Radio waves,memories, and the politics of everyday life in socialist Romania: The case of Radio Free Europe

During the communist era, Radio Free Europe (RFE) was Romania's favorite radio station. This paper analyzes the role of RFE in everyday life in the strictly controlled Romanian communist state by looking at the broadcasts of RFE's Romanian Department, their audience, and their impact. Drawing largely on the RFE archives at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) and the former secret police files at the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS), it investigates how radio waves mediated and channeled information while preparing people to embrace political and cultural change. The paper focuses on the circulation of knowledge, media confluences, and human agency. The rituals that developed around the secrecy which governed the listening process, the personal requests, attitudes, and opinions expressed in letters to RFE, and oral and written testimonies, coupled with the disproportionate and, at times, extreme reactions of the communist state, together reveal the carving out of individual spaces that allowed for the preservation of the “self” during Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship. At such critical historical moments, the connection became visible. Through an analysis of recent media representations in which RFE figures, such as Cold Waves, this study also looks at how RFE shaped personal memories of communist times.     

Cold War atmosphere: Distorted information and facts in the case of Free Europe balloons

Radio Free Europe used balloons to drop leaflets in an attempt to supplement radio with printed words in the 1950s—a historical moment when closing borders, censoring the press, jamming foreign radios, tapping telephone lines, and tracking letters from abroad created an almost hermetically sealed space without many means for exchanging information across the Iron Curtain. This article traces how distorted and limited information shaped Cold War propaganda and practices of information‐gathering. The article further examines unpredictable environmental factors that were transformed into persuasive political rhetoric. A comparative analysis of communist media shows similarities of imagination in a visual propaganda campaign across five communist countries. Fantasies evolved into an object of public interest when propaganda strategies embraced a language of facts.     

The significance of the Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context (Espoo Convention) in international environmental law: examining the implications of the Danube Delta case

The Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context, providing for a concrete framework of procedural regulation on environmentally harmful activities, has several features and is one of the most progressive multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). This convention may offset some of the limits of substantial regulation and strengthen procedural regulation in various respects where an activity, to which the convention applies, is also regulated by other MEAs. The Danube Delta case concerning the Bystroe Canal project of Ukraine may be one such precedent. This convention takes several distinctive functions, derived from the features, in the complex interaction of the management processes under five MEAs and the UNESCO MAB Programme, as well as by the European Commission. This gives us some hints of an answer regarding some questions on overlap between different MEAs.