Rubrics » Bridging News
Whose Soil? Capital, Patrimony, and the European Land Question
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 In the summer of 2018, on the alluvial plain where the Danube splits to form what Romanians call the Great Island of Brăila, the operating rights to a 57,000-hectare farm changed hands for an estimated €230 million. The seller was a Romanian entrepreneur, Constantin Dulute, who had built Agricost over two decades into the largest single contiguous farm in the European Union. The buyer was Al Dahra, a UAE-based agribusiness founded by Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother of the country’s president, and half-owned since 2020 by ADQ, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund. The land itself remained the property of the Romanian state, leased under a concession running to 2032 that the new operator inherited. What had been sold was not soil but the right to direct what the soil produced. More
Babson’s Early Warning: Reassessing a Neglected Voice in the History of Economic Thought
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The Great Depression of the 1930s is often portrayed as an event that caught the economic and financial establishment entirely by surprise. Yet Roger Ward Babson – frequently described as a precursor to contemporary crisis forecasters such as Nouriel Roubini – issued a remarkably explicit warning on 5 September 1929, at the National Business Conference. He cautioned that a “crash” was imminent, pointing to factory closures, rising unemployment, and “a serious decline in business activity.” His intervention came at a moment when Irving Fisher, the distinguished Yale economist whose name is associated with the Fisher equation, the Fisher theorem, and the Fisher effect, continued to argue that although stock prices might undergo some downward adjustment, nothing “in the nature of a crash” was foreseeable. Even on 21 October 1929, just days before the dramatic collapse, Fisher referred merely to “a slight shake‑out in some of the more marginal circles of the stock market.” More
Romania, Shortest Working Life Among EU Member States
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 Romania has the shortest working life among EU Member States, according to data published by Eurostat for last year. With a value of 32.7 years, our country ranked last in this respect, after Italy (33.0 years) and Bulgaria (34.6 years). By contrast, in seven EU countries, the average expected duration of working life is 40 years or more: the Netherlands (44.0 years), Sweden (43.4), Denmark (42.6), Estonia (41.5), Ireland (40.7), Germany (40.2) and Finland (40.1). More
Hablamos Fútbol
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The story of the Tower of Babel tells us that humanity scattered the moment it ceased to speak the same language. Football suggests the opposite: that humanity occasionally remembers it still does. More
A Quarter of a Millennium of Freedom
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The United States of America is celebrating 250 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The moment marks the final break with the British Empire, after an escalation of the economic, fiscal, political and principled conflict between the metropolis and the North American colonies. The anniversary is an important one in American secular religion as a moment of affirmation of national identity. Its importance has gradually grown, as significant waves of migration (especially the most recent) have distanced America from the hard Anglo-Saxon and British core of its founding, and then the European one of its perfection as a global power. The quarter-millennium is important not only symbolically, but also politically, as an opportunity for the Trump Administration, surrounded on several sides and facing a difficult congressional campaign, to march on the rituals of the American republic to encourage national unity at a time of maximum division. Americans have celebrated their other major anniversaries with pomp, but, measuring every 50 years, the US has never faced another anniversary in such a difficult situation, although the uncertainties of the Cold War or the post-Civil War period were probably on Americans’ minds at the time. The relative decline of American power instruments as a whole, relative to the coalition of revisionist countries that oppose it and that are accelerating the transition to a multipolar world, constitutes a challenge not only to their Great Power calculus, but also to America’s self-conception as an exceptional country. The Administration’s bombastic style is in line with what Americans want from the celebration, but Donald Trump’s self-promotional tendency and “imperious and imperial” leadership style risk alienating that part of the opposition that could be mollified. After the confetti has settled and the hot dogs have been digested, Americans will return to a world that has become largely ambivalent about the idea of American leadership. The NATO summit in Ankara on July 7-8 will pit the United States against allies fearful of the current Administration’s unpredictability and caprices, but also of long-term structural changes to the United States and its presence in the world, regardless of the political color of the White House and Congress. More
On Peaches, Coconuts and Leadership
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 Global careers are often described in terms of positions, promotions and achievements. Far less attention is paid to the personal transformation that accompanies them. This conversation with Roxana Tănase is less about career milestones than about curiosity, cultural intelligence, leadership, and the willingness to keep learning. More
France and Kazakhstan: A Strengthened Strategic Partnership
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 In 2008, France and Kazakhstan signed a strategic partnership, which the two countries wanted to strengthen, in light of the visit of the President of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, to France last November. More
Liberty Without Asking for Permission
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 My soon-to-be-published book, "Government by Permission", grew out of the research I began in graduate school in 1970 for a master’s thesis on the impact of modern science and technology on society. It subsequently developed into a long-term project which I have pursued in many directions and across multiple disciplines and which carried over – interchangeably – into a career of research, lecturing, and writing. To illustrate the continuity, this article is largely composed of passages drawn from my previous work. More
The False Promise of Romania’s “New” Economic Model
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 To halt the recession, correct macroeconomic imbalances, and return the economy to a “normal” state, a number of Romanian analysts, economists, and politicians advocate replacing the current economic model – based largely on consumption, financed in part through public borrowing – with one centred on investment, reindustrialisation, advanced technologies, and wage growth aligned with productivity. More
Why Goethe Should Have Won the Nobel Prize in Economics
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 A long-standing prejudice in modern and contemporary thought holds – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly – that economics is one thing, while life, society, culture and everything else are quite another. In other words, to look at human existence through an economic lens is to confine it to measurable, arithmetic, “accounting” aspects that supposedly reveal nothing but the “greed” that drives people toward “profit.” More
Romania, Second-Lowest Price Level in the EU in 2025
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 Romania had the second-lowest price level in the EU in 2025, with an index of 65.1% relative to the European average. Bulgaria ranked first, with an index of 62.5%, while Poland (73.3%), Hungary (77.5%), Croatia (78.4%), Lithuania (82.8%), Latvia (83.2%), and Slovakia (85.2%) were all above Romania. More
The Unsinkable Lusitania
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The Lusitania sank in less than twenty minutes. The Lusitania that truly mattered never did. Most people remember Lusitania as the British ocean liner torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915, a tragedy that helped reshape the course of the First World War. Long before it was the name of a ship, however, Lusitania was the name of a land – a civilization whose greatest voyages began not on the ocean, but in the mind. More
