Here, there, over here and over there... "What is happening there?" is one of the questions most often asked at the beginning of the 90s, when people would talk about Eastern societies. "What is happening there?" is more than a question: it is also an answer, a gesture of abandonment, slipped - and not very subtly - inside the very body of the question. "What is happening there?" is the sign of the impossibility to understand or, if you will, of an intuition that what is happening there defies our western rules, our criteria, our framework of understanding and action. You ask this question not necessarily to get an answer, but to point out the fact that you can't even find a satisfactory answer. Sometimes you don't even need to; or, anyway, you don't even try to find one. As a consequence, you act as you are used to, as things are done here, in the West, a describable and predictable place, and not there, and the results can easily be inferred. Too many times have the institutions interested in the eastern space acted in this manner. And too many times have the results of this fundamental inadequacy not been the ones expected. They are not today either. Today most eastern countries, including Romania, have come out of the shadow of the question "What is happening there?" Unfortunately, the Republic of Moldova hasn't. "The public space" - the standard of any democracy. What about the Republic of Moldova? We shall also relate the question to a concrete field. This text will speak about "the public space in the Republic of Moldova": how it is constituted, how it is structured, how it can be characterized. Everything will be placed in the context of the efforts of the society from the Republic of Moldova towards Euro-Atlantic integration. We have to start with Juergen Habermas. The whole work of German sociologists is basically centered around this conceptual axis: "the public space." This is what he means. By taking over from psychoanalysis the syntagm "distorted discourse" and by defining it, in the social field, as an ideology, Habermas then defines the latter as "systematically distorted communication." It is what un-free societies are characterized by. To oppose this, Habermas proposes the concept of the "situation of the ideal discourse", as a type of free undistorted communication, free from constraint and external intrusions. All voices must be allowed to speak in such a context, they all must be left on stage, and the decision must be taken through an exchange of arguments and reasonable "agreements", and - most definitely not! - by force. The community or certain sections of it communicate, it sends and receives messages, it discusses them, it compares and rationally contests them, it accepts them and, once again, it does not use other "arguments" - "strong" arguments, generally speaking. This being said, the public space now becomes the place where consensus may (or may not) be obtained through discursive actions. Through the power of the word, not that of the fist - "the fist" can mean anything here, any political, economic or other kind of intrusion. Beyond the criticism which can be brought - and has been brought - against the German's theory, we can already sense the chance of the concept to become an essential standard for the "evaluation" of the functioning of any democracy by appeal to the most widespread public communication instrument, the media. For democracy, in this view, no longer means the existence of a quantitative public space, on paper, a dead inventory of achievements one is only too happy to report. It is not enough to have in a society a certain number of papers, newspapers, radio or television stations. This is a purely quantitative criterion! What matters most is the manner in which these are structured, the degree of access to the public space, the real possibility of communicating efficiently with the audience, and additionally, of giving it the chance of manifesting itself adequately in the polis. The criterion now becomes qualitative, but this does not mean that the quantitative dimension should be neglected. Only that the latter without the former becomes shaky, and even more, runs the risk of justifying the very lack of democracy which, initially, it was meant to expose! The case of the Republic of Moldova seems exemplary from this point of view. The window press or the "black box" phenomenon In the Republic of Moldova the media exists. It is indubitable. Yes, we do have newspapers, radio and television stations. Any public official or clerk who makes a statistics or a report can smile satisfied at its conclusion. (Just as in the famous joke from the communist times about harvesting: "we have already finished harvesting in the newspapers, now we also need to finish harvesting on the radio and on TV.") Of course the media exists, and who might be able to contradict that? But if we take the previous "public space" idea seriously, things cannot be - and are not - so simple. According to all opinion polls taken in Chisinau during the past few years (sources: The Public Opinion Barometer launched by the IPP, Chisinau, the IRI/Gallup Opinion Polls), the written press is the main source of political information or approximately 7-8% of subjects in the whole country. If we take a look at the rural area, we shall notice that, as for the use of the written press, the numbers are much lower than the national average. In the whole country, the radio rises somewhere at 11% as a main source of information, and television clearly comes first: 50-70%, depending on the opinion poll. The national television of the Republic of Moldova is, practically, the sole player on the market of political news with a percentage of approximately 70% of partial or complete trust. Besides, an opinion poll initiated by IDIS Viitorul (October 2004) shows us something shocking: "the pluralism of opinions" is the syntagm which, as the first option, best describes the democratic government for only 4% of respondents (the second option, 3%), and the "free and independent press", only for 2% (the second option, 3%). How can we "read" the democracy/democratization in the Republic of Moldova through these figures? Firstly, we shall say that the differences between the written press and the audio-video section are visible in any democratic country of the world. Hence, the Republic of Moldova is part of a trend. And this point might be accurate but not true. For, if this is how matters stand, statistically speaking, in democratic countries one can find a conveyor belt between the two components of the media: televisions and radio stations are the loudspeakers of most of the topics delivered to the audience by the written press. In other words, the agenda of the written press also becomes the agenda of the audio-video press, and the quantitative (in percentages) differences between what comes out in newspapers and what is said on television are very small or non-existent. And here comes the crucial difference between the media from the Republic of Moldova and the media from functional democracies (Romania, for instance). In the Republic of Moldova, the conveyor belt between the written press and television (especially the national one) does not exist. For the most part, we are dealing with parallel discourses, which never meet and practically do not come up against each other on a national level, in any way. In the terms we have been using here, the "public space" from the Republic of Moldova does not exist. We cannot find that free access "in the sense of Weber's "ideal-types" "within the public discourse, there is no equal access of actors or opinions, there is no space in which actors and opinions can meet and, through meetings, debates, and dialogues, points of view and decisions can emerge. Since this public space does not exist - for one cannot compare the weight of the written press to that of televisions, especially national ones "we do not have public speeches but monologues with clearly different impacts: the papers write one thing and the television stations say another. The arguments and justification for one decision are more often than not purely political (not even in the subtle sense given to this word by Foucault!), and they do not pass through the Caudine Forks of public dialogue (hence, the quasi-inexistence of an institution such as the talk-show). One more time. There is a written press in the Republic of Moldova. But the structural mechanisms which exist and are perpetuated on the level of society simply blow to pieces the idea of diversity, since the weight of public discourses is incomparable. Hence, the apparent paradox: although there is a free press (and many journalists can write exactly what they want in their newspapers), there is no "public space", and consequently, there is no real media pluralism. We are dealing with a window media democracy, where those public discourses previously unapproved by a political authority have limited access: they circulate freely in a black box from which they can never escape. There are crowds of authors and newspapers who address themselves to the same audience, small and constrained, for financial reasons, to buy less and less papers. Television is both more comfortable and cheaper! Finally, the apparent paradox can be formulated thus: in the Republic of Moldova there is a free press, but there is no democratization of the public space. The civil society � an absent presence One of the main actors that should populate and fundamentally shape the space of public communication is the civil society. And the other way round: the existence of public space should define and shape what we call today "the civil society", that is that social space in which associations, identities, interests, differences are freely merged, beyond - and not necessarily against! - the coercive space of politics and government. About the "civil society" they speak abundantly in Chisinau. But from the perspective of what we have been talking about so far, its presence in the Republic of Moldova is only virtual. It is an absent presence. It is a "presence" because there are actors who illustrate it, real actors, quality actors (people and institutions), many of them capable to have a dialogue with the western institutions which credit, finance and add them as dialogue partners. And there is nothing wrong with this, only that, in reality, the dispersion on the level of "civil society" neutralizes it. It makes it absent. It is an absent presence because in the absence of the civic space where it should manifest itself and which it should shape function of the needs of a society whose spokesperson it (also) is, the civil society does not exist in Chisinau. It is only a number of disparate, autarchic actors, without relevant public impact. Just as in the written press, here we are also witnessing a window phenomenon or a "black box" one. The associations know each other - and sometimes recognize each other! - they support or envy each other, but almost no one knows about them outside this circle. What are the consequences? Mainly two. The first: in the absence of a public space in which discourses are manifested or confronted and thus reach the public, the most often used instrument of public communication in the Republic of Moldova has until recently been the street. A society exasperated by the lack of a public "microphone" (televisions, radio, widely circulated publications) is forced to go out into the public square in order to be, if not listened to, at least heard. The phenomenon is typical of many eastern countries after 1990, and even Romania has experimented with and used it extensively. The second consequence: given the excessive and structural politicization of the society from the Republic of Moldova, the only chance for the civil society to manifest itself was�the political channel. Yet another paradox: in order to manifest itself in the public space, the civil society in the Republic of Moldova has to become political. Only by putting on the political cloth, hence by taking on such a stake, was the civil society able to stand together and coherently transmit a relatively unanimous message. Hence the conclusion that the "victories" of the civil societies from the Republic of Moldova have been, despite their civic air, political. The first: the battle for language and history, started in 1995, continued in 2002 and ended unpredictably. The political stakes of the demonstrations was perfectly illustrated by the political leader of the demonstration: "Although it seems convenient, we must admit as fake or al least incomplete the idea that in present-day Bessarabia talks about the glotonym "the Romanian language" and the ethnonym "the Romanian people" would only have a scientific nature�Here, in Bessarabia, the affirmation that you are Romanian is a political act�Here you can be anything you like, but if you're stubborn enough to be what you are, that is a Romanian, you exasperate the whole caste of the artisans of a new nation." The Republic of Moldova - a society dominated by power, and not by the relationship between the civic and the political The solution to all the contradictions and paradoxes discussed here is only that of democratization, since that means, in fact, creating a real space for public communication. The democratization of public institutions, their de-politicization, their de-personalization, the free access to mass communication means of all arguments, all this will generate that debate so necessary and which the Republic of Moldova truly does not have today. For now, it is not arguments or good sense which speak or have spoken in Chisinau on many matters, but political decisions. But for ukases, only democratization is a remedy. And that we know from the entire eastern experience! For a real democracy has not yet been built in Chisinau, neither regarding dialogue nor decision-making, the Republic of Moldova remains a society in which power dominates - the meaning is not merely political here! - and not the relationship between the civic and the political which structures the western democracies consecrated and validated by the Euro-Atlantic space. Dan Dungaciu, Ph.D., Romania, University of Bucharest, researcher for Institute of Political Science and International Relations of Romanian Academy, editor for "Lumea"Magazine

Dan DUNGACIU