statista: The Most Culturally Chauvinistic Europeans (Oct 30, 2018)

A Pew Research Center survey set out to answer that question by surveying 56,000 adults across Europe. Respondents were asked whether they agree with the statement "our people are not perfect but our culture is superior to others". The following map shows the share of people in different countries considering their own culture to be superior to others and there are certainly some interesting results. Take Portugal where 47 percent of people agree with the above statement compared to just 20 percent in neighbouring Spain.

The most chauvinistic attitudes towards culture were recorded across Eastern Europe with Romania (66 percent), Bulgaria (69 percent) and Russia (also 69 percent) on top. The highest score of any country across Europe was actually recorded in Greece where 89 percent of people agreed with the statement.

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UnHerd: Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

Both Hitler and Mussolini incentivised childbearing with limited success. In the 1960s Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaușescu, eager to boost his nation’s demographic heft, removed the availability of contraception overnight. At first there was a sharp increase in the number of babies being born, but before too long people found ways around the system, and by the time of his fall, Ceaușescu’s Romania was not performing much better from a population perspective than most of its neighbours – which is to say, very poorly. [...]

Likewise in nearby Poland, where the current government stands on a pro-traditional-family platform and since 2016 has offered relatively generous child benefits – £100 per month per child – as well as maintaining strict anti-abortion laws. The policy has been credited with helping the ruling Law and Justice party win re-election, but, as in Hungary, the rise in fertility is small and still leaves Poland at barely two-thirds of what would be required for replacement. [...]

For now, two things for sure can be said. First, the best guarantee of avoiding the very lowest fertility rates in developed countries is an acceptance of extra-marital births and assistance to women in combining work and family. Where women get the education to aspire but are not encouraged to combine aspiration with motherhood, they tend to opt for the former, which is why fertility rates are so low in countries with traditional attitudes to women in the workplace, such as Italy and Japan, but higher in places like Scandinavia and France.

Second, much as governments can try their best, the only true guarantee of replacement fertility is a family-oriented and child-loving culture. Societies or ethnic groups wanting to survive and thrive should not just look to their governments for tax breaks and benefits but should look to themselves, their values and attitudes.

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The Calvert Journal: Bucharest modernism

Many of the houses in Anghel’s collection are designed by Marcel Janco, one of the founders of the Dadaist art movement. Janco and his Romanian contemporaries trained in Zurich, Paris, and Vienna before bringing International Style back home to Bucharest. Their repertoire is simple: flat roofs, layered cuboid shapes, porthole windows, glass brick, rounded corners. Some of the houses incorporate more traditional or art deco features. But generally speaking, their clean contours turn their back to the flourishes of Art-Nouveau; their stripped down lightness contrasts with the heavy neo-Romanian and neo-gothic style of the buildings that nestle side by side on central Bucharest’s streets.

Much of the modernist architecture in Bucharest, however, differs from the other, similar movements sweeping Europe at the same time. In Vienna, Berlin, and Frankfurt, the International Style was not purely an aesthetic concern, but a political project. Many of the era’s leading architects were motivated by the idea that beautiful housing should be open to the working classes as well as the rich. Aesthetics and politics were inextricably linked. They built functional, affordable, bright, large-scale social housing. In contrast, Romanian architects mostly served private clients. Janco and others returned from Western Europe to find Bucharest a fertile ground for their aesthetic projects: the capital’s educated urban elite were infatuated with modernism and commissioned the architects to design small residential blocks and private villas. [...]

Their opaque legal status explains the buildings’ wounds and exposed brickwork: many of the structures are now crumbling. Anghel says he doesn’t know anyone who lives in these houses due to their architectural merit. The people who care about these modernist structures can’t afford to buy them. Even listing these homes as architecturally valuable (as many already are) can’t save them, as it makes restoration an expensive business. There are those among Bucharest’s political and business elite who are simply waiting for these buildings to collapse, so that they can use the valuable land beneath to build bigger, more lucrative apartment blocks, Anghel tells me.

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The Guardian: ‘I want my country’s image to be good’: has Romania’s ruling party moved on?

In less than 48 hours in May, Romania’s ruling party was given a triple dose of reality when it was badly beaten in European parliamentary elections, rebuked in a referendum on its attempt to reverse tough anti-corruption laws and had its powerful party leader, Liviu Dragnea, jailed for three-and-a-half years for abuse of office. [...]

More than 80% backed a ban on the government having powers to change judicial legislation by emergency decree and the use of pardons in corruption-related cases, as the PSD’s vote share simultaneously more than halved from the 45% it won in the 2016 general election. [...]

In the aftermath of the May votes, Dăncilă vowed to abandon the controversial judicial proposals, a pledge she reiterated this week. “We have understood the message from 26 May. We have not spoken about the justice system, we have not let anybody get involved on that topic … I would like to go back to the agenda that is focused on the citizen, less on the justice system,” she said. [...]

Dăncilă would not be drawn on whether her government would continue to oppose Kövesi’s appointment, but said that she personally believed Kövesi must “solve her issues with the justice system” before taking this kind of role. “What do we do if those accusations are real? I don’t know if they are real or not, it’s a hypothesis, but I believe that the Romanian image will be affected and I want my country’s image to be very good,” she added.

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CityLab: An Incredibly Detailed Map of Europe's Population Shifts (JUN 22, 2015)

Look at the Eastern section of the map and you’ll see that many cities, including Prague, Bucharest, and the Polish cities of Poznań and Wrocław, are ringed with a deep red circle that shows a particularly high rise in average annual population of 2 percent or more. As this paper from Krakow’s Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Geography notes, Eastern cities began to spread out in the new millennium because it was their first chance to do so in decades.[...]

We already know from other available data that Europe is experiencing a migration to the northwest, but the BBSR map adds complexity to this picture and reveals some interesting micro-trends. The dark blue coloring of the map’s Eastern section shows that the lean years for Eastern states are by no means over. Residents have continued to leave Albania, Bulgaria and Latvia in particular in search of jobs, while even relatively wealthy eastern Germany has been hollowed out almost everywhere except the Berlin region.

Population growth in the Northwest, meanwhile, is far from even. While large sections of Northern Scandinavia’s inland are losing people, there’s still modest growth on the Arctic coasts. And while the Scottish Highlands contain some the least peopled lands in all of Europe, Scotland’s Northeast shows remarkable population gains, a likely result of the North Sea oil industry concentrated in Aberdeen. [...]

Spain’s trends look a little different from those of Europe as a whole. It’s actually in the country’s Northwest where the population has dropped most sharply, notably in the provinces of Galicia and León, which have long been known to produce many of Spain’s migrants.

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Social Europe: Tackling poverty and inequality in Europe

National poverty rates in the EU vary between over 25 per cent in Romania and less than 10 per cent in the Czech Republic. For Germany, the figure is 16.5 per cent (2016). The official Eurostat figure for the EU as a whole is 17.3 per cent, which puts poverty in the EU only slightly higher than the level in Germany. However, if a proper EU-wide poverty threshold is calculated, the figure comes out significantly higher. [...]

The poverty rate has decreased slightly since 2015, with the number of people at risk of poverty in the EU falling by around 4 million. This fall is equivalent to just under one percentage point. Any progress may be due to relatively strong growth, especially in the poorer countries. [...]

(a) Intra-country inequality is increased by welfare cuts and labour-market deregulation, technological change and globalisation. All these causes can be addressed by government policy. For example, in Germany the introduction of a minimum wage has halted the rise in inequality observable since 1995. In the EU, a stricter Posted Workers Directive could curb wage competition. In his most recently published book, the late Tony Atkinson presented numerous suggestions for how intra-country inequality could be reduced, covering all categories of cause. Unfortunately, the EU’s economic-policy advice and the requirements it has imposed on indebted countries have instead tended to increase inequality.

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Jacobin Magazine: No Scrubs

One of the most positive features of state socialism, Ghodsee argues, is that it gave women economic independence from men. In the former Soviet countries, women may not have been able to take part in free elections or find a diversity of consumer goods, but they were guaranteed public education, jobs, housing, health care, maternity leave, child allowances, child care, and more. Not only did this arrangement liberate women and men alike from the anxieties and pressures of sink-or-swim capitalism; it also meant that women were much less likely to rely on male partners for the fulfillment of basic needs. This in turn meant that heterosexual women’s romantic relationships with men were more optional, less constrained by economic considerations, and often more egalitarian. As Ghodsee writes in her book: [...]

State socialist feminists — and I should put the term “feminist” in quotes, because really they were women’s activists — understood women to have different needs from men, and sought to implement policies to meet those needs. We’re not talking about gender or sexual equality in exactly the way that it was articulated by Western feminists in the second wave. The idea was instead that men and women were both making valuable contributions to society, but doing so in different ways. Women’s role as mothers was often assumed. To that end, there were many state policies put in place to deal with the work-family balance issues that women are still dealing with today in the West. [...]

There were brilliant socialist feminists in the seventies, people like Silvia Federici and others, who were making the case that large structural changes would reorganize relationships between men and women. What happened is that, as Nancy Fraser has written about, feminism was largely co-opted by neoliberal capitalism. So we ended up getting a kind of Sheryl Sandberg-style “lean in” feminism, which is all about individual success and creating conditions for a handful of women to be as filthy rich as a handful of men are. [...]

The countries in the world with the fastest-shrinking populations are in Eastern Europe, partially because women aren’t having children — because there’s no economy to support a family — and partially because of out-migration. In the absence of economic security, women are using the tools they have to make a better life, including commodifying their relationships with men. That’s why when you type in “Ukrainian women” on Google the first thing that comes up is ads for mail-order brides.

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Political Critique: Romanians didn’t show up to an anti-LGBT referendum. But the battle for equality continues

A statement published by MozaiQ claimed the result shows “that Romanians have rejected hatred and division in society and have not identified with a political act aimed at stigmatising and discriminating against the LGBT community.” The result was hard-won. Ahead of the vote, activists reported an increase in homophobic and transphobic hate speech. [...]

The timing of this referendum provided a government under attack from anti-corruption protests with a chance to deflect attention from their own problems. By allowing the referendum, MozaiQ argued, “the political class has shown that it is disconnected from the daily realities” of Romanian people. The third thing to note is that voters rejected outside interference in their democracy from international ultra-conservative anti-LGBT groups. [...]

The ballot box defeat of their agenda suggests that outside groups determined to undermine LGBT rights around the world have been rejected in Romania. It also suggests that the influence of the Orthodox Church – whose Patriarch urged Christians to go and vote on Sunday – has been overestimated.

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Quartz: Romania’s referendum and the problem with asking people what they want

The Romanian referendum was forced by a civil society group with a clear agenda, the Coalition for the Family, which wanted a constitutional change that would stop future governments legalizing same-sex marriage. Voter turnout of just 20.4% fell below the required level of 30% for the decision to be binding. Civil rights groups had actively encouraged a boycott: In one example, a library chain offered a discount over the referendum weekend for people who wanted to stay in and read rather than vote. [...]

Psychologists call this kind of quandary a “false dichotomy.” In a false dichotomy, people start to believe that only two positions are possible, when the reality might be more multifaceted or nuanced. Parents use it—for the most part benignly—as a way to persuade toddlers who can’t yet reason: Do you want to eat the peas, or the carrots? (With no option of “the cake.”) [...]

But the problem with most referendums is that the decision of whether to put a question to the people—and what question to put—is in the hands of politicians.“It doesn’t have a lot to do with whether this should be decided by the people,” Alexandra Cirone, a fellow at the London School of Economics, told the New York Times. “It has to do with whether a politician can gain an advantage from putting a question to the people.”

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Politico: Romania’s dangerous family referendum

In truth, the initiative — launched in 2015 by a coalition of NGOs that receive backing from the Orthodox church — is a dangerous diversion tactic. For the government, which gave its backing to the proposal, it’s a useful way to distract voters, thousands of whom took to the streets earlier this year to protest rampant corruption. [...]

Supporters of the proposed constitutional alteration are attempting to use this divisive, hurtful and anti-family campaign to distract from public dissatisfaction with their policies. It might not be corruption in the financial sense, but their actions are certainly morally bankrupt. [...]

There is no upside to this campaign. The rights of married couples of opposite sexes will stay the same, while different types of families would see their legal protections stripped away. It is entirely contrary to the EU values of dignity and equality to ask voters to strike the fundamental rights from their fellow citizens. [...]

Human rights organizations and citizens in Romania are already urging voters to stay at home on October 7 to invalidate the result, which needs a 30 percent turnout rate to be considered valid. That would show this vote for what it is: a shameless exercise in political opportunism.

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Jacobin Magazine: Voting With Their Feet

The citizens in the frontline were not, as some officials claimed, hooligans picking a fight with the forces of order. But the protests did soon turn ugly. After some people began to lob stones, eggs, and bottles at the riot police, the gendarmes panicked and responded with tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannon. Peaceful protesters were hit with clubs, women with their children were tear-gassed and intimidated, random passers-by were brutally beaten, and journalists were shoved because they were filming the abuse. 455 people needed medical attention. [...]

It is unsurprising that corruption is at the heart of the current protests. This plague is rooted in the early 1990s, and Romania’s transition from the old one-party Communist regime to democracy. Many “smart guys” who had held key positions during the Communist era remained in power and took over the private businesses which now absorbed public funds. The disarray in the transition period, plus the lack of democratic institutions and civil society, allowed corruption to flourish. [...]

Almost four million Romanians — close to a quarter of the population — work abroad in all kinds of jobs, from doctors and engineers to cleaners and strawberry pickers. Romania’s 2007 entry into the European Union allowed its citizens far greater opportunities to make their way elsewhere — an opening many of them took. According to a recent UN Report, Romania in fact had the world’s second-highest increase in its diaspora between 2007 and 2015. With an average 7.3 percent annual growth rate in the number of citizens living abroad, Romania came behind only war-torn Syria (with an annual increase of 13.1 percent). [...]

In the wake of this campaign, the issue of the authorities’ disrespect for the law was again at the center of the next wave of protests. On October 30, 2015, sixty-four people were killed, and hundreds burned and injured, after a fire broke out at a Bucharest nightclub. The next day, the press reported that mayor Cristian Popescu Piedone had granted the club an operating license without the legally required permit from the fire department.

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Haaretz: Romania Starts to Confront Holocaust Past, but ‘Cycle of Denial’ Remains

But Antonescu’s regime was more than just any ally: Romania was Germany’s major ally on the Eastern Front after 1941, providing hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the Nazi war machine. As historian Timothy Snyder stresses in his 2015 book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” Romania was the only other state to “generate an autonomous policy of the direct mass murder of Jews.” [...]

His words were heeded. In October 1941, after an explosion at the Romanian military headquarters in Odessa that Antonescu blamed on the Jews, Romanian troops murdered approximately 40,000 of Odessa’s Jews. According to Yad Vashem, 19,000 of Odessa’s Jews were taken to the harbor and burnt alive, while another 20,000 Jews were taken to a an outlying village to be shot or burnt to death. [...]

This “cycle of denial,” in the words of Holocaust historian Paul A. Shapiro, wasn’t broken in Romania until 2003, after then-President Ion Iliescu made several controversial comments about there never having been a Holocaust within Romania’s borders. “The Holocaust was not unique to the Jews,” Iliescu was quoted as telling Haaretz at the time. [...]

The report, as Geissbühler and others note, resulted in some positive steps in Romania. In 2009, a Holocaust memorial was erected in Bucharest, unambiguously stating that “the Romanian state was responsible for the deaths of at least 280,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews.” There have also been changes to school textbooks and education about the Holocaust, as well as a resurgent interest in scholarship in the field.

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statista: The worst countries to be gay in Europe

The latest edition of ILGA Europe's Rainbow List has found that Malta, Belgium and Norway are the most LGBTI-friendly countries in Europe. The annual review ranks 49 European countries on a scale from 0 percent to 100 percent. Those closer to 0 percent are considered worst for gross violations of human rights and discrimination while the other end of the scale respects human rights and full equality.

LGBTI people planning a trip are best advised to avoid Turkey, Armenia and Azerbeijan. The latter is rock-bottom of the ranking with 4.70 percent. Russia, host of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, also scores poorly on the list with 10.90 percent.

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Deutsche Welle: Going naked against homophobia

Holding hands with your partner as gay men in the streets of Warsaw, Budapest or Bucharest is likely to attract at least a few disapproving looks. In some European countries, living openly as a homosexual requires a lot of courage. About half of the population of Poland (52 percent), Romania (54 percent), Hungary (44 percent) and more than one-third of Bulgaria (36 percent) would not grant equal rights to LGBT people, according to a 2015 Eurobarometer survey on discrimination in Europe.

The Romanian photographer and LGBT activist Tiberiu Capudean believes that hatred and fear are fueled by ignorance. His new project "Naked" is meant to give more visibility to the LGBT community. The artist has taken black and white pictures of more than 200 nude gay and bisexual men from different countries around the world and from a wide range of professions: medical doctors, biochemists, shop attendants, lawyers, tailors, students and engineers. "I want to help those who are not part of the LGBT community understand us, I want to give a face to those whom the homophobes hate without even knowing them", Capudean tells DW. [...]

There is also a connection between religion and homophobia in central and southeastern Europe. In Romania, the "Coalition for the Family," a group strongly backed by the Orthodox Church, has gathered 3 million signatures seeking to change the definition of family in the country's constitution through a referendum. Romania's Civil Code bans same-sex marriages and civil partnerships, but currently the constitution defines marriage as "the union between spouses," which leaves room for interpretation. The goal of this initiative is that the constitution should define family as "the union between a man and a woman."

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Slate: What Living off the Grid in Europe Looks Like

Bruy, who grew up in urban France, became fascinated by the self-sufficient, off-the-grid lifestyle he experienced and resolved to see more of it while documenting it with his camera. Using the WWOOF network, Bruy has lived on remote farms all across Europe, from Spain to Switzerland to Romania, staying anywhere from two weeks to three months at a time. “Most of the farmers had been living in big cities and I really respect their decision to say, ‘This is not my thing and I can't live this way anymore.’ I think there are a lot of people thinking this way but few making the steps to change. I was interested in how they managed to live another way,” he said.

While they all aspire to some degree of self-sufficiency, Bruy’s subjects represent a range of experiences. Some live without electricity or running water, while others are equipped with most modern conveniences. Bruy isn’t necessarily concerned with finding the most extreme cases. Instead, he’s interested in capturing a variety of people who have chosen alternative lifestyles. “Some of them would say they’re 30 percent self-sufficient or they’re 60 percent self-sufficient. It's very hard to check those numbers. The most important thing, for me, was the intention,” he said.

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Bloomberg: Richer Poles Are Bad News for Denmark Facing Labor Shortages

Despite a progressive tightening of immigration rules by the center-right government of Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, foreign workers have continued to trickle in and now account for nearly a tenth of the Scandinavian country's labor force, with eastern Europeans making up a sizable chunk of that, according to estimates by Nordea Bank AB, the region's largest lender. [...]

The arrival of about 80,000 foreign workers since 2013 helps explain why Danish inflation remains subdued despite half a decade of negative rates. According to Helge Pedersen, Nordea's chief economist in Denmark, annual wage growth could have been as much as 4.5 percent without them, compared with the actual rates of around 2 percent seen over the past five years. 

Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians or Czechs have been able to look for jobs around the continent since joining the European Union, which guarantees the free  movement of its workers. But years of EU membership – and the subsidies that come with it -- are now bringing the intended rewards to much of eastern Europe. Nordea notes that unemployment in Hungary or the Czech Republic is now at "post-communist lows," while salaries in Poland have doubled since the start of the millennium, says Eurostat, the EU's statistics agency. [...]

In November, the Confederation of Danish Industry said that nearly four out of 10 of its member companies were struggling to find qualified employees. This week, the Confederation of Danish Employers added its voice to calls for the government to attract foreign workers, citing estimates that suggest one in four firms in the construction industry are having to turn down orders because they can’t hire enough people. But the truth is that all kind of workers are needed across many sectors of Danish business.

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Quartz: The fastest shrinking countries on earth are in Eastern Europe

The top 10 countries with the fastest shrinking populations are all in Eastern Europe (with a few in Central and Northern Europe), according to UN projections. Bulgaria, Latvia, Moldova, Ukraine, Croatia, Lithuania, Romania, Serbia, Poland, Hungary, are estimated to see their population shrink by 15% or more by 2050.

In Bulgaria, the world’s fastest shrinking country, the population is expected to drop from 7 million in 2017 to 5.4 million in 2050. In Latvia, the population is estimated to drop from 1.9 million in 2017 to 1.5 million, whilst in Moldova, the population is estimated to shrink from 4 million to 3.2 million. [...]

At least 11 countries have shrunk by more than 10% in terms of their population size since 1989, Sobotka says, including, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine. Latvia lost over a quarter of its population (27%), Lithuania 23%, Bulgaria and Bosnia and Herzegovina 21%. For instance, Bulgarian population contracted from 9 million in 1989 to 7.1 million in 2017. “That’s a massive population loss, unprecedented in peace times,” he explains.

Sobotka puts this population loss down to three factors—falling fertility rates, massive out-migration and relatively high mortality. “So whereas Western and southern European countries have attracted a lot of immigration which largely offset the effects of low fertility, the East is in a double bind, experiencing both out-migration and low birth rates,” he says.

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Jakub Marian: Life expectancy at birth by region in Europe

The following map shows the life expectancy at birth of European countries by NUTS 2 regions (based on data by Eurostat from 2015). Eurostat does not collect data for all European countries; country-level statistics can be seen here.

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Politico: ECJ advocate general: ‘Free movement’ rights extend to same-sex spouses

An EU member country cannot refuse residency rights to the same-sex spouse of an EU citizen on the grounds that it does not recognize gay marriage, a European Court of Justice advocate general said in an opinion published Thursday.

The opinion was issued in response to a 2012 case in which Romanian authorities refused to grant residency rights to a male U.S. national married to a Romanian man. [...]

The married partner — including partners in same-sex unions — “may also reside on a permanent basis in the territory” of an EU member country where “his or her spouse is established as an EU citizen after exercising his or her freedom of movement,” according to the opinion.

The Romanian Constitutional Court referred the gay marriage case to the European Court of Justice in November 2016. A final ruling on the case is still pending.

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CityLab: Europe Says Uber Is Officially a Taxi Service

Uber is a taxi company. That’s the ruling today from the European Court of Justice, the highest court in the European Union, which interprets the union’s laws and ensures their application across all member states.

Uber, of course, has long resisted that label. It presents itself as a digital platform for connecting people, rather than as a taxi service. But a Barcelona taxi association  challenged that claim in court in 2014, frustrated that Uber’s revenues had been partly and unfairly bolstered by worse pay and conditions for drivers. And Wednesday’s resounding judgement against Uber, who sought to appeal the Spanish ruling at the ECJ, is a bombshell. Not only does it mean the company faces far stricter regulation across the E.U., it also undercuts the very way Uber has tried to define itself globally. [...]

More broadly, there’s a degree of existential threat in the ECJ decision. Uber has largely attempted to sail above the notion that it is a regular company employing actual humans, enabling it to deny such basic employee necessities as sick and holiday pay. Wednesday’s ruling bursts that bubble. Uber’s app-based hailing system may have been the ground-breaking key to its success, but the suggestion that it is not a transportation company is increasingly hard to sustain.

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