Bogdan C. Enache

Political scientist, former business journalist, book reviewer; interested in politics, economics and the art of living

The Reality of War

The 24th of February, the Russian invasion of Ukraine rather slowly awoke Europe to the forgotten reality of war. Despite the numerous armed conflicts all over the continent and in the world at large in which Westerners have been involved during the last three or seventy decades, Europeans in particular have forgotten the primary meaning of war. War as part of human nature, war as politics, war as a social state. This is due to something more than the usual dose of “Western hypocrisy” and double standards. Far from constituting an irrational choice, as narrow self-interested ideologies suggest, war has generally been viewed throughout most of human history as a character building activity on par with many others of a more peaceful nature, in which individuals were cultivated and through which societies were forged, maintained, expanded or destroyed. The paradox of contemporary Europe is therefore not that it denies war, its political and social function, but that the European identity is nothing but the product of the repressed memory of war. This is why it takes longer for Europeans to absorb the new reality: they must not only look at the facts around them, but also look inside them and accept their true selves as well. More

The Broken Avant-garde of Max Hermann Maxy

Bogdan C. Enache

The exhibition currently displayed by the National Museum of Arts of Romania (MNAR) in honour of Max Hermann Maxy is both an artistic and a historical event. Despite its limitations and imperfections, “M. H. Maxy: From Avant-gardisme to Socialism” offers precious insight into one of the least known, but most noteworthy, avant-garde movements in interwar Europe: integralism. The chronological organisation offers the visitor, for the very first time, a panorama of the ambitious artist’s entire work, which includes the discredited propaganda works in the service of the Communist regime. Maxy, who not coincidentally is also the founder and first director of MNAR, is the first controversial Romanian avant-garde painter who receives this kind of official treatment, although some semi-private galleries cautiously started this effort to publicly rehabilitate and reassess notable artists associated with the communist regime, such as his friend the constructivist painter Hans or János Mattis-Teutsch, just a few years before. More

Where To? The European Union between Brexit and the War in Ukraine

Bogdan C. Enache

What has become of European integration? The present concerns regarding Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, a bloody war on the European Union’s Eastern borders, and transatlantic solidarity makes the question seem a bit irrelevant. Beneath the surface, however, the worries that Britain’s exit from the mostly Brussels-based organisation brought to the fore still linger. Is there any meaningful sense left to the buzzwords or has European integration become just another euphemism for piecemeal regional cooperation? More

Growth, Degrowth and Greening

Bogdan C. Enache

Although discussions about the relationship between economics and the environment are no longer confined to scientific forums and have in fact become an inspiration for a variety of popular movements, it is often difficult to grasp the core issues at stake. The public agenda is literally flooded every day with news regarding the trade-off between preserving industrial jobs and averting climate change; supporting urban development and preventing environmental degradation; ensuring living conditions for an increased human population and avoiding biodiversity loss; but the average citizen is often unable to see how all these worrisome, dire, even catastrophic events and proposed solutions fit together in a coherent way and could therefore be addressed in a rational manner. More

Is the European Union Going Forward or Going Backwards?

Bogdan C. Enache

The many crises that have hit the European Union during the last decade and a half have made many observers pessimistic about the future of the organisation. The deep economic crisis of the eurozone has been followed by a north-south political divide and the exit of Great Britain from the EU coincided with conflicts on the meaning of democracy with some notable eastern member states. The conclusion of a European Union going backwards is nevertheless premature. As in the past, great failures, such as the Constitutional Treaty, coincided with great steps forward. More

The Bear Stearns of Romania

Bogdan C. Enache

Despite a lot of public rhetoric and noisy politics, the Romanian episode of the recent Great Financial Crisis has not been adequately chronicled to date.True, in Romania, a country with a low – but increasing – financialization rate by Western standards, there has not been any Lehman Brothers-style bankruptcy in the local banking industry. However, despite repeated public statements made, since the beginning of the Crisis, by Mugur Isărescu and other officials at the National Bank of Romania (BNR), that the Romanian financial system is crisis-proofed, there has actually been a Bear Stearns-type of failure not long after the global panic spread into the country as well. More

Romania’s “Sonderweg” to Illiberal Democracy

Bogdan C. Enache

In German historiography, there is a current of thought dating to the 19th century regarding a “special path” (Sonderweg) of political development in Germany or German settled areas. Its first incarnation was a positive one, underlying the German aptitude for social reform and development in the absence of dangerous pressures. After WW2, it became a way of explaining the rise of Nazism and retconning it as inevitable, thus making the leap from theory to tool for self-blame. This article argues that Romania is undergoing its own Sonderweg to illiberalism, based on local specificities of a political and structural nature. More

A Turkish Scenario for the Romanian Economy?

Bogdan C. Enache

Since the Social Democratic Party’s (PSD) ascent to power in 2012, which was sealed by the 2016 Romanian parliamentary and local elections, some commentators and opposition leaders have compared the actions of Social Democratic leaders – such as former PM Victor Ponta or party chairman and Chamber of Deputies President Liviu Dragnea – not only with those of their peers in Hungary and Poland, but also to those of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. More

Populism, Bank Tax Edition

Bogdan C. Enache

The Romanian government has approved, almost overnight, through an Emergency Government Ordinance, a new bank tax. The idea of imposing a special tax on banks is an old one and tends to resurface during times of financial crises. Thus, the bank tax was floated around by the Left and radical Left in the West, when the 2007/2008 Crisis began, from where it was most eagerly adopted and put into practice mainly by Eastern Europe’s Right-wing populists. The Crisis which began in 2007/2008 is now over and even the governments that have instituted a special bank levy, like the Hungarian and Polish governments, have now reduced it or plan to eliminate it. This is a first indication of how ill-thought and ill-advised this late decision of the Romanian Government to institute its own special bank tax really is. More

Can Trade Wars Be Good for the Economy?

Bogdan C. Enache

With the world economic community focused on US President Donald Trump’s acrobatics of escalating and deescalating trade battles, the question naturally arises if there’s actually any truth to his two-part statement, or tweet, that “trade wars are good, and easy to win”. Indeed, protectionism is an economic policy older than the science of Economics itself, but according to the classical theory of Smith and Ricardo it is just the oldest folly in the history of Economics. Modern neoclassical Economics incorporates and strongly validates the Smithian and Ricardian condemnation of protectionism, allowing deviations from it only in some exceptional and clearly specified situations. The explanation neoclassical Economics offers for the persistence of protectionism as a policy has changed however, replacing folly with a rational public choice theory of concentrated benefits for the beneficiaries and dispersed costs for those harmed. But is protectionism and its long history really just a folly? More

BNR’s Inflation Bias

Bogdan C. Enache

The National Bank of Romania’s (BNR) recent decision to leave its interest rate unchanged, despite inflation surpassing the 4% threshold, has been justified as a prudent decision in the face of international uncertainties with adverse effect on growth and “preemptive” rate cuts in several advance and emergent economies, but it is also a testimony to the Bank’s inflationary bias and even of its shaky real policy independence. More

How the Latest Trump Tariffs Will Affect Romania

Bogdan C. Enache

On March 1st, US President Donald Trump announced that his administration will unilaterally introduce new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in the United States of America. Officially motivated by national security concerns under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, the announcement follows a similar decision to unilaterally introduce new tariffs on imported solar panels and washing machines, for reasons of unfair competition, taken at the end of January. Along with pressures for a redrawing of the North-American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada and the retreat from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the decision constitutes the most palpable expression to date of the United States’ new protectionist trade policy, to which Donald Trump alluded to since he was campaigning on an “America first” platform for the White House back in 2016. But unlike the solar panels and washing machines tariffs of a month and a half ago, which targeted primarily Chinese, South Korean and other Asian economies, the new steel and aluminum tariffs risk triggering a full-scale trade war with the European Union’s – still – 28 nations trade bloc, Romania included. More