Volume 69, Issue 4

Research shows that social cohesion is crucial to the promotion of public health and the response to pandemic disease. This paper discusses a few key aspects of social cohesion in Moldova in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely trust in the government, social solidarity, and the perception of social cohesion. The article uses data from two sources: first from in-depth interviews carried out in May 2020 with 95 people of high status, and then from a nationally representative survey conducted in July 2020. We also compared the case of Moldova with those of other European countries regarding trust in institutions and success in combating the pandemic. The paper suggests that awareness of the COVID-19 pandemic was correlated with socioeconomic status, education, and by respondents’ trust in institutions. The interviewees participating in the qualitative research defined social cohesion as the observance of health rules and suggested that solidarity and social support were uneven during the crisis.

The article is based on my fieldwork in 2002 in a village in Eastern Romania with a multi-confessional population made up mostly of Roman Catholics/Csangos and Orthodox Christians. The core premise of the analysis is that the collective identity manifested here transcends ethnic and confessional divides. The field data about the village’s cross-cultural life fall into the following categories: the oral history of the village, the performing of rituals, and the local history of modernization. These topics inform a single collective identity that is grounded in an expressive culture (Fredrik Barth) and as such requires critical reflection on the cultural complexity of collective identities as the Csangos, which have been formed within multiple and overlapping social and historical contexts. The subject is the different temporalities that emerge during political modernization. In conclusion, in the Csangos’ case, the constructivist concept of ethnicity should be revisited and complemented with an acknowledgment of Csangos’ benign self-identification, which sheds light on their discrete or hidden identity.

This paper contributes to a growing area within memory studies which explores individual and collective memories as communicated in the contemporary media. The “nexus of memory” in this case is the tourism complex Haludovo on the Croatian island of Krk. What made Haludovo exceptional in the context of the growing tourism industry in socialist Yugoslavia was its short-lived partnership with the adult magazine Penthouse . This paper looks at the history and subsequent fate of Haludovo in the postsocialist period, focusing on the episode dedicated to Haludovo in the Croatian documentary TV series Slumbering Concrete (2016). A collaboration between a media scholar and an architectural historian, who was also one of the scriptwriters and hosts of the series, the study makes use of these multiple perspectives to situate the Haludovo case in a wider framework—the mediated communication of history and memories of the Yugoslav Adriatic coast in television and cinema.

The article mainly contends that since the real and expected benefits from the European Union (EU) and NATO were not delivered sufficiently from Turkey’s perspective, Turkey looked for alternatives and collaborated with Russia more intensely in recent years. Turkey’s cooperation with Russia was also facilitated by several global, political, economic, conjectural, security-related, and individual-level factors. Another argument of the study is that despite Turkey’s intensive collaboration with Russia, it is not feasible for Turkey to build a strategic partnership with it in the short- and medium-term at the expense of its relations with NATO and the EU. The main reasons for this are, in addition to the institutional and social shortcomings, geostrategic divergences, Russia’s inadequacy as an economic actor, the pitfalls of an asymmetric relationship with Russia, the security risks posed by Russia, NATO’s continuing importance for Turkey’s security needs, and the incompatibility of Russia’s and Turkey’s political systems.

The accession of North Macedonia to the European Union (EU) has been at an impasse for 27 years due to the political dispute with Greece. In 2018, its resolution fuelled hopes that North Macedonia would finally start negotiations with the EU. Unfortunately, there was a new obstacle, as Bulgaria vetoed the talks in December 2020. Implicit to the latest political backlog, the efforts for further EU integration should be focused on the available policy instruments. The Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) is a legally binding document which has already enabled trade liberalisation between the parties, stipulates the national treatment of business entities on the basis of reciprocity, aims for full liberalisation of capital and financial flows, and also provides other opportunities for integration. Placing the SAA in the spotlight of the mutual relations between the parties, based on proactivity from North Macedonia, could provide the impetus for more substantial EU integration of the country, despite the political stagnation of the process.