This article presents a brief analysis of the claims that the new European realities have to be funded on federalist basis. But the federalism raises a set of problems, regarding group membership and states’ liberties. The conclusion is that the issue of European construction related to federalism remains unsolved; it is a matter of option between two ways, each one with barely predictable ends – therefore, it is a matter of risk also.
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This article is focused in general on the way Romanian legislation is synchronized with EU’s, and in particular on the laws related with Aarhus Convention provisions and their enforceability. Authors’ conclusion is that even if a formal framework exists, in Romania there is no appropriate environmental protection. This situation creates dark perspectives for Romania, with the probability of becoming a permanent client of EJC due to its environmental problems.
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Dominique Schnapper “Comunitatea cetăţenilor: asupra ideii moderne de naţiune”, traducere din limba franceză şi prefaţă de Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram, editura Paralela 45, Pitesti, 2004.
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Ferenc Békássy belongs to that small but distinct group of people who before the First World War were “at home” in two languages: Hungarian and English. In fact he wrote poetry in both and could have gone on to write even better poems had he not fallen in 1915 during the First World War fighting the Russians. He was only 22 years old at the time, but his death was mourned by Mihály Babits, one of Hungary’s leading poets and also by his best English friend, the Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was so fond of young Békássy that in the summer of 1912 he visited him in Western Hungary where the Békássy family owned property.1 It is now also clear that he was instrumental in the publication of a collection of Ferenc Békássy’s verse written in English, under the title Adriatica and Other Poems (The Hogarth Press, London, 1925). In recent years interest in Békássy’s work has increased in his native Hungary2, so his relationship with James Strachey, the younger brother of Lytton Strachey is worth investigating.
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The departure of Lady Thatcher evokes in me impressions that had been crucial in the shaping of my understanding of politics – in a very irregular political education as a writer on the margins of the soft communist dictatorship of János Kádár. But also as an Americanist scholar with living personal contacts to the contemporary ferment of American and English poetry and art.
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Is oral history worth the paper it is printed on? Does it not hint at facts missed by historians? Could it serve as a footnote in their chronicles? Two of my sources – thoughtful men with minds more at home in a distant era than I ever will be – have offered tantalising details of a story three centuries old and still alive in Szabolcs County, in Hungary’s north-eastern extremity. The sources lured me into the Age of Enlightenment they loved as a glorious niche of time when heroic nobles walked the Old World and demanded such earth-shaking reforms as the abolition of serfdom, the end of state censorship, freedom of religion, and the removal of bigoted kings.
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Interview with Rupert Scholz by Roger Koppel
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Back when I was a student at the Dresden Institute of Technology in the 1970s, I rarely felt comfortable actually going to an area, ominously dominated as it was by derelict barracks and Russian military vehicles in the streets. There was one exception: the building of the former Saxon Cadet School. This was used as an officers’ mess for the Soviet troops, and civilians were sometimes granted entry in the evening, perhaps by means of bribes or other unorthodox practices. Sitting in the gallery, listening to Russian sixties and seventies hits and drinking cheap vodka, my fellow students and I would keenly scout the dance floor and whenever we spotted a pretty Russian or Asianlooking girl, we would dash across and ask her for the next dance. Yes, hard as it is to believe, such fraternisation even took place in the barracks quarter of Dresden, which, by a twist of fate, somehow survived the terrible bomb attacks in February 1945. As a reserve officer of the German army, I was not so long ago asked to take part in a military training programme in Dresden. The training was held in the same building, now functioning as the German Army Officers’ School, well restored and refurbished with a new, elegant officers’ mess building. A far cry from the communist days, when if someone had told me how the building would turn out I would called them a fool.
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I’d like to present a new project that finds itself in the borderland – between literature, knowledge about literature and knowledge from the perspective of literature. The project is entitled “Beyond the Horizon of Europe” and it endeavours to tell about the place and the context. About a slightly different Belarusian literature – the literature that emerged in the late 1980s. But to tell it in a different way. Being part of this situation, I fail to find a perspective safe enough to allow me to speak impartially.
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Of those of my generation who became involved with belles-lettres in one way or another, I was probably the only one to have been reared on the works of the so-called “populist” writers. Even as a university student in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this peculiar background made me look like an oddball, or less charitably a redneck with obsolete tastes who had fallen irreversibly behind somewhere along the way. I do not recall receiving glances of pity but I certainly elicited plenty of astonishment and incomprehension, even from my peers who had also grown up in the countryside. It seemed that works created decades before by such noted populist writers as Péter Veres, Pál Szabó, Géza Féja, even Gyula Illyés or Zsigmond Móricz, struck a chord and resonated within me. The hands-on emotional knowledge, the experience of being touched, had all but vanished without a trace by then; the intimacy of recognition was no longer really available as a memory let alone as an actual option, not even for those of my own ilk.
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Which has priority over the other, the Hungarian state or the Hungarian nation? Although the two concepts are closely related, they are unquestionably not the same. Consequently, it is quite legitimate to ask whether state building or nation building should be given preference. This question, however, cannot be answered without defining one’s position on the idea of the nation. Since the systemic changes of 1989–1990 the issue of nationhood has become central to Hungarian politics. The following study makes an attempt at outlining the strategies of Hungarian political conservatism in respect of the nation since the fall of the communist regime in 1989. But before exposing in detail the thesis of this study, some words here would be useful about the history of the relationship between conservatism and nationhood in the Hungarian context.
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Balkan or Balkans is an odd word. The term “Balkanise” is familiar to everybody far and wide, being used to designate a social process in which not merely is there a perceptible economic decline but also a coarsening of relations between people. It seeks to imply some kind of deterioration, decay and renewed primitivisation, and it often flies from the lips of those who are themselves not distant enough, but at the same time haven’t the foggiest idea what lies at the back of it, where it starts and ends, whence the ominous expression sprang to their lips like a curse: Balkans.
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1989, the annus mirabilis, when the communist dominoes rapidly fell one after the other, may already be a generation away, but we, both witnesses and participants, should not let it be forgotten just what a historical watershed it was. It was the end of the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear holocaust. It was the end of the 20th century, which began amid great optimism with the idea of “progress”, but led instead to world wars, genocides and totalitarian dictatorships. 1989 also brought to an end the term “Eastern Europe” as a synonym for the communist bloc, a term we, the inhabitants, always thoroughly disliked. It seemed to be also the end of the Age of Newspeak, the end of the Age of Lies, when Evil was spectacularly defeated, and mankind was given another chance to make the world better. Nothing that has happened since 1989, or indeed, nothing that may come, could take away from those who participated in it the memory of 1989, that time of great hope, that moment of bliss.
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If you want to understand the essential nature of Thatcherism and of Mrs Thatcher – their beating heart, so to speak – it is to be found in some words that she addressed to a television interviewer, Michael Brunson of Independent Television News, towards the close of the 1979 election campaign. Mrs Thatcher liked Brunson whom she knew to be fair and whom she suspected of being favourably inclined to her. Because of that friendly suspicion, she let down her pre-election guard somewhat and exclaimed with unrestrained passion: “I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t bear it.”
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On 17 February 2013, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest closed the doors on its exhibition entitled Cézanne and the Past: Tradition and Creativity. With some 180,000 visitors, a 527-page catalogue of scholarly merit featuring articles by the big shots of Cézanne study, and a conference marshalling a bevy of additional invited specialists, the exhibition produced fresh results worthy of further consideration by international Cézanne research. The Burlington Magazine devotes space to the exhibition in Budapest, by John-Paul Stonard in the March issue.2 The professional know-how and well-established connections of the Curator, Judit Geskó resulted in a mature exhibition concept that went beyond a recapitulation or summation of the latest research findings and thought them over in new, creative ways. As such, the exhibition in Budapest fit in comfortably with the string of great Cézanne exhibitions since the second half of the 1970s, both monographic and thematic, that had offered a complex look at the influential oeuvre of the Aix Master.
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Jonathan Knott, the British ambassador to Hungary recently quipped that London is the fifth biggest Hungarian town on the planet. Perhaps something of an exaggeration as things stand but probably not for too long. The Facebook group called Londonfalva (“London village”) had attracted a membership of over 22,000 by early 2013 – a good indicator of the number of Hungarians who work, live or intend to live in London.
More...This paper, a contribution to the current discussion on feudalism, is a study of a single, exceptionally well-documented lord/dependant (vassal) relationship from early eleventh century Aquitaine. It is based on an analysis of a 340-line narrative (Paris, BN, Lat., 5927) of a dispute between the Count of Poitiers and one of his castellans, Hugh of Lusignan. It examines successively, the author's vocabulary of dependence, contemporary conceptions of lordship and dependence, the customary basis of this relationship; i.e. obligations, restrictions, and rights, its landed, economic basis, and its effectiveness. What distinguishes this narrative from the charters, legal texts, and chronicles normally used by historians of feudalism is its secular perspective and its conversational mode. The protagonists tell the story in vivid live speech, while the author reveals their inner thoughts and motivations in his third-person commentaries. Its most significant finding is that the customs commonly thought to regulate the lord/dependant relationship, fidelity, service, aids, etc., had little relevance to concrete situations in daily life. To avoid discord and violence, lord and his dependant had constantly to negotiate new agreements to deal with each crisis as it arose. The kind of relationship the two men worked out in practice depended on power, wealth, and personal qualities such as ingenuity, daring, and ruthlessness.
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