held in Novosibirsk which offered reporters the opportunity to find a Romanian community in Siberia.

Alex Leo Serban
Per aspera ad Mostra (di Venezia; via Sibiel)
The 65th edition of the Venice Film Festival could have been much better, states the author.

Weekly dossier: Sexuality in communism

Mihaela Miroiu
A libido fallen into disgrace
The author writes a painful, true story on the state's violent oppression of women who were trying to have a normal, decent sex-life

Adrian Cioroianu
Secondary effects of natal policies, from Dej to Ceausescu ruling
The author makes a description of the effects of natal policies which worsened from Dej to Ceausescu's administration.

Interview with gynaecologist Vasile Luca
"Only cowardly gynaecologists didn't help women to have abortions"
Vasile Luca explains the effects of the anti-abortion law issued in 1966 and the illegal methods used until 1990.

Abstracts for Dilema veche no. 241

Andrei Plesu
On writing
Compared to reading, which doesn't seem to be interesting anymore, writing is endlessly developing. Everybody writes hoping for his or her name to be printed on a cover. Every teenager aspires fame, every adult longs to become a writer. Everybody writes just about anything – novels, memoirs, poems, articles, letters to newspapers and authorities. In this case, what is writing after all?

Mircea Vasilescu
Alitalia and the national pride
Once a symbol of a developing society that could be compared with the rest of the world's great powers, a it had an important role in creating the image of a new, modern Italy. Alitalia is now bankrupt. With debts of over 400 million Euros, with no money for fuel, with a license expiring sometime soon, Alitalia became a national issue going from bad to worse against all promises and attempts to solve the situation.

Andrei Manolescu
One morning
Trying to reach a high-level conference which the US president was expected to attend, two Romanian journalists working for BBC are kept aside from the big event. The chance to see, to listen to, and to take photos of the most important man on the planet turns into nothing. After an endless series of phone calls to the embassy and attempts to clear the misunderstanding, the two journalists are left with no more than a picture of Mister President holding a bottle of Dorna sparkling water.

Vintila Mihailescu
The Romanian man is a traditionalist
Starting from a study published by Discovery Networks EMEA defining Romanian men aged 25-39 as "traditionalist" – most opposed to change, the family man most willing to support his family, the author gives several explanations of the term, presenting at the same time the issues men are faced with through the emancipation of women who now are both mobile and independent.

Andrei Pippidi
Memories of an old diplomat
In 1935, Alexandru Emanoil Lahovary, Romania's representative in Constantinople and Rome and plenipotentiary minister in Vienna and Paris, starts writing his memoirs. With an exquisite sense of detail, he describes Bucharest without leaving anything aside – he writes about streets, bridges, and elegant ladies riding through the town in carriages, about public drainage and drinking water, and the capital's relations with other cities.

Tereza Barta
The fascination with Romanian ugliness
Although only one Romanian movie was presented to the International Film Festival in Toronto, the Romanian society – its "dark" side – was the main theme of some movies produced by Italy, France, and Germany. Admitting that our country may sometimes seem "sad and dirty" the author declaims against the reasons why Europe seems so interested in nothing more than Romanian ugliness.

Radu Cosasu
One day, good news
Seven years ago, a local paper announced the construction in Bucharest of the biggest horse race course in South-Eastern Europe. On a field of one hundred hectares a stand of five thousands seats, bet houses, restaurants, stables for over one thousand horses, a conference hall, and runways for trot and gallop were to be built. Nothing ever happened. Recently, another local paper announced the same thing, and the author can't help asking himself "will anything happen this time?". That is left to be seen in... another seven years.

Cristian Ghinea
Thoughts on Bucharest Day
Among many problems Bucharest is faced with, community is one. Therefore, states the author, the manifestations held on Bucharest Day seemed most welcomed. The bustle, the agitation, the carriages riding around, the ancient costumes worn in the streets, the concert performed near the National Bank and the German music played in front of the Athenaeum, far from being of bad taste, brought the city back to life.

Adina Popescu
Portuguese people and songs
Walking through Porto one may get the impression that Romania and Portugal have something in common. Beyond the appearance though, everything is different – life, for example, has a different course as Portuguese people have learnt to live in a more relaxed way. Portugal is far from being a mere travelling experience – it is a foray into a world that, the more strange and exotic it looks at first, the more familiar and friendly it becomes. Once in Portugal, it is hard to leave.

Weekly dossier: What do you have against Gypsies?

Renate Weber
Gypsies, a European dilemma
After a visit to Italy as a member of Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Commission of the European Parliament, Renate Weber states that the relations between Italian authorities and the Romanian Roma are less tense. The press no longer protest the existence of Roma on Italian territory, and the authorities, though not acknowledging the violent attitude they had towards them try, if not to solve, at least to improve the situation.

Stela Giurgeanu
Romanian journalist, looking for Italian discrimination
In September, a group of Romanian journalists were invited to take part in an experiment called "Journalist in Romania – Gypsy in Italy". The journalists were supposed to walk through Rome and Napoli dressed like Roma to see if there are any discriminatory attitudes or actions towards them, and, if so, how they are manifested. The four days spent in Italy proved that the situation is clearly not the one presented by citizens, authorities, or the press. They were not harassed in the streets, their access to public institutions was not hindered and they were not even once offended.

Stela Giurgeanu
Isolated on the outskirts of life
Two of the places the Romanian journalists visited during their stay in Italy were two Roma camps. Although the conditions in the two camps are very different (Via Santa Maria, the official camp, is a decent and clean place compared to the Via di Salerno, the unofficial one) the problems that people are faced with are the same. There are no dreams or future plans, the only concerns being the food for the next day or the clothes they put on. As for discrimination, the Romanian Romas living in these camps are appreciative of the help they get from both Italian citizens and the authorities.

Dana Enulescu
When fear becomes ideology
Italians, states the author, see the citizens of other nationalities as savages. At the beginning of the 90s, they were "invaded" by Albanians, Chinese, and Moroccans, now they feel threatened by Romanian Romas. They are homeless, criminals, thieves, drunken, violent – the perfect scapegoats for papers looking for news that bring money. Unfortunately, ignoring the public hostilities towards them, the Roma often involve themselves in violent scenes perfect for statements like "we told you so".

Published 2008-10-03

Original in Romanian
Contributed by Dilema veche
© Dilema veche
© Eurozine