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Chinese-Style Industrial Development with American Characteristics
No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 It’s not easy being a politician in America, especially a Republican one. The world’s largest economy is going through an ideological upheaval accompanied by a reorganization of the electoral coalitions that have dominated American politics for the past 50 years. The effects of demographic transformation, globalization, and social media are rewriting the rules of American politics in a very short time. More
Romania, Lowest Rate in the EU on Tertiary Educational Attainment
No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 Romania has the lost lowest rate in the EU on tertiary educational attainment, according to data published by Eurostat for 2024. Ireland (65.2%), Luxembourg (63.8%) and Cyprus (60.1%) had the highest tertiary education attainment rates, while Romania (23.2%), Italy (31.6%) and Hungary (32.3%) had the lowest rates. More
Beyond Tragedy: Monuments of Hope and Mitteleuropean Legacy
No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 Alexandru Potcoavă makes a keen observation in the August 2025 issue of the literary magazine Orizont, based in Timișoara: “You know you’re in a Central European city when, in one of its squares, you stumble upon a Column of the Plague, erected in Viennese Baroque style”. If in Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, or Hungary these columns are a common sight (now cultural, religious, and artistic monuments, but with a less-than-pleasant origin), in Romania, we find columns of the plague only in Timișoara and Cluj-Napoca – proof that, if not geographically, at least ideologically, these two cities were (and continue to be) closer to a certain Central European ideal. More
Closer than We Thought
No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 Before we discuss artificial intelligence, let’s test a bit of human intel. When carefully scrutinizing Romania–Kazakhstan relations, we have in mind a case study of Europe–Asia ties — between two countries coming from geographical and historical paradigms that make them so deeply different, yet (who knows?) surprisingly compatible. More
Economic Science and Economic Policy
No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 Economic science (economics) contributes to the design of economic policy through its analyses of supply and demand, economic growth, taxation, regulations, financial stability, etc. This discipline sometimes guides public debates on economic policy. More
Via Transilvanica – Where Romania’s Heritage, Community and Tourism Converge
No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 Romania’s landscapes have always rewarded those who explore them, from Carpathians’ ancient forests, layered cultural palimpsest, mythical monasteries to legend-worthy fortresses, living traditional villages and wildlife that still resides where it always belonged. When imagination met skills and perseverance, those gifts coalesced into Via Transilvanica, a road that is at once a hiking route, art gallery, strand of social infrastructure, and, increasingly, an engine for regional cohesive regeneration. More
Responses to Science and the Industrial Order, 1914-1950
No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 Modern technology invests political and other organizations with the means to increasingly organize all variables which impinge upon their operation. The need to economize an organization’s activities, due to a condition of insufficient means and material, motivates an effort to secure greater control over those variables on behalf of the organization’s presumed interests. This article – the first of two parts – is drawn from the first part of a paper written in 1971, which was used as the second chapter of my 1974 M.A. thesis, The Methodical Conquest: Perceptions of the Impact of Modern Technology on Society. It focuses on ideas put forward by British and some continental writers from 1914-1950. More
Bianconeri Big Dreams: Juventus and the Stadium that Prints Money
No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 Juventus knew exactly what they were doing back in 2011 when they cut the ribbon on their new home, the Allianz Stadium. Fourteen seasons later, the math is dazzling: roughly €800 million in revenue has flowed through the turnstiles, hospitality suites, and naming rights, according to Football Italia. For a club once renting the cavernous Stadio delle Alpi, this compact, privately owned fortress has been a goldmine. Annual revenues now flirt with the nine-digit mark, and the Bianconeri plan to squeeze even more juice by staging concerts, corporate events, and whatever else can keep the lights on year-round. More
The Price of a Global Stage
No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 The cobblestones of Staroměstské náměstí, once echoing with the footfalls of Czech kings and the shouts of revolutionaries, now feel the soft-soled steps of global travellers. The medieval Pražský orloj continues its silent, gilded dance, not for the locals who once set their lives by its chimes, but for a sea of up-turned faces, each framed by a glowing smartphone screen. The square, which once hummed with the daily rhythm of local merchants, gossiping neighbours, and street performers, now exists as a curated postcard. It’s a stage where the only authentic performance is the ironic tableau of a city selling its soul to the very people who come to see what it once was. More
Le Petit Prince
No. 55, Sep.-Oct. 2025 “Armies of slaves to fight for freedom” – the twisted and torn morality of conscription cannot be too far away from such a trenchant verdict. Nationalist-patriotic speeches leaning into ardour and bombast may get the blood running, but reason is impaired for the blood rarely bypasses the bulging veins of the neck presaging epic bloodbaths. Somewhere, sometime, Prince Harry of the UK has called for the reintroduction of compulsory military service, giving as the supreme argument the fact that both he and the soldiers he commanded were helped in life by their military career. The newsfeed does not detail one aspect: help with what? What could the 30-year-old prince, the fifth heir to the crown [N.B.: meanwhile, self-“spared” from the royal line], have understood from the army to such an extent that his life experience would become a governmental duty for the rest of the people? “I dread to think where I’d be without the army”, the precocious sage said (serving it to the grunts: “Maybe in Las Vegas, at some naked party”). More
Argentine President Javier Milei’s Economic Reform: A Model Worth Considering
No. 54, Jul.-Aug. 2025 Before World War I, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world, with a per capita income close to that of the United States. In the last half century, the country has been undermined by inflation, recession, and the ineffectiveness of state institutions. The cause is the economic policy pursued by Argentine governments in the post-war period. More
Did You Say Neoliberalism? The Dirigiste Theories of the Romanian Postcommunist Elite
No. 54, Jul.-Aug. 2025 Economically speaking, where did we start from within the political project shepherded by Ion Iliescu in 1990? I see that this project is called at the same time “Gorbachevite”, “neoliberal”, “shock therapist” even. Yet, rigor is needed here. My analysis is that at the decisive moment of 1990, before the fragmentation brought about by the 1991 reforms, at an intellectual level in power circles there was actually a split between market socialism and a strange neo-developmentalism grafted on social-democratic aspirations whose undercurrents neither Iliescu nor his allies understood very well, given the data of the problem in Romania in those years and the terrible isolation experienced in the 80s. The Neoliberal Consensus from Washington, not to mention shock therapy, had no supporters in the power apparatus until 1996. What was done in this regard was fragmentary and under the coercion applied by financiers (here the IMF) to the rulers of a state without access to capital. In the final socio-economic outcome – overall an extremely brutal one with millions of lives –, these economic paradigms mattered less than objective material and political factors, some inherited from the late stage of Ceausescu’s reign, others new. But in no case can we see in the dominant actors of this period simple projections of structural constraints. Some socialist countries gravitated towards the ideas that were the basis of European social democracies (Slovenia). Others went towards a kind of market socialism without the advantages of China (Belarus). Others gravitated towards liberalism, although some socially embedded it quite a lot, at least for a while (Visegrad) or did not bother to put in serious safety nets (the Baltics). More
