Challenging Bucharest’s “Little Paris” Myth: A Conversation with Alexandra Ghiţ

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, our lives are increasingly influenced by decisions made outside our national constituencies. Today, government actionsare likely to affect many people who never participated in elections in which the government in question ran for office. This applies to various policy areas but seems especially true in the financial sphere. As the financial crisis in the late 2000’s has shown, the absence of governmental oversight regardingfinancial activities in a country can have consequences far beyond its borders.One mechanism to address this is transnational peer review of financial regulators. Such peer review aims to enable supervisory convergence and dissemination of best practices. Yet, mechanisms of transnational governance themselves are often claimed to undermine democracy by giving decision-making power to experts and thereby taking it out of the hands of publicly elected officials. In this conversation, Yane Svetiev analyzes processes of peer review of financial regulators – both their peril and their promise.

Between 1914 and 1941, Bucharest’s population tripled,approaching one million inhabitants. This rapid growth created new neighborhoods and new opportunities but also brought new forms of poverty. While some historians portrayed the interwar Bucharest as ” the little Paris”, Alexandra Ghiţ’s book Welfare Work without Welfare: Womenand Austerity in interwar Bucharest provides a much more nuanced perspective about this city by focusing on the women’s role in welfare work.As she states in our podcast: ”the city had a larger modern area with beautiful governmental buildings and bloc houses (...) . Beyond the city center, there were large popular neighborhoods made up of small houses, many ofthem with a small yard (..). Increasingly, there were very precarious improvised neighborhoods. Such small housing might coexist with very clumsy barrack-like organized dwellings, which were covered with corrugated cardboard, without running water, where the tram and public transform does not really reach well, extremely dusty in the summer and very muddy in the autumn and winter”.While some celebrated the quick modernization, thelabor market was fragile and the welfare system struggled to respond. Bucharest was” a city without welfare but with plenty of welfare work”. In this context, the real engine of welfare was not the state at all. As the book argues, women created and sustained a welfare system through volunteer work, political advocacy, and sheer endurance. To explain this situation, Alexandra Ghiţ advances the concept of ”austerity welfare work”, which means” intensified labor for thewell-being of others under circumstances of great economic instability”. In our podcast, she introduces the internationalactors, religious groups and foundations that brought their contribution. Among them, we discuss the case of Veturia Manuilă, who is extremely illustrative about the ideological and social nuances of interwar Romania. Alexandra Ghiț’s book challenges the familiar image of Bucharest as simply a modernizing “little Paris”. Behind the city’s new architecture stood a much less glamorous reality, which included precarious work, but also a welfaresystem sustained to a remarkable extent by women’s largely invisible labor.

The Arctic is undergoing a profound transformation. As the region literally unfreezes under the pressures of climate change, established political relationships, imaginaries and assumptions about its future are also being unsettled. In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast,Anna Niia Varfolomeeva speaks with Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds about their book Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic . Together, they explore who gets to shape the region at this critical moment: as governments and globalpowers increasingly look northwards, whose interests guide its transformation?And how can northern and Indigenous communities retain meaningful agency over the places they call home?  Movingbetween geopolitics and everyday realities, Bennett and Dodds challenge portrayals of the Arctic as an empty wilderness or simply a new arena of great-power competition. Instead, they invite us to see it as a complex and lived space whose future is being negotiated at multiple levels, and to pay closer attention to whose voices and visions are heard as that future takes shape.

In the new episode of our series produced in collaboration with the Journal of Democracy, Ferenc Laczó speaks with Christina Cottiero, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Stephan Haggard, and Christina J. Schneider about their article, “Can the Liberal Order Survive America's Retreat?”They discuss the United States’ disengagement from institutions of global governance and what that has meant for multilateral support for human rights and democracy;what main forms the strengthening of authoritarian forms of multilateralism has taken in the meantime; whether a new liberal coalition could emerge in the aftermath of the US’ disengagement; and what key threats a more fragmentedworlds are likely to bring.

In this special-series podcast with SaeidGolkar, we discuss his latest essay “Why IRGC is the war’s Biggest Winner” published in the July issue of the Journalof Democracy.  Professor Golkar argues that Iran’s wars, security crises, and political upheavals have gradually transformed the IRGC from a revolutionary militia into a powerful institution that increasingly functions as a “state within the state.” Rather thanweakening authoritarian rule, external threats have expanded the Guards’ political, economic, intelligence, and security roles, steadily reducing meaningful civilian control and shifting the balance away from elected and clerical institutions. This has contributed to Iran’s evolution from an ideologically driven theocracy toward a more security-centered authoritarian system, particularly as leadership succession approaches. While a cohesive IRGC may make the regime more resilient in the short term, its growing dominance canalso create elite rivalries, public alienation, and new internal vulnerabilities.The broader lesson is that militarization does not always occur through coups, as the Iranian case shows. The military can gradually absorb state functions while preserving the formal appearance of civilian and constitutional institutions.

Can a law be unjust and still be legitimate? And if we believe a law is unjust, does that mean the state has no right to enforce it? In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast,Jonathan Quong discusses his new book PoliticalPhilosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice which examinesthe uneasy relationship between two central concepts of political philosophy: justice and legitimacy. He explains why disagreement about justice is an unavoidable part of living together in free and pluralistic societies, and why even well-functioning democracies will inevitably produce laws and policies that some of us have good reason to regard as unjust. How, then, should societies deal with these unavoidable political mistakes?Quong argues that rather than seeing justice and legitimacy as competing values, we should think about how theburdens created by our collective disagreements can be shared fairly. The conversation explores why some unjust laws may nevertheless remain legitimate, when injustice crosses the line into illegitimacy, and how we might distinguishreasonable political disagreement from laws rooted in prejudice, corruption, or self-interest. Finally, we discuss what this perspective can tell us about contemporary debates ranging from immigration and racial injustice to thegrowing role of artificial intelligence in government.

In our new podcast, Aline Sierp discusses central questions in contemporary European memory and surveys how EU institutions have attempted to deal with Europe’s past over the decades. She also considers why the remembrance of European colonialism and imperialism remained marginal for so long – and what might be changing these days. The conversationalso focuses on how studying the politics of memory can contribute to our understanding of contemporary conflicts. Last but not least, she reflects on the rise of memory studies, whether it has become a discipline, and where it might be heading next.

Across the world, political actors are challenging rights in increasingly sophisticated ways. But are we looking in the right places? In this episode of Review of Democracy,Gabriel Pereira speaks with María Paula Saffon about how we should understand backlash against rights today. They discuss why familiar accounts of backlash may overlook some of its most consequential forms, explore the distinctionbetween backlash and pushback, and unpack the idea of veiled backlash—a concept that sheds light on how rights can be weakened through seemingly ordinary legal and institutional practices. The conversation draws on examplesfrom Latin America while reflecting on broader implications for democracy, the rule of law, and the future of rights.

Always a controversial and often a confusing topic inacademia, the rule of law has, since the late twentieth century, been elevated to almost a universal ideal. So much so that many of those once perceived as its staunchest enemies today claim to be rule of law enthusiasts. Large amounts ofmoney have been spent, and much work has been done to lay its foundations in many places and for various reasons. And yet, today, despite all these efforts, many see the rule of law as increasingly threatened. Often, the rule of law has beenpresented as an end in itself, with less consideration of the purposes for which it was invented. This might have eased the way for the current surge of practices, in numerous contexts, that appear to contradict it. In this conversation, Martin Krygier explains that the purpose of the rule of lawtraditionally was and should continue to be to temper power and prevent arbitrariness. Achieving this ideal, however, requires recognizing the rule of law’s limitations, not to abolish it, but to think of ways to temper powerbeyond it.

In this new episode of our podcast series produced in cooperation with the Journal of Democracy, Ferenc Laczó speaks with Kim Lane Scheppele about her article, “CanPéter Magyar Restore Hungary’s Democracy?”The conversation discusses the major challenges and dilemmas that the new Hungarian government led by Péter Magyar faces after 16 years of illiberal rule and illiberal state-building by Viktor Orbán and his cronies; how the prospects ofHungarian democracy look in comparative perspective; how European law and European funds are shaping those prospects – and what has surprised Kim Lane Scheppele the most in recent months.