Dilema veche 400, 13 October 2011

Andrei Plesu
Those who have faith and those who have not
Andrei Plesu describes these two human attitudes, based on the theme proposed recently by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, for the public in Bucharest: the necessary dialogue between faith and unbelief.

Mircea Vasilescu
Left-right, right-left
Mircea Vasilescu finds that in Romania, left and right ideas have begun to be more in line with the West. People have begun openly to assume that they have options for left or right values, and no longer hesitate, as in the past, to display them openly. However, the author finds that intellectual and civic modern speech continues to have no connection with political parties agenda oriented to the right or left.

Gabriel Giurgiu
We quickly forget
Gabriel Giurgiu is surprised that many Romanian seem to have forgotten the not too distant time when they themselves struggled by any means to reach freer and richer countries. He notes that today, Romanians are insensitive to the dramas of stowaways who want to come to Romania or to escape from countries like Syria or Iran.

Ovidiu Nahoi
Why we are not like the Poles?
Ovidiu Nahoi notes that Romania and Poland are very similar countries and that they have a lot of similar interests. However, Poland got through the crisis better and has been able to get much more out of the European cohesion policy. The author believes that Poland has taken the step into "big league" of "European games", while Romania still struggles muddy fields of the province.

Stela Giurgeanu
From Lefkosia to Lefkosa
Stela Giurgeanu describes what the separation of Cyprus looks like on the ground. She travels to both sides of the border, recounting what she sees and recalling some of the history of the region.

Weekly dossier
Your neighbour – what (and how) we do for him

Irina Zamfirescu
Defend us against democracy, so that we can defend against dictatorship ourselves
Irina Zamfirescu, coordinating a project for monitoring non-government press, tells how her generation was educated in the spirit of obedience to authority, in communist times. She found, however, that "the right to a democratic Romania can be won only by the obligation of being an awake citizen".

Horia Marinescu
From Naschmarkt to Matache
Horia Marinescu – an architect in Vienna – makes an analogy between what happened with the Viennese Naschmarkt district in the 1970s and what is happening today in Bucharest around Market Matache. Both were in danger of demolition by the municipality, with more or less the same arguments. The Naschmarkt was saved by civic mobilization. Matache could be saved in the same way.

Dilema veche 401, 20 October 2011

Ana Maria Tolbaru
Who keeps causing a furore in Brussels?
Markus Kerber, a Berlin-based academic, became known after having sued the German government for approving the international loan to Greece. In his opinion, the EU should have excluded Greece from the eurozone a long time ago, thus preventing the "contamination" of the entire area. Besides criticising the European leaders, Kerber also proposes "rescue" measures for the future of the eurozone, but less for the future of the European construction.

Interview with Pat Metheny
"I'm more preoccupied with conception and ideas"
An interview with one of the most successful, influential and awarded jazz guitarists of the world, about why he chose the guitar and not his father's piano, the difference between discovering and exploring music, the importance of receiving awards, as well as the value of music, regardless of where it comes from.

Madalina Schiopu
Belgium: The Flemings, the Walloons and the rest
Officially, Belgium represents the centre of Europe, with Brussels the capital of the European Union. Madalina Schiopu tackles the delicate issue about the cultural differences between the Flemings and the Walloons in Belgium, how they try to coexist while keeping their own identity and culture.

Dialogue with Csilla Kató and Dumitru Budrala
A festival that could last a lifetime
This dialogue centres around the eleventh edition of the Astra Film Festival in Sibiu. This international festival of documentary films created its personal, unique atmosphere, continuously shaped its public, and became one the highest rated in Europe.

Weekly Dossier
Where do we go away from home?

Marius Chivu
"Explore. Dream. Discover"
Aside from Romanians' well-known holiday destinations – Austria, Bulgaria, Greece or Spain – a new type of traveller emerges. One who goes backpacking in exotic, faraway places, or one who simply flies for the weekend to see a concert in another country. A traveller willing to explore and discover unfamiliar places, and take a part of it back home.

Lucia Terzea-Ofrim
How we became tourists
Terzea-Ofrim takes us on a journey through time, history and language in an attempt to highlight the significant moments that shaped the modern traveller.

Laurentiu Bratan
Wandering through the Orient. About the pleasures of the independent traveller
For a workaholic who can only afford two or three such escapades a year, Iran becomes the perfect holiday destination. And although it might take a while, one can soon learn to appreciate Iran's wonderful, kind people, its architecture and its contrasts.

Interview with David Neacsu
"I organised the first Romanian expedition on Everest"
David Neacsu is a professional climber who, in 2003, organised and coordinated the first Romanian expedition on Everest. In this interview, he talks about what climbing truly means, the solidarity between climbers, as well as the lessons he has learned from the mountains.

Dilema veche 402, 27 October 2011

Andrei Plesu
Notes, moods, days
For a few days, Romanian televisions discovered a new guest: Miron Cosma, the former leader of the miners in Valea Jiului. Why does the news that Miron Cosma has founded a new political party warrant becoming a media event? Why he is offered the opportunity to show off for so many hours for no one's benefit? Because the televisions are eager to reinforce their stock of buffoons.

Mircea Vasilescu
What's happening to the European cultural press
The European cultural press encounters two main problems: the financial ones and adapting to the new technologies. The first problem cannot be solved through lamentations only, as in Romania, but by trying to find alternative solutions and persuading the authorities as to the importance of culture in the common European project. The second may be solved by taking into consideration new technologies, such as selling online content, print on demand, i-Pad applications and smartphones.

Ovidiu Nahoi
Romania is reproving Europe? Let us be reasonable
Two statements of president Basescu, launched close to the European summit, generated numerous debates: the first referred to the high interest rates Romania has to pay to the European financial market. The second, to Holland's and Finland's failure to respect a political commitment to Romania's access to the Schengen space. Suffocated by corruption and an incompetent administration, the last of Europe's countries at the absorption chapter, Romania suffers from a lack of credibility.

Weekly Dossier
Places where culture is at home

Anda Becut
From the Culture Club to the Cultural Centre
What is a cultural centre? Any institution that hosts facilitates or presents cultural and artistic activities: cultural clubs, community centres, citizens' centres, concert halls, galleries, libraries, museums or conference halls. In Romania, only private-public partnership or an active strategy of attracting public and private sponsors will be able to make culture clubs more dynamic and help them look more like cultural centres and less like places where nothing happens.

Bogdan Georgescu
"Country Tour". A project of Active Art for education together
Active art is a form of art generated by an encounter between the members of a community and the artists, proposing the possibility of representation through artistic products and communitarian actions. The national project "Country Tour", initiated in 2009 has as purpose the revitalizing of cultural clubs and their transformation in community centres for creative education and active art. "Country Tour" aims at facilitating access to culture for everyone, opening new perspectives and possibilities for the young people in rural communities and giving back the stories to the communities they have been generated by.

Dilema veche 403, 3 November 2011

Andrei Plesu
One piece of good news
Bucharest has a large offer of traditional restaurants. But how many are truly authentic? Where can you take out a foreigner willing to taste a Romanian dish? "If you are in luck, the dishes are mostly genuine, have a reasonable price and few disturbing digestive effects. But if you are out of luck, you'll get a huge bill at the end of dinner where you'll discover that palika is more expansive than whiskey, where chicken is more expensive than salmon and polenta more expansive than caviar." In this context, the author discovers a truly authentic restaurant, named Zexe.

Mircea Vasilescu
Who for whom decides in EU
Decisions taken at the last EU summit were considered by some people to be "historical". But the term is not necessarily meaningful and doesn't only have a positive connotation. Insistent appeals to China (and to other emerging powers) to help save the euro are also historical: a few years ago it was impossible to conceive of, as "La Libre Belgique" comments, and this shows "changes in power relationships between powers of the planet, but also and especially, the depth of current crisis on the Old Continent, crisis of confidence in the ability of the European project".

Ovidiu Nahoi
Is Europe splitting?
The Member States of the east that are outside the euro area have received assurance that the recapitalization of banks will not be made on their savings account and will not imply the withdrawal of money by the mother-companies located in the euro area. It was a common goal of countries in eastern Europe, to which they have acted together. According to the official statements, it was a goal achieved.

Weekly dossier
Can a state declare bankruptcy?

Cristian Ghinea
Thousand and thousand of billions, all together
What lies behind the statistics? Is this a real crises or more a mediated one? "A couple of months ago I received two different e-mails that circulated on the net. It was an e-mail with pictures, as many other messages that go viral are. Except this one was about the crises and about US debt. Someone played with graphics and represented the US in debt stacks of one hundred dollars each."

Roger Scruton
Unreal estate
A verse of the Koran says: "O believers, do not eat each other's possessions in futility." This is one of the many verses and hadith sites to preclude interest, insurance and debt transactions. The Prophet was terrified of selling and buying things. What are we doing?

Dan Popa
Greece. The story of a repeated bankruptcy
It was in October and it was warm, say the chroniclers. We are in the fourth century when Greece declares, for the first time, its bankruptcy. It borrowed from the temple of Delos (a kind of financial centre of the time) an amount double to one year production of the entire country.

Dilema veche 404, 10 November 2011

Mircea Vasilescu
Referendum strikes again!
Referendums initiated by politicians are becoming fashionable. In a county of Romania, citizens were asked if they want their county to be dissolved in an administrative reorganization, without these people having it explained to them what such reorganization means. The author believes that in a democratic spirit, Europeans may have a harder word to say on matters of general interest, but this depends on what will be asked.

Gabriel Giurgiu
Kosovars do not exist
Visiting Kosovo, Gabriel Giurgiu found that the Albanians are the only inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia who do not share the same nostalgia with other former Yugoslavs. He says that a so-called Kosovo people does not exist, but only two ethnic groups: Albanians and Serbs.

Sever Voinescu
King, my thoughts and peace
Sever Voinescu comments on the speech in parliament by the former leader of Romania, King Michael, on 25 October 2011. The previous speech in parliament was held by King Michael in 1946. Sever Voinescu, an MP, believes that he witnessed the first time in the Romanian Parliament when common sense won over boorishness.

Cristian Ghinea
Dictionary of terms misused
Cristian Ghinea shows that many terms such as neo-liberalism, fascism and colonialism have acquired different connotations today the original. For example: the current crisis is regarded as neo-liberal, and if you say something bad about immigrants, you are considered fascist.

Interview about terrorism with prof. Roger Griffin
"Let's look the monster in the eye"
Roger Griffin, Professor of Modern History at Oxford Brooks University, describes how terrorists think and the psychological mechanism by which a man comes to commit criminal acts that are difficult to understand.

Stela Giurgeanu
Stories and people from Istanbul
Stela Giurgeanu explored the streets of Istanbul and talked to some people. She tried to understand how thinking people who live in the capital of a country which lies on the border between different cultures.

Weekly dossier
Old things are put back into value

Irina Dumitriu
Unfinished city
Irina Dumitru describes the evolution of Berlin with the restoration of sites and buildings (even if some may recall painful history). She notes that vintage things appear and disappear overnight.

Dilema veche 405, 17 November 2011

Mircea Vasilescu
After Berlusconi
At the end of the "Berlusconi era", the author takes us through a brief journey in history, pointing out a few of the actions that made the former Italian prime minister so controversial. He also mentions the fact that, although he is no longer prime minister, Berlusconi still remains the leader of the main party, therefore, the "technical" decisions of the Mario Monti government will have to be approved by the Parliament.

Ovidiu Nahoi
Romania, euro and the game of seduction in Berlin
While many politicians and analysts predict the end of the euro zone, Romanian president Traian Basescu made a firm declaration in Berlin, in front of chancellor Angela Merkel, that Romania is maintaining its objective to adopt the euro as a currency in 2015.

Interview with Anouar Brahem
"In the absence of diversity, neither life, nor culture are possible"
Anouar Brahem – the world famous musician from Tunis, known for playing the oud, the lute of the Arab world – played for the first time in Romania. Dilema veche features an interview with Brahem, where he talks about the oud as an atypical instrument, his career, which started over 20 years ago, the importance of his music, and the influence of religion and spirituality over it.

Weekly Dossier
One reality. More realities

Luiza Vasiliu
Hats and pipes
Ever since the beginning of time, people have tried to understand what is going on both around them and inside them. In 2011, we know more than we ever did about how our brains function, we can see the sun rising anywhere in the world, through our webcams, and news travels fast "in real time". But no matter how much we think we control and are able to explore and understand reality, we are more prone to being fooled than ever.

Ana Dragu
What world are you coming from?
Based in personal experience, in her article the author tries to shed some light and show the differences between two "realities". The first one seems to be "the right one", the things most of us see, hear and feel. The second one – which we perceive as "the wrong one" – is the reality of an autistic person. In fact, this second reality is not wrong at all, but truly different.

Iulian Comanescu
Which reality?
Comanescu is writing about the different realities that we see reflected in the media – TV stations in particular – as well as the ones on the Internet and the cyberspace.

Interview with the magician Andrei Teasca
"Love is the true magic"
In his interview, magician Andrei Teasca talks about what it means to be an illusionist and how he manipulates some forms of reality, in order to perform a certain number, his dreams of having a home for the Theatre of Magic, and what he would change in the world, if given the power to do so.

Dilema veche 406, 24 November 2011

Andrei Plesu
Intellectuals say crazy things
Andrei Plesu writes about Lucian Boia's recently published book, The traps of history. The intellectual Romanian elite between 1930 ­ 1950. The book is about how Romanian intellectuals passed through a troubled historical period, from Charles the Second's dictatorship to the legionary period, from general Antonescu's dictatorship to the ambiguous one between August 1944 and December 1947. The balance sheet, as regards their propensity to compromise, is...sad.

Mircea Vasilescu
The European quarrel ­ the nations' phase
For about a year and a half, Romania and Bulgaria live the frustration of not being accepted in the Schengen space, even if they fulfil the technical conditions. Because the initial agreement regarding the abolishment of the internal frontiers provided, in fact, exactly this: technical conditions. Now, in the cases of Romania and Bulgaria the rules have changed along the way: it isn't only about technicalities, but about other things that, on the surface, have a legal and moral aspect, but, in fact, appear to have rather a political one.

Ovidiu Nahoi
Crisis of the "right" or of the "left"?
Is the actual crisis exclusively one of the "left", generated by the unaccounted for expenses of the states and by the saraband of the public loans? Is it exclusively one of the "right", with roots in the greed of the bankers and of the traders? The spokesmen of dominant ideologies do not stop throwing the cat in the neighbour's garden. But how well funded are these ideological approaches today?

Weekly Dossier
A hot year. Indignations, protests, violence

Andrei Manolescu
Changing the logic
This year was a hot one, and even if the protests and violence had different causes and manifestations, all of them were linked, in a way or another, to the economic crisis, and were based on social networks as instruments of informing and coagulation. The year started with the Arab world revolutions, that, far from being over, advanced in an unpredicted way and had, in several cases, positive results. Then the Spain indignant movement arouse, extended in many Western countries: the so-called "occupy" movements protested against the faults of the democratic systems, with much lower risks than in the Arab countries. Followed by the odd robberies and fires in Great Britain. And by the tragic episode in Norway. The Arab Muslims prove to be capable of sacrificing themselves for ideals, whereas the Westerners observe, in amazement, how their society can give birth to blonde robbers and even terrorists.

Zoe Petre
Occupy everywhere?
Sure, in a naive way, the New York, Portland, Oklahoma, London demonstrators, live in the illusion to be the apostles of a Global reconstruction, and that they will be able to impose a new ethics to the big companies, thus taming them. The protestants are thus heading towards a great disappointment, because their protests are not going to change anything.

Vlad Andrei
OWS and what do the protests say about us
Heterogeneous and lacking ideological coherence, protestants have unified under the idea "We are the 99%", which resumes the individuals' discontent as to the "concentration of power in the hands of a perverse and illegitimate elite". Wall Street is the symbol of the system that needs to be changed (demolished). But their ideas are not new: C. Wright Mills demonstrated the thesis of protests in an essay become classical in 1956.

Dilema veche 407, 1 December 2011

Andrei Plesu
Survival vs integration
Written fourteen years ago this text is an analysis of the past European request for Romania's integration vs countries which were made members without any constraints, just as "suggestion". The article is being republished due to its amazing present interest. "On the one hand, we are overrun by inertia, dilettantism, confusion and disorder – things hardly to be changed overnight in a capital of reconstruction. Going round in circles: to change ourselves means changing ourselves. On the other hand, the European model towards which we strive comes with requirements and inflexible schedules, with no reasonable relationship to the point where we are. Compressed between our own poverty and Western super standards, between local incompetence and continental hipercompetence we try, frustrated, to save appearances. I'm not saying that those who raise the bar up so much do not have, in principle, all the right reasons. But with that fuel? At what pace? And, above all, in what order? How many "priorities" can we assume at once? I recently asked a distinguished diplomat: ""How did you manage Greece integration? Have you had a "contest"? "No" – he answered. "But this was a failure. They still don't have a civil society ".

Mircea Vasilescu
Playing maps
What if countries would have the same freedom of movement as people do? "Recently, in the Wall Street Journal I found another map, drawn by Peter Arkle, with Germany stretching up to the Mediterranean Sea, an area called "Laissez-Faire Lands" (including Poland and the Baltic countries) and in the south from Portugal to Greece, a large space called "Vacation Land". The map is illustrating an article by Niall Ferguson entitled "2021: The New Europe". In a mixture of jokes and warning lucid utopia, Ferguson actually imagines the consequences of the crisis: a strong Germany, having its capital in Vienna – which is a new kind of Hapsburg empire, given the experience of the old "multicultural policies".

Sever Voinescu
To a responsable Europe
I think the biggest problem of Europe today is not entirely the economic and financial crisis itself, but the consuming dream. There are two ways dreams can strangle a life. The first is the quixotic – no one believes in that dream, but everybody is losing their minds dreaming... The second is where Europe stands today. The dream is realized, more and more people believe in it, and utopia becomes a rule of thought, obsession, unique thinking. Then the program becomes a huge bureaucracy.

Weekly Dossier
Children are not a child's play

Stela Giurgeanu
Half steps
When we hear mass media stories about children, almost every time we hear tragic news. We are terrified, we are mortified, and some of us shed tears. But only for a moment, because almost immediately afterwards we succumb back to our personal present lives. A cynical, egocentric, mercantile present, from which we exclude children. We use to complain about the lack of their values, ignoring our lack of values. Where do the children stand these days?

Stefan Darabus
When childhood is a open wound
The author is the manager of Hope and Homes for Children, Romania, an ONG that pleads for deinstitutionalization. Darabus gives an insight into the life children are leading in a children's home in Romania. "Ana grew up in institutions. Since she was born she was taken into a home. From home to a centre for preschoolers. Hence, a centre for school. Then I managed to bring her in a foster family. Training sessions for foster care, talk about her life before. We learn that she doesn't have pictures of herself. It's only the picture in the file. One of the exercises in preparation for the move (and is the first time that Ana is involved in what is about to happen in her life) was to draw something about her life. She drew a latticed window.

Ana Bulai
Quicksand generation
More than seven hundred news reports on television about Romanian children, only this year: Child victims, child abusers, children abandoned, abused, confused. There are rarely any news about positive cases, school or sports success. The media shape the image of a childhood adrift.

Published 2011-12-13

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