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 the Great Brăila Island (Insula Mare a Brăilei), the operating rights to one of the largest farms in Europe changed hands. Agricost cultivated roughly 56,000 to 57,000 hectares there under a concession from the Romanian state running to 2032, and the Abu Dhabi–based agribusiness Al Dahra acquired the company in a deal the seller valued at roughly €200 million to €250 million. The soil itself stayed Romanian state property; Al Dahra acquired control of the company holding the concession, and with it the authority to decide what those hectares would produce and where the proceeds would go. 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 Factory, the Office and the West: Reading the Sino-Indian Rivalry Back to Economic Reality
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 This essay looks again at the Chinese and Indian “economic miracles”, not as events that cannot be explained, but as the results of institutional reform. It then asks where the rivalry between the two Asian giants is being fought today. The main argument is that the United States and the European Union are not the main actors in this story, but external arenas in which the competition between China and India is expressed and measured. By looking at the American side (tariffs and “de-risking”) and the European side (regulation, connectivity and trade agreements), the essay shows how China and India turn Western policy into strategic decisions aimed, in the end, at each other. The conclusion is that globalisation today has not removed the rivalry between states, but only moved it to a new place and that the result will depend on the quality of institutions rather than on the idea of a “miracle”. More
Romania 2030: Integration, Resilience, and Reform Momentum
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 Romania approaches 2030 at a moment when fiscal consolidation, pension sustainability, energy transition, governance reform, security pressures, and EU‑funding absorption increasingly converge into a single strategic challenge. This article synthesises insights from the previous six parts of the series to outline how Romania’s structural vulnerabilities – ranging from demographic decline to administrative fragmentation – interact with its substantial advantages in energy, NATO positioning, and European integration. The central argument is that Romania’s trajectory will depend less on isolated policy interventions and more on coherent, sequenced, and sustained reforms capable of strengthening resilience and long‑term competitiveness. The 2030 horizon presents risks, but also an exceptional window for transformation anchored in EU, NATO, and OECD frameworks. 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
