Browsing by Author "Ungureanu, Radu-Sebastian"

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BOOK REVIEW: Miruna Troncotă. 2014. Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critical Case Study of Europeanization, Bucharest, Tritonic Publishing House, 327 pages, ISBN: 978-606-8571-36-2
(National University of Political Studies and Public Administration - Department of International Relations and European Integration, 2015-09) Ungureanu, Radu-Sebastian
European Union a polity in search of a mission?
(Ecozone Publishing House, 2012-04-22) Ungureanu, Radu-Sebastian
The unique features of the European Union generate permanent political and theoretical debates; the fact is unsurprising, since simply describing this entity is a challenge. Despite the impressive literature on the topic, there is no widely recognized understanding of EU‟s nature as a polity. The paper considers that the most appropriate term from the usual political vocabulary to designate it is that of „empire‟. EU is based on an imperial myth, comprises many former imperial powers, can be considered an empire, but does not display the behaviour and ideology expected from one. The article suggests that the answer for this dissonance can be found in considering that the defining feature of a given empire is its „mission‟ – the ideological project that legitimizes and guides it. From the theoretical position of social constructivism, the paper investigates the characteristics of EU‟s mission as an innovative polity.
New patterns of europeanisation: digitalizing Romania's educational system during COVID-19 crisis
(National University of Political Studies and Public Administration - Department of International Relations and European Integration, 2024-07-15) Caradaică, Mihail; Cucută, Radu Alexandru; Negrescu, Victor; Ungureanu, Radu-Sebastian
As a result of the major pressure exerted by the COVID-19 pandemic and its management on students and teachers, the EU member states and institutions face the necessity to accelerate the digitalization of education. The EU interventions in this field open the debate on whether digital education will be another subject of Europeanisation as the supranational institutions are acquiring more competences, and whether a new European policy approach was generated by the pandemic. Therefore, the paper investigates whether the COVID crisis represents a major shift in the Europeanisation of digital education in the EU. We will thus try to assess this transformation by analysing the impact of the crisis on digital education, showcasing Romania and the manner in which the national government designed its public policies against the background of the EU positions, recommendations and measures.
Wars, states, and liberal values: reshaping the international order in a global world
(Civil Szemle Foundation, 2023-12) Ungureanu, Radu-Sebastian
For three decades after the end of the Cold War, non-traditional threats and their management dominated the perception and understanding of international security. Intra-state conflicts and humanitarian interventions, the war on terror, the financial crisis, migration or the pandemic sketched the main lines of a political and intellectual landscape prone to notice a continuous erosion of the traditional foci on nation-states and their military preoccupations due to the processes of globalization. Facing these challenges, the major powers, connected by a certain consensus on fundamental issues, commonly coped with the ubiquitous crises. The outbreak of the Russo–Ukrainian war dramatically marked the slow, even unnoticed, change of this perspective. As the ‘classical’ optics regains its privileged position as the main approach to international security, this conflict also indicates a revision of the international order, too. The aim of this paper is to question the noticeable current changes of the international order, based on three main arguments. Firstly, a certain de-legitimization of the great powers’ military interventions accompanies the reassertion of the statist understanding of international security. Secondly, the liberal values are still the very basis of the international order, as they were in the last thirty years. In this realm, the cosmopolitan approach, of Kantian inspiration, which envisions a transnational civil society, was slightly replaced by a Wilsonian conception, focused on national and international actors, institutions and processes. Finally, the global issues do not disappear, but become the premises of the present reshaping of the international order.