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China as a Space Power
After the death of the famous admiral Zheng He, whose fleet had explored the Indian Ocean and even reached East Africa, the move of the empire’s capital to Beijing and the threat from the Mongols led to an inward reorientation of China, which completely withdrew funding for new naval expeditions and repressed contacts with the outside world, even with those visiting China from Java, Siam and other kingdoms.This decision had a powerful impact in history, because only 55 years after Zheng He’s seventh and final expedition, Bartolomeo Diaz’s compatriots, the Portuguese, sailed past the Cape of Good Hope and reached the Indian Ocean, bypassing Arab and Ottoman-controlled routes through North Africa and the Middle East. Eventually, European powers came to impose their will on China through military and economic force, embodied in the “unequal treaties” that still dominate Chinese perceptions of the “century of humiliation”. I believe that this is one of the explanations for China’s surge in space. From its first steps in this area, with the launch of the Dong Fang Gong 1 satellite onboard a Long March 1 rocket in 1970, the fifth country in the world to launch a satellite, to Yang Liwei’s flight in 2003, by which China became the third country to send people into space through its own strength, the level of resources devoted to space has been steadily increasing. Now, China has developed an ambitious agenda to reach full parity with the US in space and become a global hub for space development that attracts other countries. More
Where To? The European Union between Brexit and the War in Ukraine
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
Republicans and Support for Ukraine
Trump has been the most vocal of Republican critics of the Biden policy and has suggested that more money needs to be directed toward our domestic needs. DeSantis has also been moving in that direction and on 14 March, The New York Times reported that he had stated that defense of Ukraine was not a vital interest. The combined support within the Republic Party is a total of 75%. Establishment Republicans reject this position, but it could well have an impact on the attitudes of rank and file party members. More
Digitally United We Stand, Digitally Divided We Fall!
The European environment – business and wider society alike – is undergoing significant disruptions following the impact of digitalisation. Traditional value creation models for European businesses change. Value creation models are impacted by digital transformations – both if we talk about a “digital twin” (a virtual/digital control of physically running processes and physical resources) or about a full “digital from scratch”. New combinations of digital and physical resources (components) allow new, innovative, fully – or partially – digital products to be launched onto the markets. Thereupon, digital platform ecosystems (DPEs) and digital platform-based value creation models leave their marks on production, consumption, organization and organizations, or exchange. More
The Broken Avant-garde of Max Hermann Maxy
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
Romania, Third Among EU Economies Regarding Net Personal Transfers as Percentage of GDP and First in Nominal Terms
In 2021, the EU countries that generated surpluses of personal transfers, representing more than 1% of their respective gross domestic product (GDP), were Croatia (2.7% of GDP), Bulgaria (1.6%), Romania (1.5%) and Latvia (1.1%). In contrast, Cyprus (-0.9%), France and Spain (each -0.5%) generated the largest deficits of personal transfers vis-à-vis the rest of the world as a share of their respective GDP. In terms of personal transfers and compensation of employees related to economic result, our country is placed also third among EU member states, with a percentage of 3.2% of GDP, after Croatia (7.3% of GDP) and Latvia (3.3%) and above Luxemburg (2.7%), Bulgaria (2.4%), Belgium (2.3%), Slovakia (2.1%), Portugal and Hungary (both with 2%). More
Dead Men Tell Many Tales
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
Restoring the EU Competitiveness: Challenges and Opportunities in the Context of the Twin Green & Digital Transition
Since its creation in 1993, the single market has helped to make everyday life easier for people and businesses, fuelling jobs and growth across the EU. In the aftermath of the pandemic crisis and the war against Ukraine, the Council of the EU, through its three Presidencies – France, the Czech Republic and Sweden –, aimed at enabling the Union to overcome the economic and social shocks. The actions supporting this objective were: fully implementing the recovery and resilience plans, strengthening the EU’s resilience, competitiveness and convergence, and ensuring an optimum economic policy coordination. More
Dead Men Tell Many Tales
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
Presidential Summits and the Role of the Host States: Lessons from the Three Seas Initiative
The aim of the seminar, organized by the Three Seas Initiative Research Center, affiliated with the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Science, is to review the results of the Three Seas Initiative Summits, the importance of the declarations adopted there, the role of the host states, as well as the challenges facing this model of cooperation. The seminar discussion will also focus on the upcoming summit, which will be held in Bucharest. It is worth noting that Romania is the first state to host the Three Seas Initiative presidential summit for the second time. More
Dead Men Tell Many Tales
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
Where We Head to When There’s Nowhere to Run
The phrase “life is a struggle” aptly describes the experience of writing about anything other than the ongoing war a year after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, but so much has already been written on the topic (and so much will yet be written – in vain, though) that a distraction would be welcome for the sake of mental sanity. Thus, we “struggle” with the temptation to join the “library” division of the corps of strategists operating deep behind the front lines, specifically the “armchair reasoning” battalion of the “ex cathedra” regiment. Nevertheless, it is impossible to keep at it indefinitely, for the boomerang of wandering thoughts will follow its own course, no matter how much one may try to shift one’s mind away from the unceasing horrors. In Sci-Fi literature and cinema, the desolation of Mother Earth following a (nuclear, technological, environmental etc.) cataclysm is usually coupled with the remaining population fleeing to the unknown worlds of outer space and/or retreating to the catacombs of what’s left of the planet, partially sedated through immersion in surrogate cyber-realities. In other words, it is an outward and/or inward escape. More
