LefteastMihai-Dan Cîrjan is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of the Central European University in Budapest. His research interests include economic sociology, financial anthropology and the history of capitalism in Eastern Europe, with a focus on the first decades after the Great Depression. His current research project tackles the restructuring of the Romanian financial system after 1929, with an emphasis on the state’s sovereign debt and the private debt of Romanian citizens.
Note from LeftEast editors: This text was originally published by Bilten When the French European parliamentary group that includes Emmanuel Macron’s party expressed its support for the Romanian Laura Codruța Kövesi rather than the French Jean-François Bohnert for the position of European Public Prosecutor, it became clear that very little could stand between Romania’s chief […]
Romania’s main political battles for this year, or at least its most violent and its most consequential, will unfold in what will apparently be dry technical discussion about interbank rates, just as seemingly neutral actors like the Central Bank will play an essential role in this year’s elections.
This article is published in cooperation with Bilten: Regional Portal. 1. Failing against all odds Just as the polls were announcing a crushing defeat for the Romanian Social-Democrats at the European elections, their party leader, Liviu Dragnea, was slowly being escorted to prison, putting what is probably an end to his political career: a three […]
This article has been published in collaboration with Bilten. According to the Eurostat statistics for 2016, one third of all farms in the EU can be found in Romania- roughly 3,600 thousand agricultural holdings. Similarly, the country boasts the largest share of labor force employed in agriculture in the EU, a staggering 26% of the […]
This article is published in collaboration with the Serbo-Croatian portal Bilten. On the 17th of November 2017, the majority party in the Romanian parliament, the Social Democrats (PSD) issued a statement condemning the existence and practices of the Romanian “parallel state.” This strange notion, with its mysterious air of 1950s spy movies, had already made […]
This article has been published in collaboration with the Bilten regional platform. The illusion of the “private vs. public” opposition A flurry of irate opinions, fuming comments, and angry analyses have emerged in Romania’s liberal press once the Social-Democratic Prime-Minister, Mihai Tudose, announced in late August, under rather vague terms, his Cabinet’s intentions to reform the […]
This text was first published in Serbo-Croatian by Bilten. On the 25th-28th of May, and with the official support of the Hungarian government, Budapest was the place to be for all those keen on defending “the traditional family”. Called the “Budapest Family Summit,” the event occasioning this huge congregation of patriarchy enthusiasts, was a massive […]
Introduction and Context The Two Revolutions The following text is a short fragment of an eye-witness account of the 1917 Revolutions: Voicu Nițescu’s Twenty Months in Russian and Siberia published in Brașov (Romania) in 1926. The book, a rather long-winded work of three volumes, is not the work of an enthusiast: there is hardly […]
(Review: From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Haymarket Books: 2015. ) Real America has a Romanian accent and lives in Prague In Eastern Europe there is a specific way in which the class relations and social transformations which have moulded US politics get lost in a glazed landscape of critical opacity. Within the […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: This article has first appeared in Romanian on the website Criticatac. It was translated into English by Maria Pozsar and extensively reworked by the author. 1. The Oblivion Today, only two months after they took place, the protests mentioned in […]