Journal articles on the topic 'Romania – Politics and government – 1945-1989'

THE VIOLENCE WHICH MARKED THE OVERTHROW OF Nicolae Ceaugescu's regime at Christmas 1989, and the recurrent disorders, especially in Bucharest, which have punctuated developments over the last nine months, have made Romania's experience of anti-Communist revolution strikingly different from that of its neighbours to the north and to the west. Whatever the political and social tensions emerging in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland (and whatever may be the GDR's legacy to a reunified Germany), it is unlikely that the charge of neo-communism will be central to their political debate. It is precisely that charge levelled against the government party (National Salvation Front/FSN) and against the person of Ion Ilescu by various opposition groups, and former prominent dissidents under Ceaugescu, which remains the most emotive issue in Romanian politics. The question of whether the revolution which overthrew Nicolae Ceauyescu and led to the dissolution of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) was the result of a popular uprising or a coup d'état planned by Party members has haunted Romanian politics through the first nine months of the post-Ceauqescu period.

The article proves that an important task of adaptation to new conditions,in which Romania is developing as a full member of the EU,is the "europeanization" of its political and economic spheres,the very mentality of Romanian society.Modern Romania is a state that has radically changed in comparison with that,which in 1989 survived the most turbulent anti-communist revolution in the CEE.Romania has adopted "Europeanism" as a national long-term development project,but ten years after the accession did not convince the partners of the opportunity to enter the Schengen area and protect the external borders of the EU. The global crisis of 2008-2009, the struggle of political forces in the parliament, various institutions of other branches of power and beyond,unsolved corruption at all levels – from central to local authorities, has negatively impacted on the vital activity of the state.The deep downturn experienced by the Romanian economy makes the introduction of the scenario of future development created quite problematic.At the same time, the role of the state has not decreased in crisis conditions.There is a growing need to strengthen the function of regulation, control over market relations, increasing the value of the management function. Keywords: European Union, European Commission, Romania, integration, political parties, public organizations, government, economy

Abstract The Romanian-Bulgarian relations were assigned the role of satellites belonging first to the Axis, and then to U.S.S.R., following the regulation of the territorial statute of South Dobrudja on September 7th 1940, through the Treaty from Craiova. After the Red Army has entered Bulgaria, on September 8th 1944, an unusual fact has intervened between Bucharest and Sofia, from the perspective of Kremlin’s influence, of course: the priority of Bulgarian political, ideological and diplomatic factors over the Romanian ones, unprecedented fact in the history of almost seven decades of the modern bilateral relations. The lack of human and ideological resources of the Romanian Communist Party has become obvious during the not even declared competition with the Bulgarian Communists and their leader, Georgi Dimitrov. The Communist Bulgaria has become a model that Romanian communists do not only seriously took into account, yet, at least the year King Mihai I has abdicated (1947), they zestfully were also studying and copying, as the case may have been. Being a so-called People’s Republic even since September 1946, following a falsified popular referendum, Bulgaria has undertaken during the next months to coordinate plans of internal and external politics of Romania. In order to finalize a “Bulgarian way” in Romania, the government led by Petru Groza and the media of propaganda, and mainly the press official of the Romanian Communist Party, “Scânteia”, have scrupulously assumed the role of protagonists. And Communist Bulgaria, just like U.S.S.R., has become for more than two years (1946- February 1948) an extremely important and valuable topic of the Romanian public speech, of the Romanian Communists’ confirmation, of establishing the project for instituting the totalitarian regime. The similarity of actions and of institutes’ organization is striking for this short period, and the treaty signed in January 1948 is nothing but the final of a stage extremely abundant in models and suggestions for the Romanian communists.

The political development of Romania started after the death of Nicole Ceausescu in 1989. The article describes and analyses institutional and behavioural dynamics of the political processes that have occurred in Romania since 1989. This article focuses on the constitutional framework of governing institutions. This paper tries to explore the understanding of theoretical approaches to political and institutional development in the country. It examines the evolution of legislative, executive, and judiciary bodies. These are the three pillars of democracy. The article discusses how political parties participating in elections, form a government and will look at the stability of the institutions. This article examines institutional foundations of the coalition government in the 1990–2020 post-communist democracy period in Romania. The article starts with the institutional framework premise that electoral systems and constitutional provisions on the division of powers, structure, and the relationship between parliament and the president determines the point at which political power can be dispersed or concentrated in the political system.

Though vilified as instances of “parliamentary putsch,” no-confidence censure motions remain significant constitutional tools through which the opposition can challenge the government in Romania, and publicly underscore its policy ineffectiveness in certain areas of activity. An overview of censure motions debated in the Romanian parliament from 1989 to 2012 reveals that center-left cabinets faced fewer challenges than their centerright counterparts, anti-communist forces were less skilled in articulating criticisms against cabinets, not all adopted motions led to cabinet removal, and motions became increasingly complex over time. Two motions adopted in 2009 and 2012, tabled by the center-left opposition against center-right cabinets, turned these parliamentary tools into powerful censure instruments.

AbstractIn this article attention is focused on the features of the emerging Romanian banking system, its failures, and their determinants. These failures were either politically driven or simply a result of the weak regulatory capacity of the state (as the owner of the banks) and lax monitoring from the central bank, as the central authority entrusted with the responsibility to maintain a well-functioning banking system. The reluctance of various governments, regardless of their political orientation, to apply sanctions against banks that are in trouble until the last possible moment encourage excessive risk-taking when banks first encounter financial difficultics, and asset-stripping when the insiders realize that a bank's continued viability is in jeopardy. Based on a number of case studies, the article argues that, in post-1989 Romania, insider trading, self-loans and blunt theft appeared more as systemic features rather than isolated incidents.

AbstractThe last three decades have brought important changes to the Romanian judicial system, especially concerning the struggle for independence and autonomy within the separation of powers equation. The internal and external context – i.e. the transition to democracy, after 1989, and the intention to join the European Union – determined an orientation towards the “Euro-Model” of judicial self-government. This has not come without difficulties and perils, both from the inside and from the outside. The article provides a comprehensive analysis of the Romanian system of judicial self-government in the context of these perils and emphasizes the link between the attempts to reinforce judicial independence and the anti-corruption fight, required by the supervision mechanism under which Romania has been placed at the moment of the EU accession. The increase in the number and intensity of such perils in the recent period has coincided with an increase in the number of high-level political corruption cases that have resulted in convictions. The article also discusses recent changes in the laws of the judiciary, which still are, partially, under parliamentary scrutiny, but which have raised serious concerns at the European level, as regards the progress made by Romania in achieving the objectives included in the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism.

On being awarded the Legion of Honor by President Corazon Aquino, Joaquin ‘Chino.’ Roces, publisher of The Manila Times, pleaded with the president:Please allow me to remind you, first. That our people brought a new government to power because our people felt an urgent need for change. That change was nothing more and nothing less than that of moving quickly into a new moral order. The people believed, and many of them still do, that when we said we would be the exact opposite of Marcos, we would be just that. Because of that promise which the people believed, our triumph over Marcos was anchored on a principle of morality . . . . To our people, I dare propose that new moral order is best appreciated in terms of our response to graft and corruption in public service. We cannot afford a government of thieves unless we can tolerate a nation of highwaymen.

This article is the fifth and final in a Nationalities Papers series providing an overview of the development of Romani political group representation and administration, from the arrival of Roma to Europe up to 1971, the landmark year of modern transnational Romani politics. The article concentrates on the period between the Second World War and 1970 and the emergence of the following phenomena which distinguish this period from those covered in the previous articles: some limited Romani participation in non-Romani mainstream political or administrative structures, an international Romani evangelical movement, reconciliation between Romani political representation and the Catholic Church, national institutions created by various governments to aid the administration of policies on Roma and rapid growth of non-governmental organizations addressing Romani issues.

This article is a re-evaluation of the Holocaust memory in the contemporary Romanian society. It shows that from its inception, Romania’s nation-building process went hand in hand with antisemitism. Furthermore, it points out that after 1989 the country’s sense of frustration at its communist past managed to obscure the memory of the Holocaust. Despite Romania’s government recognition of the country’s involvement in the Holocaust (2004), a wholehearted acknowledgement of the issue remains improbable at the general level of Romania’s society. A new law to counteract Holocaust denial was adopted in Romania in 2015. However, the country has proved ever since that it has barely come to terms with its historical legacy.*

The struggle of Fortinbras and Horatio in Romania: removal and re-collection of the communist past in Romanian museumsOver twenty years after the dismantling of communist regimes began in Central and Eastern Europe, the governments and people in these former Soviet bloc countries are faced with varying and often opposing ways to approach and present the communist past. Focusing on post-1989 museums in Romania, especially the Sighet Museum in Sighetul Marmaţiei and the Romanian Peasant Museum in Bucharest, the article will examine three themes that appear in museum exhibitions of Romanian communist history: the marginalization of the communist past, the victimization of a nation, and the need by curators to “rescue memory.” these approaches to the communist past leave a great deal out. Limited and biased portraits hinder a healthy coming to terms with the past initially intended by these institutions in Romania and similar institutions across Central and Eastern Europe. However, some attempts have been made to bring in more voices and face the past on its own terms apart from the political motivation or desires for retribution, which often motivate the current interpretation of the past. Walka Fortynbrasa z Horacym w Rumunii: likwidacja i ponowne przypomnienie komunistycznej przeszłości w rumuńskich muzeachPo ponad 20 latach od chwili, gdy zaczęły się rozpadać komunistyczne reżimy w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej, rządy i społeczeństwa byłych krajów bloku sowieckiego doświadczają odmiennych, często przeciwstawnych podejść do komunistycznej przeszłości i sposobów jej przedstawiania. Skupiając swą uwagę na muzeach w Rumunii po roku 1989, zwłaszcza Miejscu Pamięci Ofiar Komunizmu i Ruchu Oporu w Sighetu Marmaţiei (Syhot Marmaroski) oraz Muzeum Chłopstwa Rumuńskiego w Bukareszcie, autorka niniejszego artykułu analizuje trzy zagadnienia, które przewijają się w muzealnych ekspozycjach poświęconych dziejom Rumunii w czasach komunistycznych; są to: marginalizacja komunistycznej przeszłości, wiktymizacja narodu i potrzeba „ocalenia pamięci” przez kustoszy. Powyższe podejścia do komunistycznej przeszłości ignorują wiele kwestii. Niepełny i tendencyjny obraz opóźnia zatem dojście do ładu z przeszłością na zdroworozsądkowych zasadach, co w myśl początkowych założeń miało w Rumunii nastąpić dzięki muzeom, jak też dzięki podobnym placówkom w całej Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej. Jednakże podejmowane są wciąż nowe próby, aby dopuścić do głosu więcej różnych opinii i stawić czoło przeszłości niezależnie od motywacji politycznych bądź dążenia do zemsty, które często stoją za bieżącymi interpretacjami przeszłości.

Social movements are not completely spontaneous. On the contrary, they depend on past events and experiences and are rooted in specific contexts. By focusing on three case studies – the student mobilizations of 2011 and 2013, the anti-government mobilizations of 2012, and the protests against the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation project of 2013 – this article aims to investigate the role of collective memory in post-2011 movements in Romania. The legacy of the past is reflected not only in a return to the symbols and frames of the anti-Communist mobilizations of 1989 and 1990, but also in the difficulties of the protesters to delimit themselves from nationalist actors, to develop global claims, and to target austerity and neoliberalism. Therefore, even in difficult economic conditions, Romanian movements found it hard to align their efforts with those of the Indignados/Occupy movements. More generally, the case of Romania proves that activism remains rooted in the local and national context, reflecting the memories, experiences, and fears of the mobilized actors, in spite of the spread of a repertoire of action from Western and southern Europe.

Historically, high sovereign debt and austerity policies have coincided with regime-changing popular uprisings. Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania was no exception. Why, when faced with a sovereign debt crisis in the 1980s, did his regime choose to pay its foreign debt as early as possible, at the cost of economic recession and dramatically compressed consumption? How did these choices relate to the regime’s failure to survive the end of the decade? The article argues that while exogenous shocks shattered the economic bases of the regime, it was the ideas with which the regime understood development and interpreted the crisis that shaped government policy responses in the 1980s. When the price of oil and development finance went up abruptly in 1979, the low energy efficiency of Romanian industry pushed the country into a situation where debt levels became unsustainable. Committed to a view of development that blended nationalist and Stalinist ideas, but with a focus on policy sovereignty, Ceausescu diagnosed the crisis as evidence that debt-financed development and policy independence were incompatible. Consequently the regime decided to pay off foreign debt through a mix of austerity, import substitution, and export-led accumulation of dollar reserves. By the time all debt was paid off in 1989, the regime’s economic sources of legitimacy were exhausted. In the external environment of 1989, this policy regime change contributed to political regime change even in the absence of an organized civil society. In addition to casting a new light on the causal mechanisms of the Romanian revolution of December 1989, the findings of this article contribute to emerging scholarship that stresses the nexus between debt-induced economic crisis and popular uprisings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate, from a socio-semiotic perspective, the manner in which the political regimes installed after the forced abdication of King Mihai I (on 30 December 1947) used the Throne Hall in the former royal palace in Bucharest to meet their own needs. In December 1947, Romania was illegally turned from a constitutional monarchy into a popular republic, with the help of the Red Army. Then, the popular republic was transformed into a socialist republic, in fact, a communist dictatorship. In December 1989, the communist regime collapsed and was replaced by a post-communist one, a regime which did not seem willing to leave behind the communist ideological legacy, manifest, in the 1990s, in the brutal repression of anti-government protesters in University Square in Bucharest, or in the Romanian Mineriads of 1990 and 1991. The political regimes that succeeded to power after 1947 deprived the Throne Hall of its monarchic symbolism and used it in ways incongruent with its inherent function, albeit for official purposes. The manner in which the communist regime made use of this particular place is indicative of its intent and success in reinventing traditions or adapting older traditions to its ideological goals, in order to alienate Romanians from their recent past, in disrespect for the nation’s heritage. Although the former royal palace was completely transformed into a national museum of art after 1990, a cultural institution meant, by its very purpose, to save at least part of the nation’s memory, political decision makers ignored the symbolism of a national museum such as the National Museum of Art of Romania, known to many Romanians as the former royal palace. In bewildering, yet not unprecedented fashion, the Throne Hall has been recently used, by the Romanian government, as a dining hall in a series of events that preceded the takeover of the presidency of the EU Council by Romania in January 2019. We claim that the government’s decision can be circumscribed to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of consumerism, characterized by the rule of sign value as a status symbol. In addition, Jan Blommaert’s and Barbara Johnstone’s taxonomies further the argument that the Throne Hall is not a mere space, but a place, its function having been perverted by both ideological manipulation and aggressive consumerism.

What determines the incentives of governments and businesses to invest in skills needed for higher value-added activities? While many factors matter, this article focuses on the motivations and the role of political parties in government. A policy analysis in Poland and Romania between 1989 and 2015, shows how governments can determine a change in the supply of skills even in relatively new democracies. We tackle the variation in the supply of sophisticated skills in the two countries and find that, unlike governments dominated by national-conservative parties, governments dominated by liberal parties have strategically steered the supply of skills in the economy. They have simultaneously identified and incentivized three key actors to invest in higher added value activities: (1) They have steered their higher education institutions towards offering degrees conducive to research and development; (2) they have incentivized students through scholarships or through secure employment by fostering links with enterprises; and (3) they have bargained with multinational companies to attract sophisticated activities. The article suggests that political parties should figure more prominently in political economy scholarship focusing on CEE. Moreover, this work speaks to a broader debate about the role of political parties in skill formation and in institutional change more generally.

During The Years Immediately Following The Fall Of The Ceausescu regime in 1989, Romania fulfilled the requirements of an ‘electoral democracy’. Free and reasonably fair elections regularly produced parliaments (1990, 1992) and governments dominated by the communist successor parties run by Ion Iliescu, a member of the old nomenklatura. Once elected, these institutions operated in principle within the framework of procedural democracy, but in practice often broke the rules and norms accepted in the West as characteristic of liberal democracy. When this occurred public opinion was either too weak, or divided, or simply too indifferent to demand more accountability. Further impoverishment of the poorest citizens due to mismanagement of the economy and rampant corruption contributed to the demise of the post-communist regime in 1996, which in turn led to the hope that with electoral democracy established, the development of democratic institutions and government accountability would follow.

This article reassesses U.S. Cold War policy in 1945, with particular emphasis on Eastern Europe. The article considers how the U.S. government proposed to deal with the Soviet Union in the postwar period more generally. The article looks closely at U.S. policy toward Poland and toward Romania and Bulgaria and sets these policies into context in order to determine whether U.S. leaders had “written off” the East European countries by the end of the year, consigning them to a Soviet sphere of influence. The article traces the strategic concept underlying U.S policy and analyzes key aspects of Secretary of State James Byrnes's policy at the July 1945 Potsdam conference and in the October–December 1945 negotiations with the USSR about the occupation of Japan.

AbstractThe article focusses on the fate of Sovietisms in modern Romanian, i.e. the situation of words or phrases borrowed from Russian in the period of Soviet control over Eastern Europe (1945–1989). The borrowings reflect relevant concepts of Soviet-Communist economics, culture, politics and propaganda. Romanian received the largest number of Sovietisms of all Romance languages, mainly because of its close political relationship with the URSS. The use of terms which implicated a critical attitude towards the Soviet-Communist dictatorship (samizdat ‘samizdat’, aparatcic ‘apparatchik’, gulag ‘goulag’, etc.) was forbidden both in the URSS and in socialist Romania, but they passed into Russian and Romanian through western radio broadcasts, mainly Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Today, most of those Sovietisms are no longer in use in Romanian.

The Process of the transition from authoritarianism to more representative forms of government has become a major subject of the scholarship on Latin American politics today (O'Donnell, et al, 1986; Malloy and Seligson, 1987; Stepan, 1989; Diamond et al, 1988-1990; Lowenthal, 1991). Given this interest, as expressed by the growing literature in this area, little attention has been paid to the transition process now going on in Paraguay, which is now emerging from one of Latin America's most long-standing authoritarian regimes.A number of studies testify to the authoritarian nature of Paraguay's government and society. Johnson indicates that Paraguay ranked either 18th or 19th—out of 20 Latin American nations ... in 9 successive surveys of democratic development, carried out at 5-year intervals from 1945 to 1985 (Jonnson> 1988). A longitudinal study of press freedom found that Paraguay was invariably placed in the category of “poor,” or even “none,” between 1945-1975 (Hill and Hurley, 1980). When Palmer applied his 5 indicators of authoritarianism (nonelective rule, coups, primacy of the military, military rule, executive predominance) to the countries of Latin America, Paraguay consistently ranked first in its degree of authoritarianism (Palmer, 1977).

In the period between 1945-1989, Polish-Mexican relations were determined by the Cold War rivalry. Poland remained in the Soviet sphere of influence and its sovereignty was limited by Moscow. Although controlled by the Kremlin, Poland had its own initiatives in foreign policy. Warsaw considered Mexico to be the most important partner in Latin America (not to mention the communist ally, Castro of Cuba), thus Polish diplomacy made many efforts to strengthen mutual political, cultural and economic relations. Mexico, with its independent foreign policy, progressive state ideology and tremendous market, seemed a particularly valuable partner in Latin America to the Polish communist leaders. The climax of Polish diplomatic initiatives occurred in the 1970s. Mexico was also interested in cooperation with Poland, especially in its economic dimension but the result of the efforts was mixed. The poor performance of Polish-Mexican economic relations when compared with the Mexican commercial exchange with other East European countries proves that the efforts of the Polish government in the economic sphere were rather futile. Political relations were good, however geopolitically both countries belonged to different spheres. The special, independent position of Mexico in world politics made such friendly relations possible.

Abstract The communication structures of the Ministry of National Defense have a considerable seniority and have played an important role both in different historical, critical periods for the country (wars, political crises) or institutional building (the forming of the Romanian army, of the modern command structures, etc.) as well as during the transition period after 1989. The first military publication, Observatorul Militar, (Military Observer), was released in 1859, being followed by a few thousands of magazines, newsletters, specialized directories, or during the war years of information and opinion journals such as Romania, organ of the General Headquarters, in the years of World War I, or Soldatul (The Soldier), Santinela (The Sentry), during the years of World War II. One after another, others followed such as: since 1916 Studioul Cinematografic al Armatei (Army Cinema Studio), originally, a photo-cinema structure, then specialized in the documentary film: history, presentation or training, and, since 1940, on public radio frequencies Ora Ostaşului (Ora Armatei), (Soldier’s Hour, Army’s Hour), then since 1968, a television broadcast on public television station broadcasting frequencies, since 1996 the web products (the first web site of an army in Eastern Europe, the first site of a ministry within the Government of Romania). The force and the role of the structures varied from period to period Studioul cinematografic (The Cinematographic Studio) had in 1989, 217 employed people, military and civilians, today there are less than 15), according to the budgets and the importance of what they were given by the management structures. The revolution of December 1989 marked the depoliticization of the communication act and the switch to the professionalization of the specialized structures, transforming their propaganda tools into products and means of Public Relations. The years 1990-1995 have marked this process through: (a) the establishment of structures, (b), staff training (in France, Switzerland, Germany, but especially in the United States), (c) the completion of the first guides, instructions, procedures for the field, (d) the opening of the first course for specialists, (e) the initiation of a quarterly specialized magazine Panoramic militar, (Military Panorama), (f) a code of ethics for practitioners.

The institution of the prime-minister, formed in monarchical states, has gained a new political environment in the republic affecting the position and nature of the p[rime-minister’s office. This position depended ,to a large extent, on the systemic location and the shape of the function and competences of the elected president of the republic. The systemic solution adopted in this respect were, as a rule, between two border models; the prime-minister’s full dependence on the political (party) and majority forces in the parliament and the political connection of the castoff the prime-minister’s position to the political profile and personal preferences of the president. Among the solutions indicated here were a number of intermediary solutions used in the systemic practice of individual countries. The political changes at the turn of the Year 1989/1990 in Central and South-Eastern Europe favoured shaping the position of the prime-minister in connections of the model of parliamentary government (i.e. depending on the party structure and majority confidence in parliament) ,but with influence of the president (especially in case of the cast of this office in general and direct election).

The 1989/1991 demise of European communist regimes created a powerful impulse for the investigation of memory cultures at Cold War borders and, subsequently, for reflections on the creation of new European border regimes. The four studies included in this special section investigate these two processes on a micro level of their dynamics in new and old borderlands from the perspectives of history, anthropology and political science. At the same time, they explore the relations between the everyday life experience of borderland communities and larger historical and political processes, sometimes going back to the re-drawing of European borders in the aftermath of the First World War.It is the hybrid nature of borders as at the same time separating and connecting (Anzaldúa 1987; Gupta and Fergusson 1997), as the place where “a transition between two worlds is most pronounced” (Van Gennep 1960 paraphrased in Berdahl 1999, 12) that makes them such an attractive and interdisciplinary site of research. It is of interest to geographers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists (e.g. Donnan and Wilson 1994; Anderson 1997; Ganster et al. 1997; Breysach, Paszek, and Tölle 2003; Wastl-Walter 2010). Daphne Berdahl sees boundaries as “symbols through which states, nations, and localities define themselves. They define at once territorial limits and sociocultural space” (Berdahl 1999, 3). Border research distinguishes between “border,” “bordering,” and “borderland” or “frontier” (the term first defined by Turner 1921). While borders connote a dividing line, borderlands connote an area, and bordering refers to the process of border- and borderland-creation. Borders are established through a three-stage process of allocation, delimitation and demarcation: a territory is first placed (allocated) under the jurisdiction of a government, then an imaginary line is drawn (delimited) on a map, and finally the boundary is marked with physical markers (demarcated) in the terrain (Sahlins 1989, 2). Borderlands or frontier zones are “privileged sites for the articulation of national distinctions” (Sahlins 1989, 271), and as such are places where difference is produced and institutionalized through territorial sovereignty, but also constantly renegotiated by multiple actors.

This article is the third in this Nationalities Papers series, following “Part 1: The Legacy of Early Institutionalism: From Gypsy Fiefs to Gypsy Kings,” which covered the period from the arrival of Gypsies to Europe until the mid-nineteenth century (Vol. 32, No. 3), and “Part 2: Beginnings of Modern Institutionalization,” describing the birth of the first modern forms of ethnically-based political and social organizations established by Romani elites from the nineteenth century up until the Second World War (WWII) (Vol. 33, No. 2). The article concentrates on developments between two significant landmarks in the history of Romani mobilization—the end of WWII in 1945 and the institutionalization of a permanent international Romani body in the form of a World Romani Congress, held for the first time in 1971. The time period covered in this article is distinguished from the previously covered periods by the emergence of the following phenomena: (1) modern Romani political organizations at the national level, (2) their unification through international Romani umbrella organizations, (3) some limited Romani participation in non-Romani mainstream political or administrative structures, (4) an international Romani evangelical movement, (5) reconciliation between Romani political representation and the Catholic Church, (6) national institutions created by various governments to aid the administration of policies on Roma, (7) rapid growth of non-governmental organizations addressing Romani issues, and (8) some limited cooperation between Romani organizations and intergovernmental organizations.

This article is the fourth in this Nationalities Papers series, following Part 1 which covered the period from the arrival of Gypsies to Europe until the mid-nineteenth century, Part 2 describing the birth of the first modern Romani organizations from the nineteenth century up until the Second World War (WWII) and Part 3a covering the first wave of expansion of Romani activism countrywide after 1945. As mentioned in Part 3a, the period between WWII and 1970 can be distinguished from the previously covered periods by the emergence of the following phenomena: (1) modern Romani political organizations at the national level, (2) their unification through international Romani umbrella organizations, (3) some limited Romani participation in non-Romani mainstream political or administrative structures, (4) an international Romani evangelical movement, (5) reconciliation between Romani political representation and the Catholic Church, (6) national institutions created by various governments to aid the administration of policies on Roma, (7) rapid growth of non-governmental organizations addressing Romani issues, and (8) some limited cooperation between Romani organizations and intergovernmental organizations.

The development of Islamic educational institutions in Indonesia has undergone the different developments in accordance with the period of government politics. The old order era and the new order era, for example, have their own dynamics of development. This study analyzes the development of Islamic education that occurred during the Old Order and the New Order governments (1945-1998). This research uses a historical approach which is based on literature study. Library research is a method of collecting data and information; from books, magazines, documents, journals, history books, and others. The results of this study indicate that: 1) The thought of Islamic education in the period of independent Indonesia was characterized by a dualistic education model: a) the education and teaching system in secular public schools did not recognize religious teachings, which was the legacy of the Dutch colonial government. b) Islamic education and teaching system that grows and develops in the Islamic community, both isolated-traditional and synthetic with a variety of educational patterns. 2) The practice of education from the time of Indonesia's independence until 1965 can be said to be heavily influenced by the Dutch education system. This colonial education practice continues to discriminate between the children of officials and ordinary children. 3) Islamic education has strengthened its position after entering and being inclusive in the national education system which is regulated in Law No. 2 of 1989 which further regulated a series of government regulations relating to education and then continued with the enactment of Law No. 20 of 2003. Meanwhile, the development of post-New Order Islamic education is a topic that needs further research.

For any political regime the employment and unemployment of active population represents the most pressing social and economic obligation. in Romania, any comparative study before and after 1990, on 2 x 2 decades of different economic policies, can observe the damaging effects which they had forced privatization of state enterprises on the labor market, with over 1,000,000 declared unemployed in 1999, compared to zero unemployed in 1989. After this disaster, and after a short economic rehabilitation, it followed another crisis, with a further increase in unemployment of ANOFM, from 445,000 persons in 2009 to 626,960 persons in 2010 to 740,000 in 2011 of 674,000 in November 2012 , 512 333 persons in December 2013 to 724,000 persons in March 2014. These data indicate that in Romania the crisis is not over yet. in parallel to these developments there have been published the analyzes of the National Commission for Prognosis, but with some significant deviations in two directions. On the one hand, the calculations are made on the formula BIM records, and on the other hand, they are in the direction of a lower estimates. So, in the estimates of performed forecasts for the years 2014 -2017, with trend analysis and analysis of previous years, the total number of unemployed in 2011 was to be of 730 200 persons. in 2012 the total number of unemployed was to be of 701,200 persons, in 2013 of 726,000 persons, of 705,000 persons in 2014, of 690,000 in 2015 and of 685,000 in 2016. Without contesting the effort to accuracy of this Commission and the fact that any forecast includes a dose of risk too, there are obviously immeasurable variables that were not taken into account. We refer to the quality of business environment, revenues polarization, with decreasing trends in wages, to labor migration especially medium and high qualified. We refer to the existing difficulties in the allocation of development credits, to the corruption of officials from the local councils the excess of electoral concerns of governments, with the necessity of different approaches for each of them. With this supplement of fren factors we can say that on prospective 2 years, the registered unemployment from National Institute of Statistics, will not fall below 740.000 persons. To these things, it must be added the volume of more than twice unregistered persons, which means a total of approx. two million persons, this being the actual estimation of the non-employed population, to which has reached in Romania today.

The life path, scientific-pedagogical and public activity of Volodymyr Sokurenko – a prominent Ukrainian jurist, doctor of law, professor, talented teacher of the Lviv Law School of Franko University are analyzed. It is found out that after graduating from a seven-year school in Zaporizhia, V. Sokurenko entered the Zaporizhia Aviation Technical School, where he studied two courses until 1937. 1/10/1937 he was enrolled as a cadet of the 2nd school of aircraft technicians named after All-Union Lenin Komsomol. In 1938, this school was renamed the Volga Military Aviation School, which he graduated on September 4, 1939 with the military rank of military technician of the 2nd category. As a junior aircraft technician, V. Sokurenko was sent to the military unit no. 8690 in Baku, and later to Maradnyany for further military service in the USSR Air Force. From September 4, 1939 to March 16, 1940, he was a junior aircraft technician of the 50th Fighter Regiment, 60th Air Brigade of the ZAK VO in Baku. The certificate issued by the Railway District Commissariat of Lviv on January 4, 1954 no. 3132 states that V. Sokurenko actually served in the staff of the Soviet Army from October 1937 to May 1946. The same certificate states that from 10/12/1941 to 20/09/1942 and from 12/07/1943 to 08/03/1945, he took part in the Soviet-German war, in particular in the second fighter aviation corps of the Reserve of the Supreme Command of the Soviet Army. In 1943 he joined the CPSU. He was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree and the Order of the Red Star (1943) as well as 9 medals «For Merit in Battle» during the Soviet-German war. With the start of the Soviet-German war, the Sokurenko family, like many other families, was evacuated to the town of Kamensk-Uralsky in the Sverdlovsk region, where their father worked at a metallurgical plant. After the war, the Sokurenko family moved to Lviv. In 1946, V. Sokurenko entered the Faculty of Law of the Ivan Franko Lviv State University, graduating with honors in 1950, and entered the graduate school of the Lviv State University at the Department of Theory and History of State and Law. V. Sokurenko successfully passed the candidate examinations and on December 25, 1953 in Moscow at the Institute of Law of the USSR he defended his thesis on the topic: «Socialist legal consciousness and its relationship with Soviet law». The supervisor of V. Sokurenko's candidate's thesis was N. Karieva. The Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, by its decision of March 31, 1954, awarded V. Sokurenko the degree of Candidate of Law. In addition, it is necessary to explain the place of defense of the candidate's thesis by V. Sokurenko. As it is known, the Institute of State and Law of the USSR has its history since 1925, when, in accordance with the resolution of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of March 25, 1925, the Institute of Soviet Construction was established at the Communist Academy. In 1936, the Institute became part of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and in 1938 it was reorganized into the Institute of Law of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1941–1943 it was evacuated to Tashkent. In 1960-1991 it was called the Institute of State and Law of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In Ukraine, there is the Institute of State and Law named after V. Koretsky of the NAS of Ukraine – a leading research institution in Ukraine of legal profile, founded in 1949. It is noted that, as a graduate student, V. Sokurenko read a course on the history of political doctrines, conducted special seminars on the theory of state and law. After graduating from graduate school and defending his thesis, from October 1, 1953 he was enrolled as a senior lecturer and then associate professor at the Department of Theory and History of State and Law at the Faculty of Law of the Lviv State University named after Ivan Franko. By the decision of the Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Higher Education of the USSR of December 18, 1957, V. Sokurenko was awarded the academic title of associate professor of the «Department of Theory and History of State and Law». V. Sokurenko took an active part in public life. During 1947-1951 he was a member of the party bureau of the party organization of LSU, worked as a chairman of the trade union committee of the university, from 1955 to 1957 he was a secretary of the party committee of the university. He delivered lectures for the population of Lviv region. Particularly, he lectured in Turka, Chervonohrad, and Yavoriv. He made reports to the party leaders, Soviet workers as well as business leaders. He led a philosophical seminar at the Faculty of Law. He was a deputy of the Lviv City Council of People's Deputies in 1955-1957 and 1975-1978. In December 1967, he defended his doctoral thesis on the topic: «Development of progressive political thought in Ukraine (until the early twentieth century)». The defense of the doctoral thesis was approved by the Higher Attestation Commission on June 14, 1968. During 1960-1990 he headed the Department of Theory and History of State and Law; in 1962-68 and 1972-77 he was the dean of the Law Faculty of the Ivan Franko Lviv State University. In connection with the criticism of the published literature, on September 10, 1977, V. Sokurenko wrote a statement requesting his dismissal from the post of Dean of the Faculty of Law due to deteriorating health. During 1955-1965 he was on research trips to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Austria, and Bulgaria. From August 1966 to March 1967, in particular, he spent seven months in the United States, England and Canada as a UN Fellow in the Department of Human Rights. From April to May 1968, he was a member of the government delegation to the International Conference on Human Rights in Iran for one month. He spoke, in addition to Ukrainian, English, Polish and Russian. V. Sokurenko played an important role in initiating the study of an important discipline at the Faculty of Law of the Lviv University – History of Political and Legal Studies, which has been studying the history of the emergence and development of theoretical knowledge about politics, state, law, ie the process of cognition by people of the phenomena of politics, state and law at different stages of history in different nations, from early statehood and modernity. Professor V. Sokurenko actively researched the problems of the theory of state and law, the history of Ukrainian legal and political thought. He was one of the first legal scholars in the USSR to begin research on the basics of legal deontology. V. Sokurenko conducted extensive research on the development of basic requirements for the professional and legal responsibilities of a lawyer, similar to the requirements for a doctor. In further research, the scholar analyzed the legal responsibilities, prospects for the development of the basics of professional deontology. In addition, he considered medical deontology from the standpoint of a lawyer, law and morality, focusing on internal (spiritual) processes, calling them «the spirit of law.» The main direction of V. Sokurenko's research was the problems of the theory of state and law, the history of legal and political studies. The main scientific works of professor V. Sokurenko include: «The main directions in the development of progressive state and legal thought in Ukraine: 16th – 19th centuries» (1958) (Russian), «Democratic doctrines about the state and law in Ukraine in the second half of the 19th century (M. Drahomanov, S. Podolynskyi, A. Terletskyi)» (1966), «Law. Freedom. Equality» (1981, co-authored) (in Russian), «State and legal views of Ivan Franko» (1966), «Socio-political views of Taras Shevchenko (to the 170th anniversary of his birth)» (1984); «Political and legal views of Ivan Franko (to the 130th anniversary of his birth)» (1986) (in Russian) and others. V. Sokurenko died on November 22, 1994 and was buried in Holoskivskyi Cemetery in Lviv. Volodymyr Sokurenko left a bright memory in the hearts of a wide range of scholars, colleagues and grateful students. The 100th anniversary of the Scholar is a splendid opportunity to once again draw attention to the rich scientific heritage of the lawyer, which is an integral part of the golden fund of Ukrainian legal science and education. It needs to be studied, taken into account and further developed.

Abstract :The Covid-19 pandemic has slowed the pace of economic growth in Indonesia. As a result, several business sectors in the community experienced a decline, so the state issued a legal policy to take steps to resolve it. Legal politics as a form of government policy in an effort to restore the national economy is a necessity. This article uses a type of normative juridical research method, with a statutory and conceptual approach, legal materials (primary, secondary, tertiary) are analyzed using the content analysis method. This article shows and emphasizes the urgency of the government's legal politics in efforts to recover the national economy due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the process of its formation, it certainly requires a comprehensive, integrated and targeted policy set. The 1945 Constitution Article 22 paragraphs (1-3) provides space for the government to stipulate Perpu No. 1 of 2020 becomes Law No. 2 of 2020 as a legal umbrella in an effort to maintain the resilience of all elements of the nation from all threats that endanger the safety of the people of the nation and state. The role of the government's legal policy in national economic recovery has a central position in anticipating a fragile "system" and management. The national economic recovery policy cannot be separated from the legal politics policy itself, of course by taking into account the principles of prudence, good faith and full integrity and remains based on the principles of good governance, accountability, and transparency.Keyword: Legal Politics, Economic Recovery, Covid-19, Economic Constitution.Abstrak :Pandemi Covid-19 memperlambat laju pertumbuhan ekonomi di Indonesia. Akibatnya beberapa sektor usaha bisnis di masyarakat mengalami penurunan, sehingga negara mengeluarkan kebijakan hukum untuk mengambil langkah penyelesaian. Politik hukum sebagai bentuk kebijakan pemerintah dalam upaya pemulihan ekonomi nasional menjadi keniscayaan. Artikel ini menggunakan jenis metode penelitian yuridis normatif, dengan pendekatan perundang-undangan dan konseptual, bahan hukum (primer, sekunder, tersier) dianalisis menggunakan metode content analysis. Artikel ini menunjukan dan menekankan urgensi politik hukum pemerintah dalam upaya pemulihan ekonomi nasional akibat pandemi Covid-19. Dalam proses pembentukannya tentu membutuhkan perangkat kebijakan yang komprehensif, terintegrasi dan tepat sasaran. Konstitusi UUD 1945 Pasal 22 ayat (1-3) memberikan ruang bagi pemerintah menetapkan Perpu No. 1 Tahun 2020 menjadi UU No. 2 Tahun 2020 sebagai payung hukum dalam upaya dan menjaga ketahanan seluruh elemen bangsa dari segala ancaman yang membahayakan keselamatan masyarakat bangsa dan negara. Peran kebijakan hukum pemerintah dalam pemulihan ekonomi nasional, memiliki kedudukan sentral guna mengantisipasi “sistem” dan manajeman yang rapuh. Kebijakan pemulihan ekonomi nasional tidak lepas dari kebijakan politik hukum itu sendiri, tentu dengan memperhatikan prinsip-prinsip kehati-hatian, itikad baik dan penuh integritas serta tetap berlandaskan pada asas tata kelola yang baik, akuntabilitas, dan transparansi.Kata Kunci : Politik Hukum, Pemulihan Ekonomi, Covid-19, Konstitusi Ekonomi.Abdullah, Irwan. “COVID-19: Threat and Fear in Indonesia.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 12, no. 5 (July 2020): 488–90. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0000878.Adhe, Kartika Rinakit, Rohmatul Maulidiya, Muchamad Arif Al Ardha, Wulan Patria Saroinsong, and Sri Widayati. “Learning During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Correlation Between Income Levels And Parental Roles.” Jurnal Obsesi : Jurnal Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini 5, no. 1 (June 8, 2020): 293-302–302. https://doi.org/10.31004/obsesi.v5i1.554.Ali, Imran, and Omar M. L. Alharbi. “COVID-19: Disease, Management, Treatment, and Social Impact.” The Science of the Total Environment 728 (August 1, 2020): 138861. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138861.Altig, Dave, Scott Baker, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Scarlet Chen, Steven J. Davis, et al. “Economic Uncertainty before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Journal of Public Economics 191 (November 1, 2020): 104274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104274.Asshiddiqie, Jimly. “Memperkenalkan Gagasan Konstitusi Ekonomi.” Jurnal Hukum PRIORIS 3, no. 2 (May 17, 2016): 1–26.Astomo, Putera. “Pembentukan Undang-Undang dalam Rangka Pembaharuan Hukum Nasional Di Era Demokrasi.” Jurnal Konstitusi 11, no. 3 (May 20, 2016): 577–99. https://doi.org/10.31078/jk%x.Bhuiyan, A. K. M. Israfil, Najmuj Sakib, Amir H. Pakpour, Mark D. Griffiths, and Mohammed A. Mamun. “COVID-19-Related Suicides in Bangladesh Due to Lockdown and Economic Factors: Case Study Evidence from Media Reports.” International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, May 15, 2020, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-020-00307-y.Bonal, Xavier, and Sheila González. “The Impact of Lockdown on the Learning Gap: Family and School Divisions in Times of Crisis.” International Review of Education, September 15, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-020-09860-z.Burhanuddin, Chairul Ihsan, and Muhammad Nur Abdi. “KRISIS EKONOMI GLOBAL DARI DAMPAK PENYEBARAN VIRUS CORONA (COVID-19).” AkMen JURNAL ILMIAH 17, no. 1 (March 31, 2020): 90–98.Chapra, M. Umer. Islam and the Economic Challenge. Leicester: Islamic Foundation, 2003.Coccia, Mario. “The Relation between Length of Lockdown, Numbers of Infected People and Deaths of Covid-19, and Economic Growth of Countries: Lessons Learned to Cope with Future Pandemics Similar to Covid-19 and to Constrain the Deterioration of Economic System.” The Science of the Total Environment 775 (June 25, 2021): 145801. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.145801.Dewantara, Reka, and Dien Nufitasari. “POLITIK HUKUM PENGATURAN MENGENAI TINDAKAN PENCEGAHAN NON PERFORMING LOAN PADA BANK DALAM MASA PANDEMIK DENGAN PENDEKATAN KONSEP BIFURKASI HUKUM.” Jurnal Bina Mulia Hukum 6, no. 1 (September 30, 2021): 66–83. https://doi.org/10.23920/jbmh.v6i1.176.Fitria, Tira Nur. “Kontribusi Ekonomi Islam Dalam Pembangunan Ekonomi Nasional.” Jurnal Ilmiah Ekonomi Islam 2, no. 03 (November 19, 2016). https://doi.org/10.29040/jiei.v2i03.3.Friedman, Lawrence M. Hukum Amerika: Sebuah Pengantar. Translated by Wisnu Basuki. Jakarta: PT. Tatanusa, 2001. http://books.google.com/books?id=0Bg7AQAAIAAJ.Gupta, Anubhab, Heng Zhu, Miki Khanh Doan, Aleksandr Michuda, and Binoy Majumder. “Economic Impacts of the COVID−19 Lockdown in a Remittance-Dependent Region.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 103, no. 2 (2021): 466–85. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajae.12178.Hermanto, Asep Bambang. “Pandangan Tentang Apakah Politik Hukum Itu?” Jurnal Hukum dan Bisnis (Selisik) 5, no. 2 (December 31, 2019): 31–43. https://doi.org/10.35814/selisik.v5i2.1687.Indaryanto, Wisnu. “DAMPAK PANDEMI COVID-19 DAN URGENSI PEMBENTUKAN PERATURAN DAERAH TENTANG BANTUAN HUKUM.” Jurnal Legislasi Indonesia 18, no. 3 (September 30, 2021): 309–23. https://doi.org/10.54629/jli.v18i3.777.“Indonesia: Expanding Access to Islamic Finance for SMEs.” Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.firstinitiative.org/stories/indonesia-expanding-access-islamic-finance-smes.KAHF, Monzer. Ekonomi Islam : Telaah Analitik Terhadap Fungsi Sistem Ekonomi Islam. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar, 1995.Kurniawan, Muhamad Beni. “Politik Hukum Pemerintah dalam Penanganan Pandemi Covid-19 Ditinjau dari Perspektif Hak Asasi atas Kesehatan.” Jurnal HAM 12, no. 1 (April 22, 2021): 37–56. https://doi.org/10.30641/ham.2021.12.37-56.Mahfud MD", Moh. Membangun politik hukum, menegakkan konstitusi. Jakarta: Rajawali Pers, 2010.Masoed, Mochtar. Ekonomi-politik internasional dan pembangunan. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar, 1994.MD, Mahfud, and Abdul Gani. “Membangun Politik Menegakkan Konstitusi.” In Membangun Politik Hukum, Menegakkan Konstitusi. Jakarta: Konstitusi Press, 2012.Mikhael, Lefri. “Covid-19 Vaccination as Part of The Basic Right to Health, Should It Be Mandatory During The Covid-19 Pandemic.” SASI 27, no. 4 (November 27, 2021): 423–29. https://doi.org/10.47268/sasi.v27i4.682.Otoritas Jasa Keuangan. “Syariah.” Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.ojk.go.id/id/kanal/syariah/Pages/Perbankan-Syariah.aspx.Radjagukguk, Erman. Peranan Hukum Dalam Pembangunan Pada Era Globalisasi : Implikasinya Bagi Pendidikan Hukum Di Indonesia. Jakarta: UI Press, 1997. http://lib.ui.ac.id.Rahardjo, Satjipto. Ilmu Hukum. Bandung: Citra Aditya Bakti, 2013.“Resesi Ekonomi Indonesia: Pemerintah Disarankan Fokus ‘menangani Pandemi’ Demi Perbaikan Ekonomi - BBC News Indonesia.” Accessed December 31, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/indonesia/indonesia-53152994.Sadeq, AbulHasan Muhammad. Development Issues in Islam. Kuala Lumpur: Research Centre IIUM, 2006.Santoso, Yusuf Imam. “Ini Delapan Dampak Negatif Bagi Perekonomian Indonesia Akibat Wabah Virus Corona.” Accessed December 31, 2021. https://nasional.kontan.co.id/news/ini-delapan-dampak-negatif-bagi-perekonomian-indonesia-akibat-wabah-virus-corona.Satria, Adhi Putra. “Sibernetika Talcott Parsons: Suatu Analisis Terhadap Pelaksanaan Omnibus Law Dalam Pembentukan Undang-Undang Cipta Lapangan Kerja Di Indonesia.” Indonesian State Law Review (ISLRev) 2, no. 2 (May 28, 2020): 111–18. https://doi.org/10.15294/islrev.v2i2.37317.Sen, Amartya Kumar. Beyond the Crisis: Development Strategies in Asia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000.Silva Neto, Raimundo Monteiro da, Cicero Jonas Rodrigues Benjamim, Poliana Moreira de Medeiros Carvalho, and Modesto Leite Rolim Neto. “Psychological Effects Caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic in Health Professionals: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis.” Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology Biological Psychiatry 104 (January 10, 2021): 110062. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pnpbp.2020.110062.Simanjuntak, Rico Afrido. “Pemerintah Tak Ingin Tiru Italia Dan India Gagal Dengan Lockdown.” Accessed December 31, 2021. https://nasional.sindonews.com/berita/1575424/15/pemerintah-tak-ingin-tiru-italia-dan-india-gagal-dengan-lockdown.Soemitro, Ronny Hanitijo. Perspektif Sosial Dalam Pemahaman Masalah-Masalah Hukum. Semarang: CV. Agung, 1989.Sudirman, Sudirman, Ramadhita Ramadhita, Syabbul Bachri, Erfaniah Zuhriah, and Zaenul Mahmudi. “The Family Corner for the Post-COVID 19 Revitalization of Family Function.” Samarah: Jurnal Hukum Keluarga Dan Hukum Islam 5, no. 1 (June 30, 2021): 88–107. https://doi.org/10.22373/sjhk.v5i1.9122.Sugianto, Danang. “Seberapa Dahsyat Efek Corona Ke Ekonomi RI?” Accessed December 31, 2021. https://finance.detik.com/berita-ekonomi-bisnis/d-5055905/seberapa-dahsyat-efek-corona-ke-ekonomi-ri.Vago, Steven, and Steven E Barkan. Law and Society. Milton: Taylor Francis Group, 2021. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6507082.Wang, Chunlei, Dake Wang, Jaffar Abbas, Kaifeng Duan, and Riaqa Mubeen. “Global Financial Crisis, Smart Lockdown Strategies, and the COVID-19 Spillover Impacts: A Global Perspective Implications From Southeast Asia.” Frontiers in Psychiatry 12 (2021): 1099. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.643783.Wildan, Muhammad. “Pertumbuhan Ekonomi Global Diprediksi -2,2 Persen Bagaimana Dampaknya Ke RI?” Accessed December 31, 2021. https://ekonomi.bisnis.com/read/20200414/9/1226850/pertumbuhan-ekonomi-global-diprediksi-22-persen-bagaimana-dampaknya-ke-ri.Zuraya, Nidia. “Tiga Dampak Besar Pandemi Covid-19 Bagi Ekonomi RI | Republika Online.” Accessed December 31, 2021. https://republika.co.id/berita/qdgt5p383/tiga-dampak-besar-pandemi-covid-19-bagiekonomi-ri.

The paper focuses on the evolution of Romanian political turmoil during the timeframe 1 – 6 March 1945 in the light of new information from British documents that provides a comprehensive analysis.As occupying Soviets required the dismissal of the Rădescu Government, King Michael had to accept. The Romanian King and the democratic/historical parties hoped to form a national union Government, excluding as before Antonescu’s collaborators and Legionaries, based on the percentage held by each party in the Rădescu Government. With Soviet help, Petru Groza, one of the leading members of the National Democratic Front, dominated by Communists, was nominated Prime Minister by the King. Groza offerred only a minimal participation to the historical parties, which rejected the proposal argumenting they were representing the political majority of the Romanian people. Warned by the Soviets, King Michael had to accept the installment of the Groza Government. The new Government informally represented the first Communist Government of Romania.

This essay presents a critical account of the social and political history of postcommunist Romania from the time of the violent overthrow of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s communist dictatorial regime in 1989 to the writing of the essay in 1995. King Michael chronicles the processes through which power in Romania following 1989 was quickly seized by representatives of the former Communist Party and the communist secret police (Departamentul Securităţii Statului or Securitate). Led by Ion Iliescu, a former communist leader and one-time protégé of Ceauşescu, a powerful group of politicians came to dominate the National Salvation Front, an originally anticommunist political organization that held power following the coup. Through manipulation of the media and voting processes and imposition of a flawed new constitution, Iliescu ensured the ascendancy of his Party of Social Democracy during the first half of the 1990s. The essay critiques the course of events and laments the faltering pace of both economic and political reform resulting from the stagnant Romanian political situation and the persistence of former communist leaders in government. Additionally, although not as its central focus, King Michael argues that a restoration of the Romanian monarchy could help to stabilize and improve the country’s political fortunes.

Romania was considered a defeated country in the World War II and was ocuppied by the Red Army, under Armistice, supervised by the Soviet Union, the United States of America and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.On the 6th of March 1945 the Soviets imposed to King Mihai the loyal Groza Government, found unacceptable by the USA and the UK. Encouraged by those two powers, Mihai dismissed the Government but Groza stayed in power as the King and the opposition could not match the Red Army. Mihai addressed the three powers in the matter and refused any collaboration with the Government, including the signing of Royal Decrees for approving laws made only by the Government, after the 21st of August 1945 marking the beginning of the so-called RoyalStrike, The Government used all sorts of pressure in order that the King should resume his duties and warned him he would be deposed. In September the Government approached the Soviets in order to assume the Royal Prerogative but the Groza Cabinet continued to rule Romania as the only political power neglecting the King.In December, the Soviets and the Romanian Communists that dominated the Cabinet thought about a Regency Council under their control but the Allies’s Moscow Conference proposed Mihai to add two ministers of the opposition. Provided only with the opposition’s help, the King had to accept in January 1946 and ended unsuccessfully the Royal Strike.

Romania was considered a defeated country in the World War II and was ocuppied by the Red Army, under Armistice, supervised by the Soviet Union, the United States of America and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.On the 6th of March 1945 the Soviets imposed to King Mihai the loyal Groza Government, found unacceptable by the USA and the UK. Encouraged by those two powers, Mihai dismissed the Government but Groza stayed in power as the King and the opposition could not match the Red Army. Mihai addressed the three powers in the matter and refused any collaboration with the Government, including the signing of Royal Decrees for approving laws made only by the Government, after the 21st of August 1945 marking the beginning of the so-called RoyalStrike, The Government used all sorts of pressure in order that the King should resume his duties and warned him he would be deposed. In September the Government approached the Soviets in order to assume the Royal Prerogative but the Groza Cabinet continued to rule Romania as the only political power neglecting the King.In December, the Soviets and the Romanian Communists that dominated the Cabinet thought about a Regency Council under their control but the Allies’s Moscow Conference proposed Mihai to add two ministers of the opposition. Provided only with the opposition’s help, the King had to accept in January 1946 and ended unsuccessfully the Royal Strike.

Abstract The efficiency-driven trend towards amalgamation characterising local government reforms in Europe seems to have escaped Romania, which displays a significant increase in the number of local governments post-1989. This is the result of rural first-tier local governments splitting into smaller units. The paper examines objective factors and subjective motivations that have shaped the behaviour of both national and local actors in dealing with territorial reform. First, it explores the rationale and rationality of a central government initiative to facilitate municipal splits against a set of criteria derived from the literature. Second, it examines the municipal splits occurring between 1991 and 2018 against alternative or concurring explanations developed in the literature based on economic, socio-cultural and political elements. The paper argues that in the highly charged political context of the post-communist countries it is reasonable to expect a dominance of subjective rather than objective factors in decision-making on territorial reform.

+e fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu regime in Romania in 1989 showed not only the collapse of a political system unable to survive its own internal contradictions and unable to o=er alternatives to the capitalist model operating across the Iron Curtain, but the end of a system whose land policy were based on a public and cooperative agriculture promotion. +ose agriculture policies were dismantled by the National Salvation Front (FSN) inmediately when that transition government was empowered after january 1990, only one month later of the 1989 December Revolution. However, the especialized literature has focused extensively in addressing the 1991 land reform, devoting less attention than it deserves, due to its importance, to the 'rst political and legal decisions of the FSN took to lay the groundwork of the future land privatization one year before. +e paper deals with the exposition and the analysis of the agro-liberal measures enacted to dismantling the collective agriculture of Romania by the predemocratic transitional government in 1990.

IntroductionFor over five years, Romanians have been using their bodies in public spaces to challenge politicians’ disregard for the average citizen. In a region low in standards of civic engagement, such as voter turnout and petition signing, Romanian people’s “citizenship of the streets” has stopped environmentally destructive mining in 2013, ousted a corrupt cabinet in 2015, and blocked legislation legalising abuse of public office in 2017 (Solnit 214). This article explores the democratic affordances of collective resistive walking, by focusing on Romania’s capital, Bucharest. I illustrate how walking in protest of political corruption cultivates a democratic public and reconfigures city spaces as spaces of democratic engagement, in the context of increased illiberalism in the region. I examine two sites of protest: the Parliament Palace and Victoriei Square. The former is a construction emblematic of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and symbol of an authoritarian regime, whose surrounding area protestors reclaim as a civic space. The latter—a central part of the city bustling with the life of cafes, museums, bike lanes, and nearby parks—hosts the Government and has become an iconic site for pro-democratic movements. Spaces of Democracy: The Performativity of Public Assemblies Democracies are active achievements, dependent not only on the solidity of institutions —e.g., a free press and a constitution—but on people’s ability and desire to communicate about issues of concern and to occupy public space. Communicative approaches to democratic theory, formulated as inquiries into the public sphere and the plurality and evolution of publics, often return to establish the significance of public spaces and of bodies in the maintenance of our “rhetorical democracies” (Hauser). Speech and assembly, voice and space are sides of the same coin. In John Dewey’s work, communication is the main “loyalty” of democracy: the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in the uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. (Dewey qtd. in Asen 197, emphasis added) Dewey asserts the centrality of communication in the same breath that he affirms the spatial infrastructure supporting it.Historically, Richard Sennett explains, Athenian democracy has been organised around two “spaces of democracy” where people assembled: the agora or town square and the theatre or Pnyx. While the theatre has endured as the symbol of democratic communication, with its ideal of concentrated attention on the argument of one speaker, Sennett illuminates the square as an equally important space, one without which deliberation in the Pnyx would be impossible. In the agora, citizens cultivate an ability to see, expect, and think through difference. In its open architecture and inclusiveness, Sennett explains, the agora affords the walker and dweller a public space to experience, in a quick, fragmentary, and embodied way, the differences and divergences in fellow citizens. Through visual scrutiny and embodied exposure, the square thus cultivates “an outlook favorable to discussion of differing views and conflicting interests”, useful for deliberation in the Pnyx, and the capacity to recognise strangers as part of the imagined democratic community (19). Also stressing the importance of spaces for assembly, Jürgen Habermas’s historical theorisation of the bourgeois public sphere moves the functions of the agora to the modern “third places” (Oldenburg) of the civic society emerging in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe: coffee houses, salons, and clubs. While Habermas’ conceptualization of a unified bourgeois public has been criticised for its class and gender exclusivism, and for its normative model of deliberation and consensus, such criticism has also opened paths of inquiry into the rhetorical pluralism of publics and into the democratic affordances of embodied performativity. Thus, unlike Habermas’s assumption of a single bourgeois public, work on twentieth and twenty-first century publics has attended to their wide variety in post-modern societies (e.g., Bruce; Butler; Delicath and DeLuca; Fraser; Harold and DeLuca; Hauser; Lewis; Mckinnon et al.; Pezzullo; Rai; Tabako). In contrast to the Habermasian close attention to verbal argumentation, such criticism prioritizes the embodied (performative, aesthetic, and material) ways in which publics manifest their attention to common issues. From suffragists to environmentalists and, most recently, anti-precarity movements across the globe, publics assemble and move through shared space, seeking to break hegemonies of media representation by creating media events of their own. In the process, Judith Butler explains, such embodied assemblies accomplish much more. They disrupt prevalent logics and dominant feelings of disposability, precarity, and anxiety, at the same time that they (re)constitute subjects and increasingly privatised spaces into citizens and public places of democracy, respectively. Butler proposes that to best understand recent protests we need to read collective assembly in the current political moment of “accelerating precarity” and responsibilisation (10). Globally, increasingly larger populations are exposed to economic insecurity and precarity through government withdrawal from labor protections and the diminishment of social services, to the profit of increasingly monopolistic business. A logic of self-investment and personal responsibility accompanies such structural changes, as people understand themselves as individual market actors in competition with other market actors rather than as citizens and community members (Brown). In this context, public assembly would enact an alternative, insisting on interdependency. Bodies, in such assemblies, signify both symbolically (their will to speak against power) and indexically. As Butler describes, “it is this body, and these bodies, that require employment, shelter, health care, and food, as well as a sense of a future that is not the future of unpayable debt” (10). Butler describes the function of these protests more fully:[P]lural enactments […] make manifest the understanding that a situation is shared, contesting the individualizing morality that makes a moral norm of economic self-sufficiency precisely […] when self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly unrealizable. Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech, and silence are all aspects of a sudden assembly, an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics […] [T]he bodies assembled ‘say’ we are not disposable, even if they stand silently. (18)Though Romania is not included in her account of contemporary protest movements, Butler’s theoretical account aptly describes both the structural and ideological conditions, and the performativity of Romanian protestors. In Romania, citizens have started to assemble in the streets against austerity measures (2012), environmental destruction (2013), fatal infrastructures (2015) and against the government’s corruption and attempts to undermine the Judiciary (from February 2017 onward). While, as scholars have argued (Olteanu and Beyerle; Gubernat and Rammelt), political corruption has gradually crystallised into the dominant and enduring framework for the assembled publics, post-communist corruption has been part and parcel of the neoliberalisation of Central and Eastern-European societies after the fall of communism. In the region, Leslie Holmes explains, former communist elites or the nomenklatura, have remained the majority political class after 1989. With political power and under the shelter of political immunity, nomenklatura politicians “were able to take ethically questionable advantage in various ways […] of the sell-off of previously state-owned enterprises” (Holmes 12). The process through which the established political class became owners of a previously state-owned economy is known as “nomenklatura privatization”, a common form of political corruption in the region, Holmes explains (12). Such practices were common knowledge among a cynical population through most of the 1990s and the 2000s. They were not broadly challenged in an ideological milieu attached, as Mihaela Miroiu, Isabela Preoteasa, and Jerzy Szacki argued, to extreme forms of liberalism and neoliberalism, ideologies perceived by people just coming out of communism as anti-ideology. Almost three decades since the fall of communism, in the face of unyielding levels of poverty (Zaharia; Marin), the decaying state of healthcare and education (Bilefsky; “Education”), and migration rates second only to war-torn Syria (Deletant), Romanian protestors have come to attribute the diminution of life in post-communism to the political corruption of the established political class (“Romania Corruption Report”; “Corruption Perceptions”). Following systematic attempts by the nomenklatura-heavy governing coalition to undermine the judiciary and institutionalise de facto corruption of public officials (Deletant), protestors have been returning to public spaces on a weekly basis, de-normalising the political cynicism and isolation serving the established political class. Mothers Walking: Resignifying Communist Spaces, Imagining the New DemosOn 11 July 2018, a protest of mothers was streamed live by Corruption Kills (Corupția ucide), a Facebook group started by activist Florin Bădiță after a deadly nightclub fire attributed to the corruption of public servants, in 2015 (Commander). Organized protests at the time pressured the Social-Democratic cabinet into resignation. Corruption Kills has remained a key activist platform, organising assemblies, streaming live from demonstrations, and sharing personal acts of dissent, thus extending the life of embodied assemblies. In the mothers’ protest video, women carrying babies in body-wraps and strollers walk across the intersection leading to the Parliament Palace, while police direct traffic and ensure their safety (“Civil Disobedience”). This was an unusual scene for many reasons. Walkers met at the entrance to the Parliament Palace, an area most emblematic of the former regime. Built by Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu and inspired by Kim Il-sung’s North Korean architecture, the current Parliament building and its surrounding plaza remain, in the words of Renata Salecl, “one of the most traumatic remnants of the communist regime” (90). The construction is the second largest administrative building in the world, after the Pentagon, a size matching the ambitions of the dictator. It bears witness to the personal and cultural sacrifices the construction and its surrounded plaza required: the displacement of some 40,000 people from old neighbourhood Uranus, the death of reportedly thousands of workers, and the flattening of churches, monasteries, hospitals, schools (Parliament Palace). This arbitrary construction carved out of the old city remains a symbol of an authoritarian relation with the nation. As Salecl puts it, Ceaușescu’s project tried to realise the utopia of a new communist “centre” and created an artificial space as removed from the rest of the city as the leader himself was from the needs of his people. Twenty-nine years after the fall of communism, the plaza of the Parliament Palace remains as suspended from the life of the city as it was during the 1980s. The trees lining the boulevard have grown slightly and bike lanes are painted over decaying stones. Still, only few people walk by the neo-classical apartment buildings now discoloured and stained by weather and time. Salecl remarks on the panoptic experience of the Parliament Palace: “observed from the avenue, [the palace] appears to have no entrance; there are only numerous windows, which give the impression of an omnipresent gaze” (95). The building embodies, for Salecl, the logic of surveillance of the communist regime, which “created the impression of omnipresence” through a secret police that rallied members among regular citizens and inspired fear by striking randomly (95).Against this geography steeped in collective memories of fear and exposure to the gaze of the state, women turn their children’s bodies and their own into performances of resistance that draw on the rhetorical force of communist gender politics. Both motherhood and childhood were heavily regulated roles under Ceaușescu’s nationalist-socialist politics of forced birth, despite the official idealisation of both. Producing children for the nationalist-communist state was women’s mandated expression of citizenship. Declaring the foetus “the socialist property of the whole society”, in 1966 Ceaușescu criminalised abortion for women of reproductive ages who had fewer than four children, and, starting 1985, less than five children (Ceaușescu qtd. in Verdery). What followed was “a national tragedy”: illegal abortions became the leading cause of death for fertile women, children were abandoned into inhumane conditions in the infamous orphanages, and mothers experienced the everyday drama of caring for families in an economy of shortages (Kligman 364). The communist politicisation of natality during communist Romania exemplifies one of the worst manifestations of the political as biopolitical. The current maternal bodies and children’s bodies circulating in the communist-iconic plaza articulate past and present for Romanians, redeploying a traumatic collective memory to challenge increasingly authoritarian ambitions of the governing Social Democratic Party. The images of caring mothers walking in protest with their babies furthers the claims that anti-corruption publics have made in other venues: that the government, in their indifference and corruption, is driving millions of people, usually young, out of the country, in a braindrain of unprecedented proportions (Ursu; Deletant; #vavedemdinSibiu). In their determination to walk during the gruelling temperatures of mid-July, in their youth and their babies’ youth, the mothers’ walk performs the contrast between their generation of engaged, persistent, and caring citizens and the docile abused subject of a past indexed by the Ceaușescu-era architecture. In addition to performing a new caring imagined community (Anderson), women’s silent, resolute walk on the crosswalk turns a lifeless geography, heavy with the architectural traces of authoritarian history, into a public space that holds democratic protest. By inhabiting the cultural role of mothers, protestors disarmed state authorities: instead of the militarised gendarmerie usually policing protestors the Victoriei Square, only traffic police were called for the mothers’ protest. The police choreographed cars and people, as protestors walked across the intersection leading to the Parliament. Drivers, usually aggressive and insouciant, now moved in concert with the protestors. The mothers’ walk, immediately modeled by people in other cities (Cluj-Napoca), reconfigured a car-dominated geography and an unreliable, driver-friendly police, into a civic space that is struggling to facilitate the citizens’ peaceful disobedience. The walkers’ assembly thus begins to constitute the civic character of the plaza, collecting “the space itself […] the pavement and […] the architecture [to produce] the public character of that material environment” (Butler 71). It demonstrates the possibility of a new imagined community of caring and persistent citizens, one significantly different from the cynical, disconnected, and survivalist subjects that the nomenklatura politicians, nested in the Panoptic Parliament nearby, would prefer.Persisting in the Victoriei Square In addition to strenuous physical walking to reclaim city spaces, such as the mothers’ walking, the anti-corruption public also practices walking and gathering in less taxing environments. The Victoriei Square is such a place, a central plaza that connects major boulevards with large sidewalks, functional bike lanes, and old trees. The square is the architectural meeting point of old and new, where communist apartments meet late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, in a privileged neighbourhood of villas, museums, and foreign consulates. One of these 1930s constructions is the Government building, hosting the Prime Minister’s cabinet. Demonstrators gathered here during the major protests of 2015 and 2017, and have walked, stood, and wandered in the square almost weekly since (“Past Events”). On 24 June 2018, I arrive in the Victoriei Square to participate in the protest announced on social media by Corruption Kills. There is room to move, to pause, and rest. In some pockets, people assemble to pay attention to impromptu speakers who come onto a small platform to share their ideas. Occasionally someone starts chanting “We See You!” and “Down with Corruption!” and almost everyone joins the chant. A few young people circulate petitions. But there is little exultation in the group as a whole, shared mostly among those taking up the stage or waving flags. Throughout the square, groups of familiars stop to chat. Couples and families walk their bikes, strolling slowly through the crowds, seemingly heading to or coming from the nearby park on a summer evening. Small kids play together, drawing with chalk on the pavement, or greeting dogs while parents greet each other. Older children race one another, picking up on the sense of freedom and de-centred but still purposeful engagement. The openness of the space allows one to meander and observe all these groups, performing the function of the Ancient agora: making visible the strangers who are part of the polis. The overwhelming feeling is one of solidarity. This comes partly from the possibilities of collective agency and the feeling of comfortably taking up space and having your embodiment respected, otherwise hard to come by in other spaces of the city. Everyday walking in the streets of Romanian cities is usually an exercise in hypervigilant physical prowess and self-preserving numbness. You keep your eyes on the ground to not stumble on broken pavement. You watch ahead for unmarked construction work. You live with other people’s sweat on the hot buses. You hop among cars parked on sidewalks and listen keenly for when others may zoom by. In one of the last post-socialist states to join the European Union, living with generalised poverty means walking in cities where your senses must be dulled to manage the heat, the dust, the smells, and the waiting, irresponsive to beauty and to amiable sociality. The euphemistic vocabulary of neoliberalism may describe everyday walking through individualistic terms such as “grit” or “resilience.” And while people are called to effort, creativity, and endurance not needed in more functional states, what one experiences is the gradual diminution of one’s lives under a political regime where illiberalism keeps a citizen-serving democracy at bay. By contrast, the Victoriei Square holds bodies whose comfort in each other’s presence allow us to imagine a political community where survivalism, or what Lauren Berlant calls “lateral agency”, are no longer the norm. In “showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still […] an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics” is enacted (Butler 18). In arriving to Victoriei Square repeatedly, Romanians demonstrate that there is room to breathe more easily, to engage with civility, and to trust the strangers in their country. They assert that they are not disposable, even if a neoliberal corrupt post-communist regime would have them otherwise.ConclusionBecoming a public, as Michael Warner proposes, is an ongoing process of attention to an issue, through the circulation of discourse and self-organisation with strangers. For the anti-corruption public of Romania’s past years, such ongoing work is accompanied by persistent, civil, embodied collective assembly, in an articulation of claims, bodies, and spaces that promotes a material agency that reconfigures the city and the imagined Romanian community into a more democratic one. The Romanian citizenship of the streets is particularly significant in the current geopolitical and ideological moment. In the region, increasing authoritarianism meets the alienating logics of neoliberalism, both trying to reduce citizens to disposable, self-reliant, and disconnected market actors. Populist autocrats—Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, the Peace and Justice Party in Poland, and recently E.U.-penalized Victor Orban, in Hungary—are dismantling the system of checks and balances, and posing threats to a European Union already challenged by refugee debates and Donald Trump’s unreliable alliance against authoritarianism. In such a moment, the Romanian anti-corruption public performs within the geographies of their city solidarity and commitment to democracy, demonstrating an alternative to the submissive and disconnected subjects preferred by authoritarianism and neoliberalism.Author's NoteIn addition to the anonymous reviewers, the author would like to thank Mary Tuominen and Jesse Schlotterbeck for their helpful comments on this essay.ReferencesAnderson, Benedict R. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016.Asen, Robert. “A Discourse Theory of Citizenship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189-211. Berlant, Lauren. “Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33.4 (2007): 754-80. Bilefsky, Dan. “Medical Care in Romania Comes at an Extra Cost.” New York Times, 8 Mar. 2009. 1 Sep. 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/world/europe/09bribery.html>.Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalism Poisons Everything: How Free Market Mania Threatens Education — and Democracy.” Interview by Elias Isquith. Salon, 15 June 2015. 20 May 2016 <https://www.salon.com/2015/06/15/democracy_cannot_survive_why_the_neoliberal_revolution_has_freedom_on_the_ropes/>.Bruce, Caitlin. “The Balaclava as Affect Generator: Free Pussy Riot Protests and Transnational Iconicity.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12.1 (2015): 42-62. Butler, Judith. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015.Calhoun, Craig J. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992. Cisneros, Josue David. “(Re)bordering the Civic Imaginary: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97.1 (2011): 26-49. “Civil Disobedience, Corruption Kills.” Facebook, 11 July 2018. 12 July 2018 <https://www.facebook.com/coruptia.ucide/videos/852289114959995/>. “Cluj-Napoca. Civil Disobedience.” Corruption Kills. 9 Sep. 2018 <https://www.facebook.com/coruptia.ucide/videos/847309685457938/>.Commander, Emily. “European Personality of the Year: Florin Badita, Founder of Corruption Kills.” Euronews, 31 May 2018. 12 Sep. 2018 <http://www.euronews.com/2018/05/31/european-personality-of-the-year-florin-badita-founder-of-corruption-kills>.“Corruption Perceptions Index 2017.” Transparency International, 21 Feb. 2018. 20 July 2018 <https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_perceptions_index_2017>. Deletant, Dennis. “Romania’s Protests and the PSD: Understanding the Deep Malaise That Now Exists in Romanian Society.” London School of Economics and Political Science, 31 Aug. 2018. 10 Sep. 2018 <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2018/08/31/romanias-protests-and-the-psd-understanding-the-deep-malaise-that-now-exists-in-romanian-society/>. Delicath, John W., and Kevin Michael DeLuca. “Image Events, the Public Sphere, and Argumentative Practice: The Case of Radical Environmental Groups.” Argumentation 17 (2003): 315-33. Dewey, John. “Creative Democracy—the Task before Us.” The Later Works, 1925–1953. Volume 14: 1939–1941. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. 227. “Education and Training Monitor 2017 Romania.” European Commission. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2017. 8 Sep. 2018 <https://ec.europa.eu/education/sites/education/files/monitor2017-ro_en.pdf>.Fabj, Valeria. “Motherhood as Political Voice: The Rhetoric of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.” Communication Studies 44.1 (1993): 1-18. Foss, Karen A., and Kathy L. Domenici. “Haunting Argentina: Synecdoche in the Protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87.3 (2001): 237-58. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. 109-42.Gubernat, Ruxandra, and Henry P. Rammelt. “Recreative Activism in Romania How Cultural Affiliation and Lifestyle Yield Political Engagement.” Socio.hu (2017): 143–63. 20 June 2018 <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01689629/document>.Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. 1962. Trans. T. Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1989.Harold, Christine, and Kevin Michael DeLuca. “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8.2 (2005): 263-86. Hauser, Gerard A. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia: U of South Carolina, 1999. Holmes, Leslie. Corruption: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015. Kligman, Gail. “The Politics of Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania: A Case Study in Political Culture.” East European Politics and Societies 6.3 (1992): 364–418. Lewis, Tiffany. “The Mountaineering and Wilderness Rhetorics of Washington Woman Suffragists.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 21. 2 (2018): 279 -315.Marin, Iulia. “Survival Strategies for Middle-Class Romanians.” PressOne, 28 Nov. 2016. 24 July 2018 <https://pressone.ro/strategii-de-supravietuire-in-clasa-de-mijloc-a-romaniei/>. McKinnon, Sara L., Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard. Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2016. Miroiu, Mihaela. Societatea Retro. București: Editura Trei, 1999.Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999.Olteanu, Tina, and Shaazka Beyerle. “The Romanian People versus Corruption: A Paradoxical Nexus of Protest and Adaptation.” Partecipazione e Conflitto 10.3 (2017): 797-825. 20 June 2018 <http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/paco/article/view/18551>.Parliament Palace Visitor Tour. Communication during group tour on 20 June 2018. “Past Events: Coruptia Ucide.” Facebook, n.d. 9 Aug. 2018 <https://www.facebook.com/pg/coruptia.ucide/events/?ref=page_internal>. Pezzullo, Phaedra C. “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89.4 (2003): 345-65. Preoteasa, Isabela. “Intellectuals and the Public Sphere in Post-Communist Romania: A Discourse Analytical Perspective.” Discourse & Society 13 (2002): 269-292. Rai, Candice. Democracy’s Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2016.“Romania Corruption Report.” GAN Business Anticorruption Portal, Apr. 2017. 9 Sep. 2018 <https://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/romania/>.Salecl, Renata. (Per)versions of Love and Hate. London: Verso, 2000.Sennett, Richard. The Spaces of Democracy. Ann Arbor: Goetzcraft Printers, 1998. <https://taubmancollege.umich.edu/pdfs/publications/map/wallenberg1998_richardsennett.pdf>. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Granta, 2014.Szacki, Jerzy. 1995. Liberalism after Communism. Budapest: Central European UP. Tabako, Tomasz. “Irony as a Pro-Democracy Trope: Europe’s Last Comic Revolution.” Controversia 5.2 (2007): 23-53. Ursu, Ramona. Va Vedem (We See You). Bucharest: Humanitas, 2018.“#vavedemdinSibiu. Aproape 700 de sibieni, cu bagajele în fața sediului PSD.” Turnul Sfatului, 17 Dec. 2017. 10 Sep. 2018 <http://www.turnulsfatului.ro/2017/12/17/foto-protestele-vavedemdinsibiu-aproape-700-de-sibieni-cu-bagajele-fata-sediului-psd/>.Verdery, Katherine. “From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe.” East European Politics and Societies 8.2 (1994): 225–255. Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics (Abbreviated Version).” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88.4 (2002): 413–25. Zaharia, Diana. “Poverty in Statistics.” Profit.ro. 8 Aug. 2016. 1 Sep. 2018 <https://www.profit.ro/stiri/economie/saracia-din-statistici-aproape-jumatate-dintre-salariatii-romani-raman-cu-cel-mult-1-000-lei-in-mana-dupa-taxare-15540558>.

One scenario put forward by researchers, political commentators and journalists for the collapse of North Korea has been a People’s Power (or popular) rebellion. This paper analyses why no popular rebellion has occurred in the DPRK under Kim Jong Un. It challenges the assumption that popular rebellion would happen because of widespread anger caused by a greater awareness of superior economic conditions outside the DPRK. Using Jack Goldstone’s theoretical expla-nations for the outbreak of popular rebellion, and comparisons with the 1989 Romanian and 2010–11 Tunisian transitions, this paper argues that marketi-zation has led to a loosening of state ideological control and to an influx of infor-mation about conditions in the outside world. However, unlike the Tunisian transitions—in which a new information context shaped by social media, the Al-Jazeera network and an experience of protest helped create a sense of pan-Arab solidarity amongst Tunisians resisting their government—there has been no similar ideology unifying North Koreans against their regime. There is evidence of discontent in market unrest in the DPRK, although protests between 2011 and the present have mostly been in defense of the right of people to support themselves through private trade. North Koreans believe this right has been guaranteed, or at least tacitly condoned, by the Kim Jong Un government. There has not been any large-scale explosion of popular anger because the state has not attempted to crush market activities outright under Kim Jong Un. There are other reasons why no popular rebellion has occurred in the North. Unlike Tunisia, the DPRK lacks a dissident political elite capable of leading an opposition movement, and unlike Romania, the DPRK authorities have shown some flexibility in their anti-dissent strategies, taking a more tolerant approach to protests against economic issues. Reduced levels of violence during periods of unrest and an effective system of information control may have helped restrict the expansion of unrest beyond rural areas.

The commerce was also afected of different problems: the control of the state in this domain; maintaining the private property; changing the taxe system; refuse of the romanian government to participate to Marshall Plan, proposed by U.S.A.; high prices to all merchendises; low quality of products; laws were changed (organisation of Professional Rooms).In this agitated period (1944–1948) there were necessary a series of measures that would stabilise the industry and trades. For the urban traders, an important action was the reopering of the industrial railways Oraviţa-IeşenovaVârşeţ-Timişoara, belonging to the U.D.R. Society.Between 1944–1947 took place some legislative changes, for example, the law for organizing the Professional Chambers, establishing prices for different trades, even banning some of them to get on the markets.The Severin district had to deal with some negative effects too, because the state started to controll everything and everyone from the trading domain. Its commerce was affected by the sovietic robberies and abuses from 1944–1945.The instability of the internal market, and the lack of products because of the soviet army have encouraged the traders to form societies of their own, professional organisations of traders, such as: The Society of Traders specialised in: wood, cereals, iron, meat and lambs, textiles, glass, food, skin and shoes, but all of them had to respect the government’s rules.In conclusion, the commerce in Severin between 1944–1948 was limited by the political factor and the state’s control over it.

The twentieth was, from one perspective, the democratic century — a span of one hundred years which began with no fully functioning democracies in existence anywhere on the planet (if one defines democracy as a political system in which there is both universal suffrage and competitive elections), and ended with 120 countries out of 192 classified by the Freedom House think tank as ‘democratic’. There are of course still many societies where democracy is denied or effectively neutered — the remaining outposts of state socialism, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea; most if not all of the Islamic countries; exceptional states such as Singapore, unapologetically capitalist in its economic system but resolutely authoritarian in its political culture. Many self-proclaimed democracies, including those of the UK, Australia and the US, are procedurally or conceptually flawed. Countries emerging out of authoritarian systems and now in a state of democratic transition, such as Russia and the former Soviet republics, are immersed in constant, sometimes violent struggle between reformers and reactionaries. Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were accompanied by the intimidation of parties and politicians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s increasingly populist and authoritarian approach to leadership. The same Freedom House report which describes the rise of democracy in the twentieth century acknowledges that many self-styled democracies are, at best, only ‘partly free’ in their political cultures (for detailed figures on the rise of global democracy, see the Freedom House website Democracy’s Century). Let’s not for a moment downplay these important qualifications to what can nonetheless be fairly characterised as a century-long expansion and globalisation of democracy, and the acceptance of popular sovereignty, expressed through voting for the party or candidate of one’s choice, as a universally recognised human right. That such a process has occurred, and continues in these early years of the twenty-first century, is irrefutable. In the Gaza strip, Hamas appeals to the legitimacy of a democratic election victory in its campaign to be recognised as the voice of the Palestinian people. However one judges the messianic tendencies and Islamist ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it must be acknowledged that the Iranian people elected him, and that they have the power to throw him out of government next time they vote. That was never true of the Shah. The democratic resurgence in Latin America, taking in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia among others has been a much-noted feature of international politics in recent times (Alves), presenting a welcome contrast to the dictatorships and death squads of the 1980s, even as it creates some uncomfortable dilemmas for the Bush administration (which must champion democratic government at the same time as it resents some of the choices people may make when they have the opportunity to vote). Since 9/11 a kind of democracy has expanded even to Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit at the point of a gun, and with no guarantees of survival beyond the end of military occupation by the US and its coalition allies. As this essay was being written, Pakistan’s state of emergency was ending and democratic elections scheduled, albeit in the shadow cast by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Democracy, then — imperfect and limited as it can be; grudgingly delivered though it is by political elites in many countries, and subject to attack and roll back at any time — has become a global universal to which all claim allegiance, or at least pay lip service. The scale of this transformation, which has occurred in little more than one quarter of the time elapsed since the Putney debates of 1647 and the English revolution first established the principle of the sovereignty of parliament, is truly remarkable. (Tristram Hunt quotes lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in the Guardian to the effect that the Putney debates, staged in St Mary’s church in south-west London towards the end of the English civil war, launched “the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth” – “A Jewel of Democracy”, Guardian, 26 Oct. 2007) Can it be true that less than one hundred years ago, in even the most advanced capitalist societies, 50 per cent of the people — women — did not have the right to vote? Or that black populations, indigenous or migrant, in countries such as the United States and Australia were deprived of basic citizenship rights until the 1960s and even later? Will future generations wonder how on earth it could have been that the vast majority of the people of South Africa were unable to vote until 1994, and that they were routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed when they demanded basic democratic rights? Or will they shrug and take it for granted, as so many of us who live in settled democracies already do? (In so far as ‘we’ includes the community of media and cultural studies scholars, I would argue that where there is reluctance to concede the scale and significance of democratic change, this arises out of continuing ambivalence about what ‘democracy’ means, a continuing suspicion of globalisation (in particular the globalisation of democratic political culture, still associated in some quarters with ‘the west’), and of the notion of ‘progress’ with which democracy is routinely associated. The intellectual roots of that ambivalence were various. Marxist-leninist inspired authoritarianism gripped much of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Until that moment, it was still possible for many marxians in the scholarly community to view the idea of democracy with disdain — if not quite a dirty word, then a deeply flawed, highly loaded concept which masked and preserved underlying social inequalities more than it helped resolve them. Until 1989 or thereabouts, it was possible for ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be regarded as just one kind of democratic polity by the liberal and anti-capitalist left, which often regarded the ‘proletarian’ or ‘people’s’ democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or Vietnam as legitimate alternatives to the emerging capitalist norm of one person, one vote, for constituent assemblies which had real power and accountability. In terms not very different from those used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, belief in the value of democracy was conceived by this materialist school as a kind of false consciousness. It still is, by Noam Chomsky and others who continue to view democracy as a ‘necessary illusion’ (1989) without which capitalism could not be reproduced. From these perspectives voting gave, and gives us merely the illusion of agency and power in societies where capital rules as it always did. For democracy read ‘the manufacture of consent’; its expansion read not as progressive social evolution, but the universalisation of the myth of popular sovereignty, mobilised and utilised by the media-industrial-military complex to maintain its grip.) There are those who dispute this reading of events. In the 1960s, Habermas’s hugely influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere critiqued the manner in which democracy, and the public sphere underpinning it, had been degraded by public relations, advertising, and the power of private interests. In the period since, critical scholarly research and writing on political culture has been dominated by the Habermasian discourse of democratic decline, and the pervasive pessimism of those who see democracy, and the media culture which supports it, as fatally flawed, corrupted by commercialisation and under constant threat. Those, myself included, who challenged that view with a more positive reading of the trends (McNair, Journalism and Democracy; Cultural Chaos) have been denounced as naïve optimists, panglossian, utopian and even, in my own case, a ‘neo-liberal apologist’. (See an unpublished paper by David Miller, “System Failure: It’s Not Just the Media, It’s the Whole Bloody System”, delivered at Goldsmith’s College in 2003.) Engaging as they have been, I venture to suggest that these are the discourses and debates of an era now passing into history. Not only is it increasingly obvious that democracy is expanding globally into places where it never previously reached; it is also extending inwards, within nation states, driven by demands for greater local autonomy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the citizen is now able to vote not just in Westminster parliamentary elections (which determine the political direction of the UK government), but for European elections, local elections, and elections for devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The people of London can vote for their mayor. There would by now have been devolved assemblies in the regions of England, too, had the people of the North East not voted against it in a November 2004 referendum. Notwithstanding that result, which surprised many in the New Labour government who held it as axiomatic that the more democracy there was, the better for all of us, the importance of enhancing and expanding democratic institutions, of allowing people to vote more often (and also in more efficient ways — many of these expansions of democracy have been tied to the introduction of systems of proportional representation) has become consensual, from the Mid West of America to the Middle East. The Democratic Paradox And yet, as the wave of democratic transformation has rolled on through the late twentieth and into the early twenty first century it is notable that, in many of the oldest liberal democracies at least, fewer people have been voting. In the UK, for example, in the period between 1945 and 2001, turnout at general elections never fell below 70 per cent. In 1992, the last general election won by the Conservatives before the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, turnout was 78 per cent, roughly where it had been in the 1950s. In 2001, however, as Blair’s government sought re-election, turnout fell to an historic low for the UK of 59.4 per cent, and rose only marginally to 61.4 per cent in the most recent general election of 2005. In the US presidential elections of 1996 and 2000 turnouts were at historic lows of 47.2 and 49.3 per cent respectively, rising just above 50 per cent again in 2004 (figures by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). At local level things are even worse. In only the second election for a devolved parliament in Scotland (2003) turnout was a mere 48.5 per cent, rising to 50.5 in 2007. These trends are not universal. In countries with compulsory voting, they mean very little — in Australia, where voting in parliamentary elections is compulsory, turnout averages in the 90s per cent. In France, while turnouts for parliamentary elections show a similar downward trend to the UK and the UK, presidential contests achieve turnouts of 80-plus per cent. In the UK and US, as noted, the most recent elections show modest growth in turnout from those historic lows of the late 1990s and early Noughties. There has grown, nonetheless, the perception, commonplace amongst academic commentators as well as journalists and politicians themselves, that we are living through a ‘crisis’ of democratic participation, a dangerous decline in the tendency to vote in elections which undermines the legitimacy of democracy itself. In communication scholarship a significant body of research and publication has developed around this theme, from Blumler and Gurevitch’s Crisis of Public Communication (1996), through Barnett and Gaber’s Westminster Tales (2000), to more recent studies such as Lewis et al.’s Citizens or Consumers (2005). All presume a problem of some kind with the practice of democracy and the “old fashioned ritual” of voting, as Lewis et al. describe it (2). Most link alleged inadequacies in the performance of the political media to what is interpreted as popular apathy (or antipathy) towards democracy. The media are blamed for the lack of public engagement with democratic politics which declining turnouts are argued to signal. Political journalists are said to be too aggressive and hyper-adversarial (Lloyd), behaving like the “feral beast” spoken of by Tony Blair in his 2007 farewell speech to the British people as prime minister. They are corrosively cynical and a “disaster for democracy”, as Steven Barnett and others argued in the first years of the twenty first century. They are not aggressive or adversarial enough, as the propaganda modellists allege, citing what they interpret as supine media coverage of Coalition policy in Iraq. The media put people off, rather than turn them on to democracy by being, variously, too nice or too nasty to politicians. What then, is the solution to the apparent paradox represented by the fact that there is more democracy, but less voting in elections than ever before; and that after centuries of popular struggle democratic assemblies proliferate, but in some countries barely half of the eligible voters can be bothered to participate? And what role have the media played in this unexpected phenomenon? If the scholarly community has been largely critical on this question, and pessimistic in its analyses of the role of the media, it has become increasingly clear that the one arena where people do vote more than ever before is that presented by the media, and entertainment media in particular. There has been, since the appearance of Big Brother and the subsequent explosion of competitive reality TV formats across the world, evidence of a huge popular appetite for voting on such matters as which amateur contestant on Pop Idol, or X Factor, or Fame Academy, or Operatunity goes on to have a chance of a professional career, a shot at the big time. Millions of viewers of the most popular reality TV strands queue up to register their votes on premium phone lines, the revenue from which makes up a substantial and growing proportion of the income of commercial TV companies. This explosion of voting behaviour has been made possible by the technology-driven emergence of new forms of participatory, interactive, digitised media channels which allow millions to believe that they can have an impact on the outcome of what are, at essence, game and talent shows. At the height of anxiety around the ‘crisis of democratic participation’ in the UK, observers noted that nearly 6.5 million people had voted in the Big Brother UK final in 2004. More than eight million voted during the 2004 run of the BBC’s Fame Academy series. While these numbers do not, contrary to popular belief, exceed the numbers of British citizens who vote in a general election (27.2 million in 2005), they do indicate an enthusiasm for voting which seems to contradict declining rates of democratic participation. People who will never get out and vote for their local councillor often appear more than willing to pick up the telephone or the laptop and cast a vote for their favoured reality TV contestant, even if it costs them money. It would be absurd to suggest that voting for a contestant on Big Brother is directly comparable to the act of choosing a government or a president. The latter is recognised as an expression of citizenship, with potentially significant consequences for the lives of individuals within their society. Voting on Big Brother, on the other hand, is unmistakeably entertainment, game-playing, a relatively risk-free exercise of choice — a bit of harmless fun, fuelled by office chat and relentless tabloid coverage of the contestants’ strengths and weaknesses. There is no evidence that readiness to participate in a telephone or online vote for entertainment TV translates into active citizenship, where ‘active’ means casting a vote in an election. The lesson delivered by the success of participatory media in recent years, however — first reality TV, and latterly a proliferation of online formats which encourage user participation and voting for one thing or another — is that people will vote, when they are able and motivated to do so. Voting is popular, in short, and never more so, irrespective of the level of popular participation recorded in recent elections. And if they will vote in their millions for a contestant on X Factor, or participate in competitions to determine the best movies or books on Facebook, they can presumably be persuaded to do so when an election for parliament comes around. This fact has been recognised by both media producers and politicians, and reflected in attempts to adapt the evermore sophisticated and efficient tools of participatory media to the democratic process, to engage media audiences as citizens by offering the kinds of voting opportunities in political debates, including election processes, which entertainment media have now made routinely available. ITV’s Vote for Me strand, broadcast in the run-up to the UK general election of 2005, used reality TV techniques to select a candidate who would actually take part in the forthcoming poll. The programme was broadcast in a late night, low audience slot, and failed to generate much interest, but it signalled a desire by media producers to harness the appeal of participatory media in a way which could directly impact on levels of democratic engagement. The honourable failure of Vote for Me (produced by the same team which made the much more successful live debate shows featuring prime minister Tony Blair — Ask Tony Blair, Ask the Prime Minister) might be viewed as evidence that readiness to vote in the context of a TV game show does not translate directly into voting for parties and politicians, and that the problem in this respect — the crisis of democratic participation, such that it exists — is located elsewhere. People can vote in democratic elections, but choose not to, perhaps because they feel that the act is meaningless (because parties are ideologically too similar), or ineffectual (because they see no impact of voting in their daily lives or in the state of the country), or irrelevant to their personal priorities and life styles. Voting rates have increased in the US and the UK since September 11 2001, suggesting perhaps that when the political stakes are raised, and the question of who is in government seems to matter more than it did, people act accordingly. Meantime, media producers continue to make money by developing formats and channels on the assumption that audiences wish to participate, to interact, and to vote. Whether this form of participatory media consumption for the purposes of play can be translated into enhanced levels of active citizenship, and whether the media can play a significant contributory role in that process, remains to be seen. References Alves, R.C. “From Lapdog to Watchdog: The Role of the Press in Latin America’s Democratisation.” In H. de Burgh, ed., Making Journalists. London: Routledge, 2005. 181-202. Anderson, P.J., and G. Ward (eds.). The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Barnett, S. “The Age of Contempt.” Guardian 28 October 2002. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/comment/0,12123,820577,00.html>. Barnett, S., and I. Gaber. Westminster Tales. London: Continuum, 2001. Blumler, J., and M. Gurevitch. The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1996. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Lewis, J., S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2005. Lloyd, John. What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable, 2004. McNair, B. Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Cultural Chaos: News, Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge, 2006. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McNair, Brian. "Vote!." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/01-mcnair.php>. APA Style McNair, B. (Apr. 2008) "Vote!," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/01-mcnair.php>.

The twentieth was, from one perspective, the democratic century — a span of one hundred years which began with no fully functioning democracies in existence anywhere on the planet (if one defines democracy as a political system in which there is both universal suffrage and competitive elections), and ended with 120 countries out of 192 classified by the Freedom House think tank as ‘democratic’. There are of course still many societies where democracy is denied or effectively neutered — the remaining outposts of state socialism, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea; most if not all of the Islamic countries; exceptional states such as Singapore, unapologetically capitalist in its economic system but resolutely authoritarian in its political culture. Many self-proclaimed democracies, including those of the UK, Australia and the US, are procedurally or conceptually flawed. Countries emerging out of authoritarian systems and now in a state of democratic transition, such as Russia and the former Soviet republics, are immersed in constant, sometimes violent struggle between reformers and reactionaries. Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were accompanied by the intimidation of parties and politicians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s increasingly populist and authoritarian approach to leadership. The same Freedom House report which describes the rise of democracy in the twentieth century acknowledges that many self-styled democracies are, at best, only ‘partly free’ in their political cultures (for detailed figures on the rise of global democracy, see the Freedom House website Democracy’s Century). Let’s not for a moment downplay these important qualifications to what can nonetheless be fairly characterised as a century-long expansion and globalisation of democracy, and the acceptance of popular sovereignty, expressed through voting for the party or candidate of one’s choice, as a universally recognised human right. That such a process has occurred, and continues in these early years of the twenty-first century, is irrefutable. In the Gaza strip, Hamas appeals to the legitimacy of a democratic election victory in its campaign to be recognised as the voice of the Palestinian people. However one judges the messianic tendencies and Islamist ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it must be acknowledged that the Iranian people elected him, and that they have the power to throw him out of government next time they vote. That was never true of the Shah. The democratic resurgence in Latin America, taking in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia among others has been a much-noted feature of international politics in recent times (Alves), presenting a welcome contrast to the dictatorships and death squads of the 1980s, even as it creates some uncomfortable dilemmas for the Bush administration (which must champion democratic government at the same time as it resents some of the choices people may make when they have the opportunity to vote). Since 9/11 a kind of democracy has expanded even to Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit at the point of a gun, and with no guarantees of survival beyond the end of military occupation by the US and its coalition allies. As this essay was being written, Pakistan’s state of emergency was ending and democratic elections scheduled, albeit in the shadow cast by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Democracy, then — imperfect and limited as it can be; grudgingly delivered though it is by political elites in many countries, and subject to attack and roll back at any time — has become a global universal to which all claim allegiance, or at least pay lip service. The scale of this transformation, which has occurred in little more than one quarter of the time elapsed since the Putney debates of 1647 and the English revolution first established the principle of the sovereignty of parliament, is truly remarkable. (Tristram Hunt quotes lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in the Guardian to the effect that the Putney debates, staged in St Mary’s church in south-west London towards the end of the English civil war, launched “the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth” – “A Jewel of Democracy”, Guardian, 26 Oct. 2007) Can it be true that less than one hundred years ago, in even the most advanced capitalist societies, 50 per cent of the people — women — did not have the right to vote? Or that black populations, indigenous or migrant, in countries such as the United States and Australia were deprived of basic citizenship rights until the 1960s and even later? Will future generations wonder how on earth it could have been that the vast majority of the people of South Africa were unable to vote until 1994, and that they were routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed when they demanded basic democratic rights? Or will they shrug and take it for granted, as so many of us who live in settled democracies already do? (In so far as ‘we’ includes the community of media and cultural studies scholars, I would argue that where there is reluctance to concede the scale and significance of democratic change, this arises out of continuing ambivalence about what ‘democracy’ means, a continuing suspicion of globalisation (in particular the globalisation of democratic political culture, still associated in some quarters with ‘the west’), and of the notion of ‘progress’ with which democracy is routinely associated. The intellectual roots of that ambivalence were various. Marxist-leninist inspired authoritarianism gripped much of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Until that moment, it was still possible for many marxians in the scholarly community to view the idea of democracy with disdain — if not quite a dirty word, then a deeply flawed, highly loaded concept which masked and preserved underlying social inequalities more than it helped resolve them. Until 1989 or thereabouts, it was possible for ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be regarded as just one kind of democratic polity by the liberal and anti-capitalist left, which often regarded the ‘proletarian’ or ‘people’s’ democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or Vietnam as legitimate alternatives to the emerging capitalist norm of one person, one vote, for constituent assemblies which had real power and accountability. In terms not very different from those used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, belief in the value of democracy was conceived by this materialist school as a kind of false consciousness. It still is, by Noam Chomsky and others who continue to view democracy as a ‘necessary illusion’ (1989) without which capitalism could not be reproduced. From these perspectives voting gave, and gives us merely the illusion of agency and power in societies where capital rules as it always did. For democracy read ‘the manufacture of consent’; its expansion read not as progressive social evolution, but the universalisation of the myth of popular sovereignty, mobilised and utilised by the media-industrial-military complex to maintain its grip.) There are those who dispute this reading of events. In the 1960s, Habermas’s hugely influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere critiqued the manner in which democracy, and the public sphere underpinning it, had been degraded by public relations, advertising, and the power of private interests. In the period since, critical scholarly research and writing on political culture has been dominated by the Habermasian discourse of democratic decline, and the pervasive pessimism of those who see democracy, and the media culture which supports it, as fatally flawed, corrupted by commercialisation and under constant threat. Those, myself included, who challenged that view with a more positive reading of the trends (McNair, Journalism and Democracy; Cultural Chaos) have been denounced as naïve optimists, panglossian, utopian and even, in my own case, a ‘neo-liberal apologist’. (See an unpublished paper by David Miller, “System Failure: It’s Not Just the Media, It’s the Whole Bloody System”, delivered at Goldsmith’s College in 2003.) Engaging as they have been, I venture to suggest that these are the discourses and debates of an era now passing into history. Not only is it increasingly obvious that democracy is expanding globally into places where it never previously reached; it is also extending inwards, within nation states, driven by demands for greater local autonomy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the citizen is now able to vote not just in Westminster parliamentary elections (which determine the political direction of the UK government), but for European elections, local elections, and elections for devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The people of London can vote for their mayor. There would by now have been devolved assemblies in the regions of England, too, had the people of the North East not voted against it in a November 2004 referendum. Notwithstanding that result, which surprised many in the New Labour government who held it as axiomatic that the more democracy there was, the better for all of us, the importance of enhancing and expanding democratic institutions, of allowing people to vote more often (and also in more efficient ways — many of these expansions of democracy have been tied to the introduction of systems of proportional representation) has become consensual, from the Mid West of America to the Middle East. The Democratic Paradox And yet, as the wave of democratic transformation has rolled on through the late twentieth and into the early twenty first century it is notable that, in many of the oldest liberal democracies at least, fewer people have been voting. In the UK, for example, in the period between 1945 and 2001, turnout at general elections never fell below 70 per cent. In 1992, the last general election won by the Conservatives before the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, turnout was 78 per cent, roughly where it had been in the 1950s. In 2001, however, as Blair’s government sought re-election, turnout fell to an historic low for the UK of 59.4 per cent, and rose only marginally to 61.4 per cent in the most recent general election of 2005. In the US presidential elections of 1996 and 2000 turnouts were at historic lows of 47.2 and 49.3 per cent respectively, rising just above 50 per cent again in 2004 (figures by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). At local level things are even worse. In only the second election for a devolved parliament in Scotland (2003) turnout was a mere 48.5 per cent, rising to 50.5 in 2007. These trends are not universal. In countries with compulsory voting, they mean very little — in Australia, where voting in parliamentary elections is compulsory, turnout averages in the 90s per cent. In France, while turnouts for parliamentary elections show a similar downward trend to the UK and the UK, presidential contests achieve turnouts of 80-plus per cent. In the UK and US, as noted, the most recent elections show modest growth in turnout from those historic lows of the late 1990s and early Noughties. There has grown, nonetheless, the perception, commonplace amongst academic commentators as well as journalists and politicians themselves, that we are living through a ‘crisis’ of democratic participation, a dangerous decline in the tendency to vote in elections which undermines the legitimacy of democracy itself. In communication scholarship a significant body of research and publication has developed around this theme, from Blumler and Gurevitch’s Crisis of Public Communication (1996), through Barnett and Gaber’s Westminster Tales (2000), to more recent studies such as Lewis et al.’s Citizens or Consumers (2005). All presume a problem of some kind with the practice of democracy and the “old fashioned ritual” of voting, as Lewis et al. describe it (2). Most link alleged inadequacies in the performance of the political media to what is interpreted as popular apathy (or antipathy) towards democracy. The media are blamed for the lack of public engagement with democratic politics which declining turnouts are argued to signal. Political journalists are said to be too aggressive and hyper-adversarial (Lloyd), behaving like the “feral beast” spoken of by Tony Blair in his 2007 farewell speech to the British people as prime minister. They are corrosively cynical and a “disaster for democracy”, as Steven Barnett and others argued in the first years of the twenty first century. They are not aggressive or adversarial enough, as the propaganda modellists allege, citing what they interpret as supine media coverage of Coalition policy in Iraq. The media put people off, rather than turn them on to democracy by being, variously, too nice or too nasty to politicians. What then, is the solution to the apparent paradox represented by the fact that there is more democracy, but less voting in elections than ever before; and that after centuries of popular struggle democratic assemblies proliferate, but in some countries barely half of the eligible voters can be bothered to participate? And what role have the media played in this unexpected phenomenon? If the scholarly community has been largely critical on this question, and pessimistic in its analyses of the role of the media, it has become increasingly clear that the one arena where people do vote more than ever before is that presented by the media, and entertainment media in particular. There has been, since the appearance of Big Brother and the subsequent explosion of competitive reality TV formats across the world, evidence of a huge popular appetite for voting on such matters as which amateur contestant on Pop Idol, or X Factor, or Fame Academy, or Operatunity goes on to have a chance of a professional career, a shot at the big time. Millions of viewers of the most popular reality TV strands queue up to register their votes on premium phone lines, the revenue from which makes up a substantial and growing proportion of the income of commercial TV companies. This explosion of voting behaviour has been made possible by the technology-driven emergence of new forms of participatory, interactive, digitised media channels which allow millions to believe that they can have an impact on the outcome of what are, at essence, game and talent shows. At the height of anxiety around the ‘crisis of democratic participation’ in the UK, observers noted that nearly 6.5 million people had voted in the Big Brother UK final in 2004. More than eight million voted during the 2004 run of the BBC’s Fame Academy series. While these numbers do not, contrary to popular belief, exceed the numbers of British citizens who vote in a general election (27.2 million in 2005), they do indicate an enthusiasm for voting which seems to contradict declining rates of democratic participation. People who will never get out and vote for their local councillor often appear more than willing to pick up the telephone or the laptop and cast a vote for their favoured reality TV contestant, even if it costs them money. It would be absurd to suggest that voting for a contestant on Big Brother is directly comparable to the act of choosing a government or a president. The latter is recognised as an expression of citizenship, with potentially significant consequences for the lives of individuals within their society. Voting on Big Brother, on the other hand, is unmistakeably entertainment, game-playing, a relatively risk-free exercise of choice — a bit of harmless fun, fuelled by office chat and relentless tabloid coverage of the contestants’ strengths and weaknesses. There is no evidence that readiness to participate in a telephone or online vote for entertainment TV translates into active citizenship, where ‘active’ means casting a vote in an election. The lesson delivered by the success of participatory media in recent years, however — first reality TV, and latterly a proliferation of online formats which encourage user participation and voting for one thing or another — is that people will vote, when they are able and motivated to do so. Voting is popular, in short, and never more so, irrespective of the level of popular participation recorded in recent elections. And if they will vote in their millions for a contestant on X Factor, or participate in competitions to determine the best movies or books on Facebook, they can presumably be persuaded to do so when an election for parliament comes around. This fact has been recognised by both media producers and politicians, and reflected in attempts to adapt the evermore sophisticated and efficient tools of participatory media to the democratic process, to engage media audiences as citizens by offering the kinds of voting opportunities in political debates, including election processes, which entertainment media have now made routinely available. ITV’s Vote for Me strand, broadcast in the run-up to the UK general election of 2005, used reality TV techniques to select a candidate who would actually take part in the forthcoming poll. The programme was broadcast in a late night, low audience slot, and failed to generate much interest, but it signalled a desire by media producers to harness the appeal of participatory media in a way which could directly impact on levels of democratic engagement. The honourable failure of Vote for Me (produced by the same team which made the much more successful live debate shows featuring prime minister Tony Blair — Ask Tony Blair, Ask the Prime Minister) might be viewed as evidence that readiness to vote in the context of a TV game show does not translate directly into voting for parties and politicians, and that the problem in this respect — the crisis of democratic participation, such that it exists — is located elsewhere. People can vote in democratic elections, but choose not to, perhaps because they feel that the act is meaningless (because parties are ideologically too similar), or ineffectual (because they see no impact of voting in their daily lives or in the state of the country), or irrelevant to their personal priorities and life styles. Voting rates have increased in the US and the UK since September 11 2001, suggesting perhaps that when the political stakes are raised, and the question of who is in government seems to matter more than it did, people act accordingly. Meantime, media producers continue to make money by developing formats and channels on the assumption that audiences wish to participate, to interact, and to vote. Whether this form of participatory media consumption for the purposes of play can be translated into enhanced levels of active citizenship, and whether the media can play a significant contributory role in that process, remains to be seen. References Alves, R.C. “From Lapdog to Watchdog: The Role of the Press in Latin America’s Democratisation.” In H. de Burgh, ed., Making Journalists. London: Routledge, 2005. 181-202. Anderson, P.J., and G. Ward (eds.). The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Barnett, S. “The Age of Contempt.” Guardian 28 October 2002. < http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/comment/0,12123,820577,00.html >. Barnett, S., and I. Gaber. Westminster Tales. London: Continuum, 2001. Blumler, J., and M. Gurevitch. The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1996. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Lewis, J., S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2005. Lloyd, John. What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable, 2004. McNair, B. Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Cultural Chaos: News, Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge, 2006.

History is not over and that includes media history. Jay Rosen (Zelizer & Allan 33) The media in their reporting on terrorism tend to be judgmental, inflammatory, and sensationalistic. — Susan D. Moeller (169) In short, we are directed in time, and our relation to the future is different than our relation to the past. All our questions are conditioned by this asymmetry, and all our answers to these questions are equally conditioned by it. Norbert Wiener (44) The Clash of Geopolitical Pundits America’s geo-strategic engagement with the world underwent a dramatic shift in the decade after the Cold War ended. United States military forces undertook a series of humanitarian interventions from northern Iraq (1991) and Somalia (1992) to NATO’s bombing campaign on Kosovo (1999). Wall Street financial speculators embraced market-oriented globalization and technology-based industries (Friedman 1999). Meanwhile the geo-strategic pundits debated several different scenarios at deeper layers of epistemology and macrohistory including the breakdown of nation-states (Kaplan), the ‘clash of civilizations’ along religiopolitical fault-lines (Huntington) and the fashionable ‘end of history’ thesis (Fukuyama). Media theorists expressed this geo-strategic shift in reference to the ‘CNN Effect’: the power of real-time media ‘to provoke major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to both global and national events’ (Robinson 2). This media ecology is often contrasted with ‘Gateholder’ and ‘Manufacturing Consent’ models. The ‘CNN Effect’ privileges humanitarian and non-government organisations whereas the latter models focus upon the conformist mind-sets and shared worldviews of government and policy decision-makers. The September 11 attacks generated an uncertain interdependency between the terrorists, government officials, and favourable media coverage. It provided a test case, as had the humanitarian interventions (Robinson 37) before it, to test the claim by proponents that the ‘CNN Effect’ had policy leverage during critical stress points. The attacks also revived a long-running debate in media circles about the risk factors of global media. McLuhan (1964) and Ballard (1990) had prophesied that the global media would pose a real-time challenge to decision-making processes and that its visual imagery would have unforeseen psychological effects on viewers. Wark (1994) noted that journalists who covered real-time events including the Wall Street crash (1987) and collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989) were traumatised by their ‘virtual’ geographies. The ‘War on Terror’ as 21st Century Myth Three recent books explore how the 1990s humanitarian interventions and the September 11 attacks have remapped this ‘virtual’ territory with all too real consequences. Piers Robinson’s The CNN Effect (2002) critiques the theory and proposes the policy-media interaction model. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan’s anthology Journalism After September 11 (2002) examines how September 11 affected the journalists who covered it and the implications for news values. Sandra Silberstein’s War of Words (2002) uncovers how strategic language framed the U.S. response to September 11. Robinson provides the contextual background; Silberstein contributes the specifics; and Zelizer and Allan surface broader perspectives. These books offer insights into the social construction of the nebulous War on Terror and why certain images and trajectories were chosen at the expense of other possibilities. Silberstein locates this world-historical moment in the three-week transition between September 11’s aftermath and the U.S. bombings of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. Descriptions like the ‘War on Terror’ and ‘Axis of Evil’ framed the U.S. military response, provided a conceptual justification for the bombings, and also brought into being the geo-strategic context for other nations. The crucial element in this process was when U.S. President George W. Bush adopted a pedagogical style for his public speeches, underpinned by the illusions of communal symbols and shared meanings (Silberstein 6-8). Bush’s initial address to the nation on September 11 invoked the ambiguous pronoun ‘we’ to recreate ‘a unified nation, under God’ (Silberstein 4). The 1990s humanitarian interventions had frequently been debated in Daniel Hallin’s sphere of ‘legitimate controversy’; however the grammar used by Bush and his political advisers located the debate in the sphere of ‘consensus’. This brief period of enforced consensus was reinforced by the structural limitations of North American media outlets. September 11 combined ‘tragedy, public danger and a grave threat to national security’, Michael Schudson observed, and in the aftermath North American journalism shifted ‘toward a prose of solidarity rather than a prose of information’ (Zelizer & Allan 41). Debate about why America was hated did not go much beyond Bush’s explanation that ‘they hated our freedoms’ (Silberstein 14). Robert W. McChesney noted that alternatives to the ‘war’ paradigm were rarely mentioned in the mainstream media (Zelizer & Allan 93). A new myth for the 21st century had been unleashed. The Cycle of Integration Propaganda Journalistic prose masked the propaganda of social integration that atomised the individual within a larger collective (Ellul). The War on Terror was constructed by geopolitical pundits as a Manichean battle between ‘an “evil” them and a national us’ (Silberstein 47). But the national crisis made ‘us’ suddenly problematic. Resurgent patriotism focused on the American flag instead of Constitutional rights. Debates about military tribunals and the USA Patriot Act resurrected the dystopian fears of a surveillance society. New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani suddenly became a leadership icon and Time magazine awarded him Person of the Year (Silberstein 92). Guiliani suggested at the Concert for New York on 20 October 2001 that ‘New Yorkers and Americans have been united as never before’ (Silberstein 104). Even the series of Public Service Announcements created by the Ad Council and U.S. advertising agencies succeeded in blurring the lines between cultural tolerance, social inclusion, and social integration (Silberstein 108-16). In this climate the in-depth discussion of alternate options and informed dissent became thought-crimes. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s report Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America (2002), which singled out “blame America first” academics, ignited a firestorm of debate about educational curriculums, interpreting history, and the limits of academic freedom. Silberstein’s perceptive analysis surfaces how ACTA assumed moral authority and collective misunderstandings as justification for its interrogation of internal enemies. The errors she notes included presumed conclusions, hasty generalisations, bifurcated worldviews, and false analogies (Silberstein 133, 135, 139, 141). Op-ed columnists soon exposed ACTA’s gambit as a pre-packaged witch-hunt. But newscasters then channel-skipped into military metaphors as the Afghanistan campaign began. The weeks after the attacks New York City sidewalk traders moved incense and tourist photos to make way for World Trade Center memorabilia and anti-Osama shirts. Chevy and Ford morphed September 11 catchphrases (notably Todd Beamer’s last words “Let’s Roll” on Flight 93) and imagery into car advertising campaigns (Silberstein 124-5). American self-identity was finally reasserted in the face of a domestic recession through this wave of vulgar commercialism. The ‘Simulated’ Fall of Elite Journalism For Columbia University professor James Carey the ‘failure of journalism on September 11’ signaled the ‘collapse of the elites of American journalism’ (Zelizer & Allan 77). Carey traces the rise-and-fall of adversarial and investigative journalism from the Pentagon Papers and Watergate through the intermediation of the press to the myopic self-interest of the 1988 and 1992 Presidential campaigns. Carey’s framing echoes the earlier criticisms of Carl Bernstein and Hunter S. Thompson. However this critique overlooks several complexities. Piers Robinson cites Alison Preston’s insight that diplomacy, geopolitics and elite reportage defines itself through the sense of distance from its subjects. Robinson distinguished between two reportage types: distance framing ‘creates emotional distance’ between the viewers and victims whilst support framing accepts the ‘official policy’ (28). The upsurge in patriotism, the vulgar commercialism, and the mini-cycle of memorabilia and publishing all combined to enhance the support framing of the U.S. federal government. Empathy generated for September 11’s victims was tied to support of military intervention. However this closeness rapidly became the distance framing of the Afghanistan campaign. News coverage recycled the familiar visuals of in-progress bombings and Taliban barbarians. The alternative press, peace movements, and social activists then retaliated against this coverage by reinstating the support framing that revealed structural violence and gave voice to silenced minorities and victims. What really unfolded after September 11 was not the demise of journalism’s elite but rather the renegotiation of reportage boundaries and shared meanings. Journalists scoured the Internet for eyewitness accounts and to interview survivors (Zelizer & Allan 129). The same medium was used by others to spread conspiracy theories and viral rumors that numerology predicted the date September 11 or that the “face of Satan” could be seen in photographs of the World Trade Center (Zelizer & Allan 133). Karim H. Karim notes that the Jihad frame of an “Islamic Peril” was socially constructed by media outlets but then challenged by individual journalists who had learnt ‘to question the essentialist bases of her own socialization and placing herself in the Other’s shoes’ (Zelizer & Allan 112). Other journalists forgot that Jihad and McWorld were not separate but two intertwined worldviews that fed upon each other. The September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center also had deep symbolic resonances for American sociopolitical ideals that some journalists explored through analysis of myths and metaphors. The Rise of Strategic Geography However these renegotiated boundariesof new media, multiperspectival frames, and ‘layered’ depth approaches to issues analysiswere essentially minority reports. The rationalist mode of journalism was soon reasserted through normative appeals to strategic geography. The U.S. networks framed their documentaries on Islam and the Middle East in bluntly realpolitik terms. The documentary “Minefield: The United States and the Muslim World” (ABC, 11 October 2001) made explicit strategic assumptions of ‘the U.S. as “managing” the region’ and ‘a definite tinge of superiority’ (Silberstein 153). ABC and CNN stressed the similarities between the world’s major monotheistic religions and their scriptural doctrines. Both networks limited their coverage of critiques and dissent to internecine schisms within these traditions (Silberstein 158). CNN also created different coverage for its North American and international audiences. The BBC was more cautious in its September 11 coverage and more global in outlook. Three United Kingdom specials – Panorama (Clash of Cultures, BBC1, 21 October 2001), Question Time (Question Time Special, BBC1, 13 September 2001), and “War Without End” (War on Trial, Channel 4, 27 October 2001) – drew upon the British traditions of parliamentary assembly, expert panels, and legal trials as ways to explore the multiple dimensions of the ‘War on Terror’ (Zelizer & Allan 180). These latter debates weren’t value free: the programs sanctioned ‘a tightly controlled and hierarchical agora’ through different containment strategies (Zelizer & Allan 183). Program formats, selected experts and presenters, and editorial/on-screen graphics were factors that pre-empted the viewer’s experience and conclusions. The traditional emphasis of news values on the expert was renewed. These subtle forms of thought-control enabled policy-makers to inform the public whilst inoculating them against terrorist propaganda. However the ‘CNN Effect’ also had counter-offensive capabilities. Osama bin Laden’s videotaped sermons and the al-Jazeera network’s broadcasts undermined the psychological operations maxim that enemies must not gain access to the mindshare of domestic audiences. Ingrid Volkmer recounts how the Los Angeles based National Iranian Television Network used satellite broadcasts to criticize the Iranian leadership and spark public riots (Zelizer & Allan 242). These incidents hint at why the ‘War on Terror’ myth, now unleashed upon the world, may become far more destabilizing to the world system than previous conflicts. Risk Reportage and Mediated Trauma When media analysts were considering the ‘CNN Effect’ a group of social contract theorists including Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, and Ulrich Beck were debating, simultaneously, the status of modernity and the ‘unbounded contours’ of globalization. Beck termed this new environment of escalating uncertainties and uninsurable dangers the ‘world risk society’ (Beck). Although they drew upon constructivist and realist traditions Beck and Giddens ‘did not place risk perception at the center of their analysis’ (Zelizer & Allan 203). Instead this was the role of journalist as ‘witness’ to Ballard-style ‘institutionalized disaster areas’. The terrorist attacks on September 11 materialized this risk and obliterated the journalistic norms of detachment and objectivity. The trauma ‘destabilizes a sense of self’ within individuals (Zelizer & Allan 205) and disrupts the image-generating capacity of collective societies. Barbie Zelizer found that the press selection of September 11 photos and witnesses re-enacted the ‘Holocaust aesthetic’ created when Allied Forces freed the Nazi internment camps in 1945 (Zelizer & Allan 55-7). The visceral nature of September 11 imagery inverted the trend, from the Gulf War to NATO’s Kosovo bombings, for news outlets to depict war in detached video-game imagery (Zelizer & Allan 253). Coverage of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent Bali bombings (on 12 October 2002) followed a four-part pattern news cycle of assassinations and terrorism (Moeller 164-7). Moeller found that coverage moved from the initial event to a hunt for the perpetrators, public mourning, and finally, a sense of closure ‘when the media reassert the supremacy of the established political and social order’ (167). In both events the shock of the initial devastation was rapidly followed by the arrest of al Qaeda and Jamaah Islamiyah members, the creation and copying of the New York Times ‘Portraits of Grief’ template, and the mediation of trauma by a re-established moral order. News pundits had clearly studied the literature on bereavement and grief cycles (Kubler-Ross). However the neo-noir work culture of some outlets also fueled bitter disputes about how post-traumatic stress affected journalists themselves (Zelizer & Allan 253). Reconfiguring the Future After September 11 the geopolitical pundits, a reactive cycle of integration propaganda, pecking order shifts within journalism elites, strategic language, and mediated trauma all combined to bring a specific future into being. This outcome reflected the ‘media-state relationship’ in which coverage ‘still reflected policy preferences of parts of the U.S. elite foreign-policy-making community’ (Robinson 129). Although Internet media and non-elite analysts embraced Hallin’s ‘sphere of deviance’ there is no clear evidence yet that they have altered the opinions of policy-makers. The geopolitical segue from September 11 into the U.S.-led campaign against Iraq also has disturbing implications for the ‘CNN Effect’. Robinson found that its mythic reputation was overstated and tied to issues of policy certainty that the theory’s proponents often failed to examine. Media coverage molded a ‘domestic constituency ... for policy-makers to take action in Somalia’ (Robinson 62). He found greater support in ‘anecdotal evidence’ that the United Nations Security Council’s ‘safe area’ for Iraqi Kurds was driven by Turkey’s geo-strategic fears of ‘unwanted Kurdish refugees’ (Robinson 71). Media coverage did impact upon policy-makers to create Bosnian ‘safe areas’, however, ‘the Kosovo, Rwanda, and Iraq case studies’ showed that the ‘CNN Effect’ was unlikely as a key factor ‘when policy certainty exists’ (Robinson 118). The clear implication from Robinson’s studies is that empathy framing, humanitarian values, and searing visual imagery won’t be enough to challenge policy-makers. What remains to be done? Fortunately there are some possibilities that straddle the pragmatic, realpolitik and emancipatory approaches. Today’s activists and analysts are also aware of the dangers of ‘unfreedom’ and un-reflective dissent (Fromm). Peter Gabriel’s organisation Witness, which documents human rights abuses, is one benchmark of how to use real-time media and the video camera in an effective way. The domains of anthropology, negotiation studies, neuro-linguistics, and social psychology offer valuable lessons on techniques of non-coercive influence. The emancipatory tradition of futures studies offers a rich tradition of self-awareness exercises, institution rebuilding, and social imaging, offsets the pragmatic lure of normative scenarios. The final lesson from these books is that activists and analysts must co-adapt as the ‘War on Terror’ mutates into new and terrifying forms. Works Cited Amis, Martin. “Fear and Loathing.” The Guardian (18 Sep. 2001). 1 March 2001 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4259170,00.php>. Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition (rev. ed.). Los Angeles: V/Search Publications, 1990. Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1999. Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Friedman, Thomas. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rhinehart, 1941. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Kaplan, Robert. The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. New York: Random House, 2000. Kubler-Ross, Elizabeth. On Death and Dying. London: Tavistock, 1969. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. Moeller, Susan D. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death. New York: Routledge, 1999. Robinson, Piers. The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention. New York: Routledge, 2002. Silberstein, Sandra. War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11. New York: Routledge, 2002. Wark, McKenzie. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington IN: Indiana UP, 1994. Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1948. Zelizer, Barbie, and Stuart Allan (eds.). Journalism after September 11. New York: Routledge, 2002. Links http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Burns, Alex. "The Worldflash of a Coming Future" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/08-worldflash.php>. APA Style Burns, A. (2003, Apr 23). The Worldflash of a Coming Future. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/08-worldflash.php>