Romania’s Cultural Capital in the Global and European Context (original) (raw)

Cultural Determinants of Economic Performance in Romania

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2015

Max Weber, the Austrian School, and the institutional economists described the influence of culture on the economy. Culture may be regarded as an economic asset -a type of capital cultural. It is an intangible public good, shared by the members of a social group. International experts agree that cultural action is an effective factor for social and economic integration, a genuine way of promoting territorial cohesion and engine for local development. At the EU level, the Culture Programme 2007-2013 continues the previous Culture 2000 Programme. The goal of the European Commission is to promote a new approach to cultural action focused on its socio-economic role and on the creation of a common cultural space. It promotes cultural dialogue, the creation and dissemination of culture and mobility of artists and their works, European cultural heritage, new forms of cultural expression. This paper presents a brief analysis of the impact on economic development, at the national level and for development regions, of cultural factors and creative sectors in Romania. Both the direct effects (turnover generated by the creative and cultural sectors, their contribution to Romania's GDP, their growth rate, the number of people employed in these sectors) and indirect effects (interdependencies with the information and communication technology, attracting investment and tourism development) of culture on economic development are analyzed.

Assessing the cultural value of the communist legacy in Romania

2014

Starting for the statement within the discourse on heritage formation that not everything is heritage not will end up acquiring the status of heritage, but anything has the potential to become heritage, in my presentation I am interested in identifying the mechanisms involved in the process of creation of "heritage" when particularly dealing with material assets of the communist past. One central problem to be presented is how historical assets are negotiated and assessed as culturally valuable and they are being incorporated, perceived and preserved as components of the national cultural heritage. Since of the amount of material present from the communist past is enormous, I will focus my presentation on two particular sites of the historic interest, namely the civic centre in Bucharest, the Victory of Socialism with a focus on the House of the People and the collections of the former museum of the Communist Party in Romania.

Cultural policy and values: intrinsic versus instrumental? The case of Romania (revised and augmented version)

The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society.Vol.39, no.1, Spring 2009, pp.24-44 , 2009

This article addresses cultural policy in post-Communist Romania, focusing on the justifications for support of culture and the arts. The objectives are to clarify values legitimizing public support and to determine their effect on the meaning and impact of cultural policy. The author argues that justifications of public funding—instrumental or intrinsic—depend on how successive governments represent the roles conferred to culture and the arts, as well as on the particular ideas of culture and art they promote. Policy discourse after 1989 has been characterized by its nourishment of a persistent instrumental ideology that gradually connected to the international debate and has been dominated by a traditional, narrow conception of culture and art, which conflicts with a modern conception. Until recently, the fluctuations and conflicts between different values and ideas of culture and art have worked to constrain cultural policy, disrupting its implementation and altering its effects.

The Vicious Spiral of Economic and Cultural Crisis . Cultural Implications of Romania ’ s Economic Collapse ( 2009 – 2010 )

2013

The paper examines the dynamics of cultural consumption during Romania’s most dramatic period of economic crisis (2009 – 2010) in an attempt to reveal the interdependence between the two phenomena, in the sense that any decline in one of them reverberates in the other. Thus, Romania’s particular case substantiates the assumption that the immediate, measurable consequences of economic crisis, such as poverty or unemployment, are doubled by a long – term impact on the population’s patterns of thought and behavior, whose alteration has a boomerang effect on the economy. Ultimately, this research combines the quantitative and the qualitative perspective in order to reveal the way in which, in moments of crisis, the economic and the cultural constantly backfire on each other in a vicious spiral and have a negative impact on social evolution at large. Key – Words: economy, society, economic crisis, cultural crisis, cultural non – consumption, social development 1 Economy – Society – Cultu...

Geographical – Historical Patterns of Romanian Identity

Diversitate si Identitate Culturala in Europa, 2012

The present study expounds a synthesis of the main cultural models leading to the present-day configuration of Romanian cultural identity. We start from the assumption that cultural identity is a construct, an ever-evolving process involving not only objective, externally induced factors, but also elements of willfulness. This perspective of analysis, also adopted by historians and cultural studies specialists, is based on the perception that the geographical location and historical events impinging on Romanian society along the centuries have created a matrix defining some of the present features of Romanian identity.

Memory and identity. Monuments of Romanian Tangible Culture Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List (a Short Presentation), in: Faces of Identity and Memory. The Cultural Heritage of Central and Eastern Europe (Managing and Case Studies), ed. by Ewa Kocój, Łukasz Gaweł, Kraków 2015, p. 11-34.

In recent years the Romanian cultural heritage has been gaining more and more interest from European scholars. It is understandable, since the turn of the 20th and 21th century is regarded as the moment of the explosion of interest in the subject of heritage and collective memory. Romania, which in the time of Communist regime was a “stronghold” on the border of the East and West, can still boast unknown and unresearched monuments, which provide a lot of new information on Byzantine and post-Byzantine culture, as well as on the cultures of ethnic and religious minorities living in this country. This article presents the characteristics of cultural heritage management in Romania, as well as the most important institutions dealing with this. Tangible cultural heritage listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites are presented, e.g. the painted orthodox churches and monasteries of Bukovina, the wooden churches of Maramureș, the Dacian Fortresses of the Orăștie Mountains, and the fortified churches in Transylvania. The discourse around these monuments in the Romanian culture is also briefly commented on. It revolves around the ancient settlement myth referring to the Dacian heritage, the orthodox faith understood as fidelity to original Christianity and, gradually, the multicultural heritage of other ethnicities so strongly inhabiting the Romanian territory. It shows that Romania, just like other European countries, has the need to present its history through tangible heritage and emphasizing the Dacian-Roman and Orthodox identity, as well as the need to create new narrative and new post-communist countenance, with a clearly emphasized aspect of a multicultural country inhabited by various ethnicities and religions.

Europeanization of Regional Identities in Romania. Case Study: The Land of Moti

Romania is known as a highly centralized country, where regional identities were strongly subject to uniformization. Cultural differences and identities have although survived even to the communist regime, often in an altered form. After 1989, in many parts of the country people began to rediscover their roots and the meaning of their local and regional identities. In the same time, the temptation and the benefits to takeover European values and behaviors were extremely high and therefore Romanians oriented their identification needs towards Europe. One of Romania’s region imbedded with a strong local identity, due to its mountainous specificity and its historical poverty, is the Ţara Moţilor (The Land of Moţi). Through this study we propose an analysis of the extent to which European values have influenced Romanian local values, in particular in the Land of Moţi, on the premise that the specific situation of this region predisposes to an orientation towards traditional values on the one hand, and to more openness and Europeanization, on the other hand. Both aspects are visible in the area, our analysis intending to clarify the reasons for one and the other orientations, in order to understand the identity issues of the area.

Cultural Heritage in the South-Eastern Region of Romania

2014

L’article ci-dessous concerne trois directions d’analyse, en fonction desquelles on structure l’approche geographique du patrimoine culturel: la typologie du patrimoine et les aspects comparatifs infraregionaux, le potentiel touristique et l’attractivite differentiee du patrimoine, ainsi que l’argumentation pour les politiques d’amenagement du territoire en accord avec la nature et la dimension du phenomene patrimonial. Le travail utilise les informations officielles concernant les monuments historiques, l’analyse critique des projets deroules dans la region SE, possible direction pour le management d’image et de marketing en relation avec la politique de developpement et d’amenagement.

The Future of National Identity in the Context of the Process of »Europeanization«. The Romanian Case

http://www.kakanien-revisited.at/, 2005

This paper intends to approach the recent historical process of reconstruction of national identity inside the theoretical and explanatory perspective of social sciences-sociology and communication sciences. More precisely, I place my approach within the new scientific paradigm that opened the constructivist trend in human and social sciences. The study is an exploratory and theoretical one, representing the first phase of research on the identification of some characteristics of a possible future of national identity. My research project deals with the issue of national identity versus European identity in the process of the so-called »Europeanization« dealing with theoretical and empirical perspectives of communication. Therefore, I am first interested in this/these identities' construction on a discursive level inside of media communication.

The risk of losing national identity in the twenty-first century Romania, or national identity from adaptation to self-censorship

Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2015

In the contemporary world of extremely dynamic movements in the fields of territorial state reconfiguration, economic “colonization”, globalization, Europeanization, migration of population, borrowing of cultural values and intensified cultural exchange or transfer, defining national identity has become a process which registers numerous changes and encounters various challenges. The classical features that assisted this process of defining national identity in the past – a historic territory, common myths, historical memories and values, a common public culture, common legal rights and duties, a common economy with territorial mobility (A. D. Smith 1991: 14) – undergo significant transformations each decade and the definition of a nation’s identity calls for important reconsiderations. One aspect worth considering is that of losing or self-censoring one’s national identity due to a nation’s own intention or some external demands of adaptation to general aspects of political, econom...