Bridging News

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 [Part I]

Steven Alan Samson

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

Teodor Burnar

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

Vlad I. Roșca

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

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

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

Silviu Cerna

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

Cornel Ban

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

Romania, Lowest Prices for Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages in EU

Dan Pălăngean

No. 54, Jul.-Aug. 2025 Romania has the lowest prices for food and non-alcoholic beverages in EU, according to a study published by Eurostat. Romania’s prices were 24% below the average, followed by Slovakia (at 17% below the average) and Poland (-13%). The study was focused primarily on price levels for food, beverages and tobacco in 36 European countries. The country groups included in the analysis were the 27 European Union (EU) countries, 3 EFTA countries (Iceland, Norway and Switzerland) and 6 candidate countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Türkiye). More

The EU-US Trade Agreement, a Study in the Contrast between Politics and Reality

Alexandru Georgescu

No. 54, Jul.-Aug. 2025 While few would compare Donald Trump to Mahatma Gandhi, a saying by the Indian leader applies to the US President: “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.” The recently announced EU-US trade agreement represents a political triumph for Donald Trump and his political vision of recalibrating trade, economic, technological, and security relations with the rest of the world, including its most important allies. From the famous clip of German delegates laughing at Trump in 2017 when he warned them about their dependence on Russian gas to today’s “unequal treaty”, Trump has managed to prevail despite domestic and foreign opposition. The economic realities behind the agreement are uncertain, as is the implementation of its vague commitments. It may well be that US citizens will suffer the most from Trump’s campaign, but the way these negotiations were presented as conflict and aggression required the designation of a winner and a loser. The agreement is therefore a political disaster for Ursula von der Leyen and the “Geopolitical Commission” that was meant to transform the EU into a global power. Several European leaders, including Pres. Macron who wanted the most aggressive approach against the US, have denounced the agreement as a continuation of a “century of humiliations” for Europe similar to those suffered by colonized countries. The hyperbole takes on a life of its own and may lead to drastic political changes in the EU. The problem is not that the Europeans do not have skilled negotiators, but that their negotiating position was weak from the start after the EU’s economically lost generation (after the 2008 crisis) and after the effect of “perma-crises and poly-crises” (in the World Economic Forum’s formula). These include the sovereign debt crisis, the refugee crisis, the Covid pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, the sanctions imposed on Russia and the failure of the EU’s political and economic system, in particular the drastic bet on combating climate change at the expense of energy security. From aspiring to equality with and surpassing the US, the EU has fallen far behind and its strategic and technological autonomy has regressed. More

The Curious Case of Techno-Reversion

Bogdan Cozma

No. 54, Jul.-Aug. 2025 I remember about two years ago, some viral videos from China presenting what was described as a major breakthrough in public transport: the trackless tram. However, it did not take long for terminally online to point out that these “smart trams” were essentially just trolleybuses. Since then, I started to notice this pattern more often, innovations that are in reality just repackaged ideas. More

The Asian Future of Europe?

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

No. 54, Jul.-Aug. 2025 “The light comes from the east” – a go-to byword spread in Eastern Europe in the dawn of the Communist rampage to come, hiding one of the most tragic optical illusions in history. However, the saying is, in fact, much older. “Ex oriente lux” marks the ultimate (“Eastern”) spiritual origin of our (“Western”) world: Indo>European populations, Greco>Roman syntheses, Judeo>Christian religions. All these, E>W. It would also be the other way around. “Ex occidente lex” shows us that the law and order of civilization flourished where an unmistakable chain reaction between various ideas and institutions occurred. The recipe, for Niall Ferguson, includes competition, science, private property, medicine, consumerism and the work ethic. This time, the arrow is W>E. While this explains the historical rise of the “West” over the “Rest”, it predicts a reversal of polarity too, amid Western degeneration under the cumulative burdens of intergenerational over-indebtedness, market over-regulation, legislation hypertrophy and civic atrophy. The “Rest” (Westernized or at least modernized) demands a reassessment of its share of participation within the production (and consumption) of “a better future”. With the East (aka Asia) at the forefront. More