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The article develops a typology of political strategies of coming to terms with the past as a theoretical frame of reference against which it assesses the transitional politics of memory pursued in Romanian post-communist society. It argues that after an initial ‘elusive’ strategy based on a politics of amnesia gave way to a confrontationist stance promoting a politics of anamnesis, the communist past was both politically criminalised and symbolically demonised. The article concludes by arguing that the failure of the ‘mastering the past’ paradigm epitomised by the 2006 Tismăneanu Report needs to give way to a ‘normalising’ paradigm of remembering Romanian communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines the political urgency and moral indispensability of coming to terms with the traumatic legacies of the past following the revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe. Topics covered include the impact of several intellectuals that emerged during the period and several conclusions that were formed based on analyses of the struggles of former communist countries like Romania and Czechoslovakia.

This article investigates the educational attainment, employment and living conditions of young Roma adults in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania with the aid of national generations and gender surveys and other sources of information. It shows that in spite of a small improvement in the educational attainment of young Roma in comparison to the generation of their parents, the educational achievement and employment gaps have increased considerably during the post-communist period. The article also compares living conditions of the Roma with other population groups. It concludes with a discussion of policy challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While migration scholars often neglect the national and transnational relations of production and exchange within which labor migration occurs, international political economists tend to treat labor migration as a mere side effect of transnational capitalism. By contrast, this article considers the constitutive role that post-socialist transformations and the EU integration played in shaping the various patterns of intra-European east–west labor migration since 1989. We argue that labor migration was not driven by development differentials between the west and the east as such, but rather by the particular type of development the latter adopted after the fall of communist regimes and by the way post-socialist countries were integrated in transnational circuits of production and exchange. We are sustaining our claims by a comparative assessment across time of the articulations between the different modes of production and different labor migration patterns during different stages of Romania's post-socialist transformation. This historical comparison enables us to insulate the influence of changing levels of development and modes of production on labor migration because our focus on a single country is keeping the influence of other national institutional factors constant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study aims to analyse the post-89 Romanian system of memory governance of the communist period, by focusing on a case study: that of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS). After discussing an overview of the institutional system in charge with the governance of the communist past in Romania, the paper deals with the attributions, internal rules, and procedures of the CNSAS. It also analyses the concepts that have been used to assign the status of political police collaborators. The paper argues that CNSAS was a key tool for governing the memory of the communist past in Romania, functioning at different levels: at the individual level by mediating the access of citizens to their personal Securitate files, and at a collective level because through its public discourse, CNSAS has shaped the concepts and collective perspective on the phenomenon of collaboration with the communist regime. Due to its politicization, the selective delivering of files to the CNSAS and the ambiguity of the legislation, the institution has become an effective political weapon in post-communist Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the development of the Romanian New Wave Cinema movement, suggesting that the typical film is a contemporary drama, and discusses the depiction of transitional post-Communist eastern European societies in Romanian films. The author describes the film industry in Romania, including the establishment of the Romanian National Centre of Cinema (Centrul National al Cinematografiei) (CNC) in 1990. Specific directors discussed include Cristu Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, and Corneliu Porumboiu.

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Postcommunist Romanian society is about to come to a close, against the backdrop and the pretext of an international crisis, a long period of transition marked by permanent mobilization to achieve a certain number of economic, legal, military and security objectives, considered to represent the same number of formal stages to reach "the Western European" level of democracy in society. However, once this period comes to an end, it slips into what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière called "logic of police" in the organization of the urban space, which evacuates, through a series of administrative, economic or media strategies, the specific process of the public space. This process presupposes a whole ensemble of practices guided by the presupposition of equality and difference among the speaking beings, animated by the preoccupation for a constant overseeing of this equality. We shall describe such a process in terms of some of its characteristics - which we shall call "infrapolitical" - referring to some possible conditions of the politics, at the junction between rational and sensible or, individual and collective: trust, promise, hope, solidarity, values and beliefs. Their mobilization into the social body and among its individuals allows not only the invention of a new political subjectivity but also the creation of new public spaces in their sensible dimensions, as an opening towards new urban places, capable of receiving and nurturing a plurality of actions, of gestures and of discourses that are precisely creative because of the differences between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the fall of the Iron Curtain in December 1989, the Romanian system of education has started a deep process of reconstruction that asked for a comprehensive package of reforms among which decentralisation. Broadly the paper aims to make a contribution to the emerging knowledge base about the realities of restructuring of post-communist education systems and the impact that governance through markets is having on public services. The paper focuses on presenting and discussing the attempts to decentralise pre-higher education in Romania in considering the role of the state and governance in the provision of public services and the introduction of market mechanisms in education. The decentralisation of education has been proposed by the then Minister of Education Andrei Marga. Although decentralisation in pre-higher education has been piloted for three academic years and the policy documents that introduced it have been permanently amended and updated, more than a decade later, this reform has not reached its aims mainly due to the various changes on the political scene. However, provided that no major amendments will be made to the Laws of National Education (2009), decentralisation in pre-higher education will be a reality from 2010-11. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]