Adrian-Ioan Damoc

Economist, Ph.D., the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, interested in international relations and economic diplomacy

Democratic Defiance or Defiance of Democracy? Elections in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Adrian-Ioan Damoc

No. 50, Nov.-Dec. 2024 While Christmas is universally viewed as a time of holiday cheer and merriment in all countries that celebrate it, it also represents a time for solemn contemplation for Romania. It was on Christmas Day in 1989 that dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed following the conclusion of a bloody revolution to overthrow the communist regime. They were also the last people to receive the death penalty at the end of a now controversial trial before it was abolished. Their deaths thus marked the end of the communist era, an end that ushered in a long transition towards the democracy that the Romanian populace had long since yearned for, and for the past three and a half decades, Romania’s geopolitical direction has been decidedly Euro-Atlantic, cemented by its accession to the EU and NATO.Nearly thirty-five years later, the results of Romania’s first round of presidential elections took the entire media by storm, shocking candidates, social scientists and voters alike. Călin Georgescu, an independent candidate with a strong anti-EU, anti-NATO and pro-Russia rhetoric, a candidate whom most of the media and political parties largely ignored, with very limited public appearances and whom pollsters expected to be voted by less than 10% of the estimated turnout, managed to win the first round of the elections, garnering nearly 23% of votes, upsetting all pre-election predictions and calculations. Georgescu isn’t altogether unknown to the general public, having been nominated by the nationalistic Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) as their proposition for prime-minister in 2021 before the faction broke off with him due to his statements defending far-right figures from Romania’s past. He is no stranger to politics either, having worked within Romania’s Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Environment and has served for a while as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur for human rights and hazardous waste. However, during the current campaign he kept a low profile, slipping under the radar as the spotlight focused on the most popular candidates. More

Dead Men Tell Many Tales

Adrian-Ioan Damoc

It is worth noting that one of the most important issues the past three years have brought to the forefront is the fact that the EU’s unity and capacity to act coherently have been challenged both by the pandemic and by the ongoing war; to be more specific, the political, cultural and economic differences translate to divergent interests and stances which, at times, have undermined the EU’s ability to act concertedly, and we have witnessed matters of internal political opportunism bleeding into matters pertaining to European affairs. The pandemic highlighted how the differences between countries led to different effects of the pandemic and different approaches, while also dangerously increasing Euroscepticism. For example, the fact that, in France, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, though losing to Emmanuel Macron, still garnered 42% of the votes while her party, the National Rally, managed to earn 89 seats in the legislative elections (about eleven times the number of seats it previously held) is quite telling. The war, on the other hand, despite rallying most of Europe against Russia’s invasion, still left a few significant country-sized chinks in its image of harmony and unity. More

Dead Men Tell Many Tales

Adrian-Ioan Damoc

As one year since hostilities began approaches, we are left to contemplate the harsh realities the ongoing situation has yielded thus far and what insights can be gleaned from them. As already stated, we have learned that even in the 21st century, war driven by geopolitical ambitions is still a part of reality on the European continent, in the very vicinity of Western Europe, and not a phenomenon occurring in less developed regions of the world, where wars are often grounded in ethnic tensions, historical animosities, or poverty and internal socio-political instability. More

Dead Men Tell Many Tales

Adrian-Ioan Damoc

An estimated 18 000 civilian deaths, 1250 of whom are children; over 17 million people who have fled Ukraine in 2022; a shrinking of the Ukrainian economy by 35%; a staggering total of 200 000 military casualties evenly split between Russia and Ukraine; an increase in European gas and electricity prices by well over 100% between February and September 2022; these are the estimated numbers describing the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that began on 24 February 2022. As is typical of any war, it is frustratingly difficult to get any reasonably accurate numbers of the effects of the war, as each side will likely attempt to use the figures in order to project its own military might (by inflating the number of enemy soldiers killed and minimising its own deaths) as well as to gain the moral high ground and demonise the opponent’s war efforts (by reporting greater civilian deaths caused by the enemy and minimising those inflicted by its own troops). As is also typical of any war, there is a certain dry cynicism to using numbers to describe the proceedings of the war. Numbers fail to convey the tales that the dead tell through their damning silence in mass graves, and pale next to the unnerving accounts of those who have survived the horrors, though few of these are unscathed. Numbers fail to capture the full extent of the humanitarian damage done, the unspeakable atrocities committed, the manner in which war brings out the absolute worst in people, the trauma caused, and the resentment it breeds among the innocents on both camps towards each other that will endure throughout generations, even long after the war will have ended. They do, however, reveal an unsavoury reality that took most of Western Europe by surprise, namely that war and armed conflict are still a part of Europe’s contemporary geopolitical reality. More

The Geopolitical Gamble Between Global Digitalisation and Green Trends

Adrian-Ioan Damoc

Ever since mankind first began applying its reasoning and inventiveness towards manipulating the elements of its natural environment to suit his needs and want, humanity became engaged in a profound, mutually transformational relationship with nature. Man’s surrounding environment heavily influenced man’s views and beliefs about his origins, role and purpose in this world as well as the origins, role and purpose of the world and the cosmos. While man’s needs and beliefs led him to explore new ways of meeting his existential (food, shelter etc.), individual (artistic expression, occupational needs etc.) and transcendental needs (religion, cosmogony, the search for ultimate meaning and what lies at the roots of reality etc.), the impact of the human species on the planet began to take shape, slowly but surely over many millennia and generations, growing ever more complex as man’s knowledge, tools and needs grew in breadth and depth. More

Europe’s Paradigmatic Dilemmas amidst Pandemic Woes: How the Covid-19 Crisis May Reshape EU’s Geostrategy

Adrian-Ioan Damoc

The much-awaited vaccine has recently been announced and reignited hope that the coronavirus pandemic that has kept the planet in a tight grip for about a year now is about to end. Though the vaccine itself is not beyond suspicion as some question the methodology used to validate it (normally, vaccines are vetted after being tested over several years), the world is gasping for a glimmer of hope against a threat it has struggled to understand and contain with mixed success. After an initial wave in the first and second quarters of 2020 that brought most of the planet to a halt with businesses closing down, unemployment rising and trade plummeting, the lockdown measures succeeded in putting a damper on the spread of the virus, leading to a relaxation of the lockdown measures during the third quarter so as to breathe new life into the ailing economy. Yet, this has caused the virus to emerge once more, thereby sparking a new wave starting around the middle of the third quarter of 2020 and continuing to this day. More

From the Queen to the Tsar: on Trump’s Travels to Europe

Adrian-Ioan Damoc

An eventful week passed from July 12 to 17 as US President Donald Trump made two high-profile visits to Europe: one to the United Kingdom where he met with the British monarchy and government officials, and one to Helsinki where he met with Russian President, Vladimir Putin. These events occurred in a complicated geopolitical context: on the one hand, it appears we are witnessing a paradigm shift in US-EU relations, with increasingly divergent viewpoints on a number of key issues, most notably security in Europe’s Eastern flank and the Middle East; on the other hand, the suspicions of Russian involvement in the US elections in order to skew the votes in Trump’s favour are still alive in the eyes of certain US officials and part of the American electorate. More

Mutating Mindsets and Contagious Behaviours (Part I): An Overview of the Coronavirus Outbreak and Its Insights for Economic Theory

Adrian-Ioan Damoc

It is no longer a secret that the new coronavirus outbreak is the most significant issue troubling mankind at the moment, generating a level of panic and uncertainty with powerful effects on all level of society, politics and the economy. What began as a biological curiosity in the city of Wuhan in China soon spread throughout the rest of the world through the travels of infected individuals and the virus’ extremely contagious nature. By the time its characteristics and potential lethality became more obvious to authorities, the virus (“baptized” SARS-CoV-2, the “author” of the COVID-19 disease) had already spread outside of China and the Asian continent. The disease it causes is not yet fully understood and how it came to be is still unclear, though scholars tend to agree that the virus was initially confined to a few species of animals before making the jump to humans in China. More

Mutating Mindsets and Contagious Behaviours (Part II): Zooming in on Economic Decision-Making in the Time of the Coronavirus

Adrian-Ioan Damoc

As we have reemphasized, neoclassical economics, with all its shortcomings, is still considered to be the mainstream wisdom and the reconciliating synthesis of ages-old advances in economic science. Behavioural economics, for its part, is a rather recent school of thought that aims at incorporating concepts from psychology, sociology and cognitive sciences in order to gain a better understanding of the decision-making process of economic agents, largely as a response to the limitations of some of the tenets of the neoclassical school, several of which it directly challenges. Below are some of its key concepts: More

Mutating Mindsets and Contagious Behaviours (Part III): Diagnosing the Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Risks of the Coronavirus Outbreak

Adrian-Ioan Damoc

In the previous parts, we argued why behavioural economics does a better job of explaining consumer and supplier behaviour in the time of the coronavirus outbreak than the neoclassical paradigm. Both approaches were discussed at a theoretical level and were then applied to the current situation as a case study. We can note that the common link between the demand-side behaviour and the supply-side behaviour is uncertainty – perhaps not so much with regards to the threat the virus poses for personal health, but rather towards the public policies and containment measures the authorities will implement which, decidedly, are not very transparent. More

Rumble in the Gulf – A Look at the Significance of the Saudi-Yemeni Conflict

Adrian-Ioan Damoc

Higher-order cognition in humans is one of the most commonly cited factors that separate us as a species from other life-forms on earth. It enables us to make sense of the patterns in our environment and the laws that govern nature, to think beyond our immediate sensory input and create art and beauty, to encode our knowledge, storing and preserving it, passing it down to further generations who would then use it to yield new knowledge as well as invent new tools and adapt the old into new, to reshape both the internal and the external world. Yet this gift does not come without its caveats, and human cognition is indeed often riddled with biases and shortcuts that, despite allowing us to simplify the complexity of our world, often dull our receptiveness to certain realities or, even more dangerously, offer the illusion of knowledge and understanding when, in fact, they are in short supply. More

The Grand (Binary) Chessboard: Security, Geopolitics and Geoeconomics in the Cyber-era

Adrian-Ioan Damoc

For each age that we think to define, there are words that describe the aspects or characteristics that are thought to define it best. The mid-twentieth century was known as the ‘Atomic Age’, when the results of research into nuclear physics were brought to the forefront with the detonation of nuclear bombs. Shortly thereafter, it was succeeded by the Space Age, with the drive to explore outer space and the competition between the world’s superpowers to develop technology to that end. Somewhere from the 1970s, the Information Age is believed to have begun, sprung by the Digital Revolution, with information technology playing an increasingly greater role in human affairs on an ever-growing number of levels: the economy, society, culture, language and politics. Thus, geographic distance became less and less relevant in defining human interaction, and physical contact was no longer an imperative for relations between people. More

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Current IssueFree access content

TheMarketForIdeas

Democratic Defiance or Defiance of Democracy? Elections in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Dead Men Tell Many Tales

Dead Men Tell Many Tales

Dead Men Tell Many Tales

The Geopolitical Gamble Between Global Digitalisation and Green Trends

Europe’s Paradigmatic Dilemmas amidst Pandemic Woes: How the Covid-19 Crisis May Reshape EU’s Geostrategy

From the Queen to the Tsar: on Trump’s Travels to Europe

Mutating Mindsets and Contagious Behaviours (Part I): An Overview of the Coronavirus Outbreak and Its Insights for Economic Theory

Mutating Mindsets and Contagious Behaviours (Part II): Zooming in on Economic Decision-Making in the Time of the Coronavirus

Mutating Mindsets and Contagious Behaviours (Part III): Diagnosing the Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Risks of the Coronavirus Outbreak

Rumble in the Gulf – A Look at the Significance of the Saudi-Yemeni Conflict

The Grand (Binary) Chessboard: Security, Geopolitics and Geoeconomics in the Cyber-era