Name Daniel Barbu | Role Political Scientist | |
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Education Saint Sava National College, Babes-Bolyai University, University of Bucharest | ||
Daniel-Constantin Barbu (born 21 May 1957) is a Romanian political scientist, publisher, essayist, journalist, and professor at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Political Science. The head of the Research Institute at the University of Bucharest, and former dean of the Faculty, he was also director of Realitatea Românească, a daily newspaper, in 1991-1992. Barbu worked as a State Adviser for President Emil Constantinescu between 1997 and 1999. He is the author as of June 2007 of eight books and many more articles on political science, and a contributor to the magazine Sfera Politicii. He is also a member of the Romanian Senate from Bucharest and former Minister of Culture.
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Early years
Barbu was born in Bucharest, and graduated from the Nicolae Bălcescu High School (the present-day Saint Sava National College) in 1976. In 1976, the Union of Communist Youth, official youth organization in Communist Romania, refused to grant him permission to attend either the Faculty of History-Philosophy or that of Law. Consequently, Barbu attended Art History in Cluj-Napoca, at the present-day Babeş-Bolyai University, graduating in 1980. He then was employed as a curator at the Village Museum (1980) and the National Museum of Romanian History (1981–1986). Between 1987 and 1992, he was a researcher at Bucharest University's Institute of South-Eastern European Studies.
Post-1989
After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, he took doctoral training in Germany, at the University of Fribourg's Faculty of Theology; he received a Ph.D. in history from the Babeş-Bolyai University in 1991. In 1999, he took a second doctorate, in Philosophy, from the University of Bucharest, where he has been teaching since 1991.
Between 1990 and 1991, he was head of Editura Meridiane, a prestigious Bucharest-based publishing house.
Barbu was the Dean of the Political Science Department of the University of Bucharest from 1994 to 2000, and then again from 2002 to 2004. Since 2004, he has been the Political Science Chair of the Political Science Department of the University of Bucharest.
He has been a visiting Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, the La Sapienza University in Rome, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Pittsburg State University, Jackson State University, and many others.
Barbu has specialized in the Comparative History of European Civilizations, Political Science and Comparative Political Science, Social and Political Models of the State, Minorities and Confessional Groups in Romania, Constitutions, Government, and Politics in Europe, Totalitarian Regimes, Communisme et Socialisme d'État, and Political Anthropology.
In 2004, the European Anti-fraud Office (OLAF) notified the Romanian Government about irregularities found in a Phare programme headed by Daniel Barbu, as dean of the Faculty of Political Science. The event was reported by an article on the BBC Romanian service on the 5th of May and appeared in the Daily Bulletin of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs a day later. According to both sources, the program engulfed over 200,000 euros coming from PHARE TEMPUS grant money into civil servant training courses which never took place and which had nonexistent people enrolled. In an interview during the 2012 Parliament election campaign, as candidate from the Social-Liberal Union, Daniel Barbu dubbed the event as a misunderstanding and a "no penal matter". As a result of the 2012 Romanian parliamentary elections, Daniel Barbu has been designated the new Romanian Minister of Culture, ironically, by the same person who in 2004 headed the Government's Control Department, Victor Ponta, department which investigated the OLAF notifications.