I have three candidates so far:

1. The world is changing and we are changing with it.

2. You will be remembered not but what you destroy, but by what you have built. (I have to pay royalties to somebody else for spotting this one)

3. In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. 

Any more ideas?

Romania as seen by Cerny’s Entropa

Bulgaria as seen by Cerny’s Entropa

If you’re in any way art-sensitive or art-educated, the shortest of visits to Prague will get you familiar with two very controversial Czech artists: David Cerny and Jan Saudek. As a photographer, the latter could not overpopulate the public space with his allegedly immoral creations. However, the former is well-known for his daring public displays, by painting for instance a Soviet tank in bright pink.

Cerny stroke back in glory this time, with a work titled Entropa, commissioned by the Czech EU Presidency, that’s currently displayed in the lobby of the European Council in Brussels. Supposedly a collage bringing together artistic visions of artists representing all 27 EU countries, in reality it is an exclusive work by Cerny that whole-heartedly mocks stereotypes European nations have of one another.

Thus, Italy is displayed as a football match between the North and the South, France as a big strike, Romania as a huge Dracula park and so on and forth. Bulgarians seem to have been the most offended, as Cerny envisioned their country as a Turkish toilet – reminding us all of the Ottoman yoke in the region. As a result, the Czech ambassador in Bulgaria was called up for official explanations.

Not surprisingly, Romanian newspapers are profoundly “offended” by this piece of art, which reminded me of the fuming controversy around the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York this summer. You can read more info here and here.

The international media seems to have a rather moderate stand on the issue, with BBC News simply telling the story behind Entropa and with the International Herald Tribune being equally objective.

Czech officials seem to be discontent with Cerny’s petite joke – namely doing the work all by himself, and not by working together with 26 other actors, but they don’t seem to pick at the content of the installation. Actions are pending, so I wonder if their broad mindedness will take into account the fact that 2009 is the official European Year of Innovation and Creativity…

In my opinion, this whole situation is going in a wrong direction. And the right questions are certainly not asked. What’s the use of drastically limiting wages in the public sector if we do not even have a transparent salary grid for civil servants? The only criterion for advancement in the public sector is the patriarchal Japanese model: the more you stay in office, the more money you get. No schemes for penalties and rewards, no key performance indicators, no effective performance reviews. The solution? Let’s just cut wages… A solution that fails to address the real problem, and it does so miserably.

There have been numerous government-sponsored programmes for training public managers, with investments exceeding millions of Euro per year, resulting in hundreds of young Romanians trained abroad and flown in back home to assume a leading role in the administration. There are numerous young people, educated abroad or currently working in the private sector who would make a great job as responsible civil servants. Management authorities for coordinating structural funds in Romania are badly in need of skilled labour, while other ministries would definitely benefit from skilled staff, too. Instead, the new government simply announced it will suspend hiring for the 145,000 vacant positions in the administration. Again, I am definitely missing something…

Ministries and subsidiary government agencies are packed with political appointees. Ridiculous political witch-hunts take place in the public sector every four years when a new executive comes in office. I admit heads of ministries, agencies and authorities have to be politically appointed. How about the rest of the staff? Sometimes, politics is so prevalent in the hierarchical organization of the public sector administration that even beginners are politically appointed. One of the key solutions to having an efficient administration is to make it less political. For now, this remains, like all others, nothing more than a line in a “Public Management” coursebook…

However, a couple of days ago worrisome events occured in Croatia. Political opponents of the current regime (Prime Minister Sanader) were arrested by the Zagreb police for political protests via Facebook. A Facebook group called “I bet I can find 5,000 people who dislike Sanader” became the main proof of anti-establishment behaviour   I believe such judiciary practices are obviously not fit for an EU member, to say the very least. I’m curious on the results of the investigation commissioned by PM Sanader…

The social democrats scored 33.6%, the democrats (allegedly a right-wing party, though their political programme seems to be the opposite) 33%, and the liberals 18.7%. The new voting system – with a 5% electoral threshold – eliminated extremist parties from the Parliament, which is great news. However, Sunday’s results leave us with a huge dilemma, as we do not know who will form the Government. Most probably, intense political negotiations will last till the end of December and our President will definitely take advantage of our semipresidential political system to veto plenty of government formulas that don’t suit him.

Unfortunately, the end of the year also reminds us we’ve done too little to curb corruption (one of the elected MPs this Sunday is actually in detention for fraud) and to absorb European structural and cohesion funds properly. With political strife prevailing over efficient administration, there are chances we will end up in the same situation of aid freezing as our Bulgarian neighbours…

Saying too much about all this as a Romanian living in Romania is somehow dishonest. Instead, I will dare copy-paste an email that I received today from a girl I worked with in New York, from whom I haven’t heard in two years. It’s touching, beware:

Warm Greetings to all my friends abroad,

I just wanted to share this experience with you all.  I hope you all have a wonderful day!

Vivi (a Romanian settled in New York) is having similar feelings (and his entry is in Romanian), while there are some other interesting entries on the topic I’ve come to read today. I really recommend Vlad Petreanu’s comparison between racism in the US and racism in Romania (his account stemming from the racial connotations of today’s victory), and a very realistic/ pessimistic/ cynical approach by Cristian Sarb.

PS: The image displays this week’s Economist cover. I found it highly prophetical…

I wonder whether this is because Romanians simply don’t care about international politics or because international politics doesn’t affect Romania. On a first glimpse, I’d tend to stick to the first version. However, over the last couple of months it became consistently more obvious to me that Obama’s stand on Europe will not change transatlantic relations in any way, hence won’t impact Romania. I discussed this topic a couple of months ago on Blogactiv, and later on with some American friends and we all concluded Obama won’t change in any fundamental way the current status quo. At least not as rapid as we’d like to see it changed.

In order to fundamentally change America’s position in the world, the President has to be backed by Congress, by a prosperous economy, by interest groups and, of course, by the American people (which is far from being as web 2.0 as we imagined . Surely, he is charismatic, surely I would vote for him, surely I’d never prefer a Republican over a Democrat, but still it takes more than one American president to change the world. Also because the world has dramatically changed:

Whoever wins the US Presidency today will be facing the ultimate challenge: steering a self-destructing Western-based economic growth model through a painful transition towards a new global sustainability. This is a task far beyond any past Apollo project. (Willy de Baecker on Blogactiv)

Overall nonetheless, Go Obama! Anxiously waiting for the victory speech…

Luckily, Eurozone countries finally agreed on common bailout guidelines. My personal belief is that this action came too late. The European Central Bank should have been a tougher regulator from the very beginning. The eternal tension between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism came out in EU debates again. The solution? A very murky middle ground, as usual. Here’s President Barosso’s intervention: We are a Union of states, not one single state. Therefore each and everybody has to act at his or her level, with his or her instruments. I recognise that the cases may vary and that there are different national contexts. As a consequence, there cannot be uniform responses. But if we act on the basis of the same principles our responses will be converging. (read full text here).

I’ve got two dilemmas on this whole issue. Who’s to blame? Greed or lack of regulation? When I first read that John McCain was blaming greed for the crisis, I burst out laughing. But now I’m taking an introductory class in insurance, and it’s incredible to learn how many synthetic derivatives (fourth of fifth generation reinsurance contracts, so to say) are out there on the capital markets, and how people are making money out of nothing basically. Surely greed is the engine, I have to confess.

Secondly, who should start acting in the EU? National banks (it turns out that some have done a better job than others – The National Bank of Romania, with its very conservative macroeconomic policy, being a great example in this sense) or the European Central Bank?

Tough questions to answer. Alas, my dear Romanian friends whose paycheck is in Euros… I sincerely envy you!

I have openly declared my admiration for Barack Obama before (here and here). I have always been very much preoccupied with the prospects of changes in American foreign policy – especially with respect to its ties with Europe and global organizations. I remember disagreeing with Antal Daniel, a Blogactiv blogger, on this issue. While I’ve always felt that Obama as president would mean a total shift of paradigm in world affairs, both this article written by Obama himself a year ago and his recent visit to Berlin make me think twice before claiming this. The story with the visit goes pretty much along these lines: Obama was more of a rock star than a politician, with extatic crowds of 200000 people cheering for him, and with a speech that reminded everybody of the messianic figures of the American nation (i.e. Kennedy and Reagan).

Obama called for renewed ties with Europe, reminding people on both sides of the Atlantic of their shared identity and of their need to fight global ills together. He spoke of lofty ideals such as global citizenship, anti-nuclear pledges and fair trade. His rhetoric was brilliant and nobody can deny it – not even McCain, jealous of all American media pundits having followed Obama in his European tour and of all important American TV stations broadcasting live Obama’s speech. You can read more about the content of his message here and here.

While I definitely admire the brilliant courage displayed by Obama’s campaign team in orchestrating this European tour, I cannot fail to notice two serious issues with his strategy:

1. Europeans are incredibly dissatisfied with the Bush administration and with how the US viewed the rest of the world in the last couple of year. Three out of four Europeans would vote for Obama. Probably three out of four New Yorkers would vote for Obama. But the United States is not Europe, and it’s not New York. “Real America” is far from what European yuppies share with America, and the question is how did Obama’s European tour impact on real Americans. I am afraid they were not very much pleased with his glamorous rhetoric…

2. Even The New York Times, renowned for its liberal views, criticized on its front page Obama’s failure to address real fault lines between Europe and the United States: Afghanistan, solid fuels, agricultural subsidies, trade. Do read this extremely interesting article in NY Times!

Thus, I wonder what would be the real and effective impact on Europe and global affairs in general should Obama become the next American president. Is it just pop star glamour or are there actually commitments to bringing about substantial change in how the United States acts in the world?

Photo: European Commission

June 20th was World Refugee Day. Plenty of celebrations all over the world. Cool things happened all over the world, even in Romania – where, surprisingly to some, there are quite a bunch of refugees, some living here for many years now (15000 refugees have received protection from the Romanian government since 199), and having become more attached to Romania than Romanians themselves. EVZ presented some of their stories, in a very nice Sunday article. Last week however was also the week when the European Parliament passed an highly debatable new laws on illegal migrants.

In April 2008, European institutions agreed on new procedures of addressing “illegally staying third-country nationals”. If a person deemed “illegal” (how ironic is it for a person, not an act, to be considered illegal) refuses to respect a “voluntary departure order” for more than 4 weeks, than he/she can be issues a removal order, and, “when there are serious grounds to believe that the illegal immigrants would hide” (how precise!), EU states would have to keep people under “temporary custody” for up to 18 months. Yes, one can get imprisoned for one and a half years in a EU member-states without committing any crime! Just a day before the celebration of the World Refugee Day, the European Parliament agreed to issuing this new set of laws.

The European Union has disappointed me. It’s the same Union engaged in a continuous cry for workforce that decides to treaty its migrants with great brutality. The United Nations, Amnesty International and all other human rights defenders are deploring this recent conservative shift in EU migration policies.

PS: A very beautiful article on Italy’s feelings towards migrants in NY Times today.