no / Since 1989 Romania has gone from communist isolation under the megalomaniac Nicolae Ceauescu to being a key player in America's war against terrorism. Because of this strategic location it has become a front-line state for nervous Western governments keen to secure oil routes from the Middle East. It joined NATO in 2004 and is due to enter the European Union in 2007-08 despite its economy being unprepared to meet the competition challenges from established members. Tom Gallagher analyses how the country is seeking to recover from a disastrous period in its history while many of the key legacies of dictatorship remain. Having lynched the discredited Ceauescu in 1989, former acolytes have spent the past fifteen years trying to retain a monopoly of control behind the facade of a Western-style democracy. They combined their political ambitions with acquiring the control of vast amounts of private property denied to them by Ceauescu. Political institutions were given a facelift, as in the case of the intelligence services which became a crucial power-base for the ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD). The state continued to be used to serve narrow private interests. Replacing the communist dynasty of the Ceauescus, there is now an oligarchy drawn from the PSD and its satellites in the bureaucracy, major industries, and the intelligence world which grew wealthy through insider privatisation and the looting of the country's banks. Romania is now at a crucial turning-point. In 2004 the mobilisation of civil society contributed to the narrow victory of Traian B sescu in presidential elections. It is unclear whether he can win control over the key levers of state necessary to stem the corruption and abuse of power which have blighted Romania's hopes of breaking free from its communist-era legacy. The PSD is now led by Mircea Geoana, the son of a general in Ceauescu's Securitate. He has recruited a string of Western politicians to block pressure for meaningful change from Brussels and to ensure that accession to the EU occurs without serious reform.

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My dissertation situates at the intersection of communication studies and political sciences under the umbrella of the interdisciplinary field of collective memory. Precisely, it focuses on the use of the communist past by political actors to gain power and legitimacy, and on the interplay between news media and politics in shaping a national identity in post-communist Romania. My research includes the analysis of the media representations of two categories of events: the anniversaries of the Romanian Revolution and the political campaigns for presidential/parliamentary elections. On the one hand, the public understanding of the break with communism plays an important role in how the post-communist society is defined. The revolution as a schism between the communist regime and a newborn society acts like a prism through which Romanians understand their communist past, but also the developments the country has taken after it. On the other hand, political communication is operating on the public imaginary of the past, the present and the future. The analysis of the political discourses unfolded in the news media shows how the collective memory of the communist past is used to serve political interests in the discursive struggle for power and legitimacy. Such an investigation allows for a deeper understanding of the identity formation in transitional societies in Eastern Europe. The historical discourse analysis of 5378 texts, selected from four national Romanian newspapers during the first two decades of post-communism (1990 - 2009), shows how the emergent corrupted political class which replaced the communist nomenclature shaped the understanding of communism that would characterize all members of the Romanian society as victims, thus impeding an effective investigation of personal and collective guilt. It also shows that the lack of clarity regarding the Romanian Revolution (as the starting point of a new society) contributed to a crisis of legitimacy in post-communist Romania so that the Romanians neither could forget the past, nor resolved its problems twenty years after the fall of communism. / Media & Communication

This thesis has a twofold aim. It first argues that monetary policy is inherently political because it involves struggles over meaning. It modifies Niebyl’s (1946) conceptual approach with an explicit attention to meaning, advancing a theory/ policy discourse/institutional practices nexus for exploring central banking. It shows that the emergence of leading representations of monetary processes (in Ricardo, Keynes and Friedman) involved discursive struggles during periods of crisis to assign meaning to problems and establish dominant interpretations. Politics and power were not grafted onto policy but were ontologically constitutive of it, shaping specific institutional configurations and practices. Second, this conceptualization is taken to a case study: a critical scrutiny of the role played by the central bank of Romania (NBR) in the reconstitution of the postcommunist Romanian economy as neoliberal economy from 1990 to 2008. The thesis asks what does the central bank do when the state, defined through its central planning legacy, ‘retreats’ from the market? The usual account explains policy success as direct result of commitments to neoliberal (monetarist) principles prescribed by international policy advice. Before 1997, neocommunist governments politically validated a communist legacy: soft budget constraints in the (state) productive sector. Politicized monetary policy decisions produced repeated crises. Afterwards, neoliberal governments gradually institutionalized an autonomous economic sphere, allowing an objective formulation and implementation of stability-orientated monetarist policies. The thesis challenges this orthodoxy. It argues against the attempts to erase politics from monetary policy processes that the above account articulates. Instead, drawing on critical conceptualizations of neoliberalism in its shifting forms, the period under analysis will be (re)interpreted as an ongoing process of neoliberalization, with the central bank an important actor in it. Indeed, the narration of crises identified the NBR as an essential instrument of institutional change and neoliberal ‘policy-making’. Monetarist narratives (ideologically) legitimized neoliberalism and effectively enacted neoliberal principles of monetary governance in the central bank. Thus, before 1997, the central bank functioned as a key vehicle of the neoliberal attack on the state’s capacity to craft economic reform. Since neoliberal institutions (also) take time to build, expanding policy repertoires outside the monetarist range invested the central bank with increasing powers to respond to structural and institutional resistance to neoliberal logics, arising from both communist legacies and ongoing political struggles. After 1997, the central bank’s rationality gradually changed to a constructive phase, normalizing an extralocal mode of economic governance whose distinguishing features will be identified. Institutional practices reconstructed the relationship between money, foreign exchange and treasury markets, subjugating liquidity management to the requirements of financialized accumulation. With financial stability increasingly tied into transnational actors’ choices, the NBR adopted inflation targeting. Nevertheless, inflation-targeting’s promise of stability operated to sideline the destabilizing nature of normalized neoliberal practices of monetary management, clearly evoked by the 2008 crisis. The thesis concludes with policy implications and an agenda for future research.

This thesis asks why some centre-right formations have been more successful than others in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. It does so by examining a single centre-right formation – the Romanian Democratic Convention. It adds to an existing body of literature that covers the development of political parties in post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe and to the small number of studies focusing on centre-right parties in the region. Specifically it adds to the literature on party success and failure and to that on Romanian party and electoral politics. The Romanian Democratic Convention is chosen to add new insights: it is unusual because it is a study of organisational failure and because there is a geographical imbalance in the published studies of the politics of the region towards the Visegrad states. The thesis acknowledges existing academic debate about the competing influences of historical legacies, agency and structural factors in relation to post-Communist democratisation. It aims to identify what led the Convention to first establish itself but then fail to consolidate and eventually to collapse. It draws on a range of sources: semi-structured interviews; contemporaneous newspaper reports; published diaries and autobiographies and a number of secondary sources. The thesis is structured thematically, examining the role of legacies and critical events in shaping long term behaviour by politicians (chapters three and four); organisational factors and the influence of operational objectives (chapter five); the search for a broad and integrative ideology (chapter six). The conclusions in chapter seven suggest that successfully crafting a new, broad political formation requires a degree of pragmatism, directive leadership and political entrepreneurship that was missing from the Democratic Convention because it was shaped by Romania's transition from Communism, by its organisational structure and by differences within its leadership elite so that competing operational objectives could not be reconciled when the formation entered government.

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Canterbury, 2009. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 119-127). Also available via the World Wide web.

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This thesis problematizes the interplay of power and media institutions as a general difficulty in democratic societies and as a specific challenge in countries that are emerging from authoritarian regimes. Based on more comprehensive studies about power, dominance, compliance, resistance and information monopoly developed in the United States, the project approaches a particular case in modern history, namely Romania, during the period of transition following Ceausescu's overthrow, in December, 1989, and before the first free elections, in May, 1990. The bulk of the work concentrates on deconstructing political and media discourses developed throughout this period, while trying to address the role that the political and media environments had in reshaping post-communist Romania. My major argument is that, given a number of difficulties that have marked this period, ranging from economic setbacks, political ambiguities, and social confusion, the May elections have been monitored and orchestrated starting early in this period by the provisional authorities (a group of former communist bureaucrats), in tandem with a number of central media outlets. From this combination of power interests, the Romanian public was deprived of correct information on a number of issues that pertained to the future of the country and was trapped in the web of a carefully designed imagery that fostered a dissimulated totalitarian propaganda. The last part of the project advances these contentions and considers them in turn, while trying to capture how the specifics of the case inscribe themselves in larger patterns of dominance and compliance. / Master of Arts

Cette thèse se propose de répondre à la question suivante: quels sont les facteurs qui influencent les décisions stratégiques de la politique étrangère roumaine? Il y a trois séries de facteurs qui ont été considérées. La première concerne les facteurs liées aux héritages historiques, qui sont examinés sous le double aspect des évènements concrets et des mentalités. La deuxième série de facteurs se réfère aux influences internes sur la prise des décisions: architecture institutionnelle et légale, partage des compétences, relations informelles entre les détenteurs des fonctions relevantes pour la politique étrangère roumaine, partis politiques et opinion publique. Finalement, la troisième série de variables concerne les facteurs externes au système politique. Deux dimensions sont ici examinées: une dimension géopolitique, qui vise la distribution de la puissance, et une dimension institutionnelle, qui détermine le poids des organisations internationales et régionales dans la prise des décisions. / Doctorat en sciences politiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished