Silviu Negut, a human brand and a social phenomenon

Neacșu, Marius-Cristian Article Silviu Negut, a human brand and a social phenomenon Amfiteatru Economic Journal Provided in Cooperation with: The Bucharest University of Economic Studies Suggested Citation: Neacșu, Marius-Cristian (2024) : Silviu Negut, a human brand and a social phenomenon, Amfiteatru Economic Journal, ISSN 2247-9104, The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Vol. 26, Iss. 66, pp. 666-677, https://doi.org/10.24818/EA/2024/66/683 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/300616 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ AE Silviu Neguţ, a human brand and a social phenomenon 666 Amfiteatru Economic Silviu Neguț, a Human Brand and a Social Phenomenon Marius-Cristian Neacșu Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania Please quote this article as follows: Neacșu M.-C., 2024. Silviu Neguț, a Human Brand and a Social Phenomenon. Amfiteatru Economic, 26(66), pp. 666-677. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24818/EA/2024/66/666 Silviu Neguț (b. 1945), “a man not great in height”..., but great, very great in achievement, if we were to paraphrase the “old chronicler”, has accomplished more and more than anyone could imagine, knowing or seeing him. He had two successive careers of over a quarter of a century each, one as editor/editor-in-chief at Encyclopaedic/Scientific and Encyclopaedic Publishing House (1968-1993), followed by another teaching career in university education (1991-present) at the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest (“ASE”, as it is known to the entire country), graduating the University of Bucharest, as a geographer, but teaching geography and geopolitics for economists. These were doubled by two other careers run in parallel, one of soul, informal, as long as a lifetime, and that of publicist, enriching the spiritual life and the publishing market in Romania with several good meters of bookstore/library shelf (first title in 1972, first book in 1975 and he still writes today, accumulating dozens of specialized books, treatises, reference encyclopedias, school textbooks and university courses, hundreds of articles, etc.), with a talented style, clear, easy to understand, scientific, encyclopaedic and with literary overtones, as fluent as a river, without any gaps and without tiring the reader, on the contrary, making him feel awkward and regretful that the book is finished, and another, a fourth, managerial, being consecutively scientific secretary (1991-1993), vice-dean (1993-2008) and dean (a four-year term, 2008-2012) of the Faculty of International Business and Economics, after 2012 becoming emeritus professor at the Faculty of Commerce (now, Business and Tourism), where he still works today. There would be room for a fifth, scientific career, making relevant contributions, and more, to the development of fields such as quantitative/mathematical geography, human geography, environmental geography, geography of tourism, geopolitics and geostrategy, contributions for which he has received numerous distinctions (from the “Simion Amfiteatru Economic Recommends AE Vol. 26 • No. 66 • May 2024 667 Mehedinți” Prize of the Romanian Academy in 1999, Doctor Honoris Causa of the University “Petrol-Gaze” of Ploiesti, 2014, to which many others are to be added, for the enumeration of which the entire space allocated to this article would be needed and it would still not be enough), memberships (dozens of organizations, foundations, professional associations, councils, scientific boards, “committees and commissions”, which would fill other pages) and many hours of radio-TV broadcasting. A tribute volume was dedicated to him: Silviu Neguț, a human geography (2010), to which another one was added, namely Silviu Neguț 77. Fragments of Life (2022), both complex writings with (auto)biographical, bibliographical, memorialistic, and celebratory sequences. In addition, he has reinvigorated “geography at ASE” in the fluid context of the 1990s2000s, ensuring uninterrupted continuity for 110 years - economic geography is one of the first courses taught without interruption at ASE from the time of the institution's founding until today - at a time when it might well have disappeared due to successive (in)adjustments in the curricula of the economic faculties: some thought that an economist should only know economics, in a world of knowledge, information, digital and global, without understanding how the planet works, where and what the resources are, and without understanding the limits of the world economy, and ended up producing graduates who no longer know or no longer understand well even economics in its many facets. Moreover, Silviu Neguț founded a mini-school of geopolitics, with several derivations and research directions, starting from its natural geographical roots: we mention, in passing, that the founder of the Romanian school of modern, scientific geography, of the first course and the first university department of geography in Romania, Simion Mehedinți studied directly, being his doctoral student, with the spiritual father of universal geopolitics himself, the German professor and geographer, Friedrich Ratzel. As I was saying, Silviu Neguț, a great, a very great man, in achievements... I also met Professor Silviu Neguț... and not in passing, nor in a hurry, although Professor Silviu Neguț's overflowing energy and the rapidity with which he did things (and well) is proverbial, as he was always in an endless battle with time. I knew him, as I said, deeply, allowing me to be close to him for about a quarter of a century now... Let it be the role of chance in human life - a theory that also the Professor has developed - when I first saw his name on a cover (the famous encyclopaedia “States of the World”), as a high school student, preparing for my admission to the Faculty of Geography of the University of Bucharest, then when I met him physically for the first time on the stairs of Simion Mehedinți's house in Dimitrie Racoviță Street no. 12, where the Institute of Geography of the Romanian Academy functioned then and still does today. Neither of these events predicted anything: first because I had the belief that the author of a good book must already be a legend, i.e. dead (I couldn't imagine how I could be a contemporary of a writer, a book author, in general), and the meeting at the institute had passed like a flash (I was a 3rd year student, somewhere in the early spring of 1999, I had been working there for a few months as an intern, being “thought of” by those who recommended me for a research position in, mind you..., geopolitics!). And so, the name of the Professor had been recommended to me with great fanfare: “Silviu Neguț is coming and he knows geopolitics”. It must have been so, but it all happened suddenly, after a quick handshake of AE Silviu Neguţ, a human brand and a social phenomenon 668 Amfiteatru Economic completeness, the meeting was “ticked off”, his attention being caught by the crowded plates marking a birthday, celebrated at the end of a conference. If someone could have read the signs and told me that by some game of fate I would become the disciple and panegyric of Professor Silviu Neguț, I wouldn't have believed it in the first place... But all of this happened - I have written several times about these events, in the Professor's tribute books, I will not elaborate here. Time has passed... and, probably, on the principle that “after the smart people you go where they are”, I followed Professor Silviu Neguț from the amphitheatres of ASE on the streets full of history and fame of Paris - where we spent more than three days visiting cemeteries! (I don't think I learnt as much in school as I did during this cultural tour through the cemeteries of Montmarte and Montparnasse, among the tombstones of universal personalities such as Émile Zola, Stendhal, Alexandre Dumas-the son, Nijinsky, the famous Russian ballet dancer, Heinrich Heine, Hector Berlioz and the beautiful Dalida, immortalised by a life-size statue as a gravestone, as well as Tristan Tzara, Dumont d'Urville, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Paul Sartre, Constantin Brâncuși, Emil Cioran, Eugen Ionescu and others). We enjoyed with our colleagues walking on the streets of Dutch cities, “devouring” the works of Van Gogh or Rembrandt or eating mussels on the North Sea shore outside the port of Rotterdam; we bathed our feet in the water of the volcanic Lake Albano, stopped for a moment to catch our breath and cool off by Bernini's fountains and then followed in the footsteps of our ancestors back to their origins, from the Dacians on the Trajan's Column or Constantine the Great's Triumphal Arch to Stephen the Great's Hotin... nor the hot deserts of the Sahara... Dugga, Douze, Tunis, plus Paris, Rome, Bari, Ancona, Gröningen, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Harlem, ... and how many more there are to mention, not to point out our famous trips around the country, on the occasion of the (inter)national conferences of the Romanian Geographical Society, but also on other occasions, so that we were known among geographers as “the (cheerful) group from ASE”, and among economists as “geographers”. I followed this path, I would call it “the Path of Silviu Neguț”, a path in the history of human civilization, a path towards becoming, a path of knowledge, a path of wisdom, a path of tolerance, a path of equilibrium and, above all, of friendship. On the last word, a parenthesis is worth opening: I know, it seems incredible, but how can this be the case between two different generations, and between two With Prof. Jean Paul Berthélemy (in charge of international relations), at the famous Paris-Sorbonne University (2006) Representatives of a "brand" in the Romanian geographical community, known as "the group from ASE", here, in a certain formula (from left to right): Silviu Neguț, Gheorghe Vlăsceanu, Marius Neacșu, Viorel Mionel and Adrian Kanovici - standing (Botoșani, SGR Congress, 2008) Amfiteatru Economic Recommends AE Vol. 26 • No. 66 • May 2024 669 different generations in a teacher-student/assistant relationship? Well, maybe it's harder to explain, but we lived it to the fullest, the three of this group - Silviu Neguț, Gheorghe Vlăsceanu and, with your permission, the author of these lines - constituting the core of what I mentioned above, namely “the group from ASE”, because wherever you spotted one of them, you immediately spotted the other two. Coming back, I saw the Professor tireless, driven constantly by an unequalled curiosity and frenzy, with a “quark” energy, always accompanied by a travel notebook and something to write down, with a “crazy” need to enjoy a moment in a corner of the world and who, although he revisited places he had visited before, said “every time, you see something else”. Essentially, the trialectics of Silviu Neguț's philosophy could be summarized as follows: the joy of reading (wisdom), the joy of travelling (knowledge, tolerance), the joy of the show (the stage - read the cathedra, life and people). A man who loves life so much, and whom life, in turn, loves him... Surely, if he were to be asked and according to his own confessions, the Professor would want more, not even solving them all. Incidentally, during a question session at the end of an event I attended - the kind of template questions like “what is the secret of your success” (I always laughed when I heard them, people probably imagining that you live for success, that you eat and breathe success, and that success has only absolute value and is intangible to most) - he got the following question, “what is the secret of life?”. I don't know why, but the Professor's answer stuck in my memory: “to be lived!”. Of course, there are many times in life when you feel like giving up, but that's exactly what you don't have to do, you have to go on. Otherwise, life would have no meaning. In the long course of existence, you are one link in a chain, indispensable for the next. Any missing piece leads to the collapse of the whole. Geography in ASE carried, for a while, the name “Silviu Neguț”. Few geographers, economists alike, know, and even fewer are aware, that one of the disciplines with which our university started in 1913, was Economic Geography (or, as it was written in the Royal Decree establishing the Academy of Higher Commercial and Industrial Studies/AISCI of 6 April 1913, in article 3, position 7 Economic Geography with Developments on the Markets of the Orient). Thus, on 4 November 2023 (the date on which the courses at the “Commercial Academy”, as it appeared in the press at the time, actually started), 110 years of continuous and uninterrupted teaching of Geography in the ASE were celebrated. Tuesdays and Thursdays were Geography days at ASE in its debut year. In the same context, our institution was also the first in the country to teach a specialized course in Economic Geography (taught by Professor Gheorghe Arghirescu), after Simion Mehedinți gave the opening lecture in Geography at the University of Bucharest (3 November 1900), marking its debut as a university discipline. A small contextual mention: from universal geography, two basic fields have emerged, namely Geography in ASE carried, for a while, the name "Silviu Neguț", a name that has held and still holds the cover I (here, "Tribuna Învățământului" magazine, no. 27, 2022) AE Silviu Neguţ, a human brand and a social phenomenon 670 Amfiteatru Economic physical geography (which brings together all the disciplines that deal with the planet as a whole, analytically and synthetically, from a physical point of view) and human geography (which concentrates the disciplines that deal with humanity as a whole, as a geosphere - sociosphere, in its interdependent relationship with the other planetary geospheres and from which economic geography also emerged). Eight decades later (1993), as a newly titled university professor PhD (1991-1993, associate professor), Silviu Neguț took over the destiny of Geography in ASE, ensuring its continuity and, moreover, its development, in a post-December complicated context by administrative reorganizations and curriculum reform that extended over years. But that's not all there is to it, Geography at ASE meant not only that it was a “founding discipline” but also the following: it was a compulsory discipline of the admission exam (for as long as ASE held admission exams); it gave geography department; it gathered a collective of geographers, who worked permanently, regardless of the administrative formula of the department's existence and, at the beginning, it was also a doctoral field (for example, one of the first PhD graduates of the AISCI was Constantin Greceanu, the first assistant of Professor Gheorghe Arghirescu - the first titular of the course of economic geography in ASE - in 1927, with a thesis entitled “Location of industries on the Prahova Valley”). In all these aspects of geography in ASE, Professor Silviu Neguț has been a constant presence. Thus, he was the “geographic vector” of the Commission for the elaboration of the subjects for the Geography of Romania admission exam, and the days spent “locked” in the “Virgil Madgearu” Hall, where we had to arrive at night (at least at 4 a.m.), especially on the day when the exam was given, remain memorable. The rector Paul Bran, a man who deserves our homage, instituted a real ritual in this respect. Then, he contributed to the revitalization of the department within the Faculty of International Business and Economics/REI (after it had disappeared in 1985, following an internal reorganization, for a short period of time), by advocating and obtaining the presence of the phrase “geography” in the title of the department, which became the Department of Economic History and Geography. Since 2011, after another internal reorganization, it evolved into the Department of Tourism and Geography, within the Faculty of Business and Tourism (formerly Commerce) this time, one of the oldest faculties in ASE, “commerce” being also present in the name of the institution since its foundation. Also, a collective of geographers has always functioned in ASE, in all more or less good circumstances (with its own department or, for very short periods of time, within other collectives), but since the 2000s, Professor Silviu Neguț has played a fundamental role in its growth, practically all geographers who arrived in ASE after that time passing through his filter. But perhaps the greatest merit of Professor Silviu Neguț was the development of geography in ASE, first of all by multiplying the geographic academic disciplines from “World Economic Geography” as an almost exclusive discipline, adding Geography of Tourism, Geography of Transport and, the "queen", Geopolitics, with which the Professor has forever associated his name, initially as an optional course (nine full decades after the first course in economic geography was taught at ASE), then optional, then compulsory, then developed at 'postgraduate' level and, since 2004, with the transition to the Bologna system, a master's programme in its own right. The “Silviu Neguț” school thus came into being, without saying too many big words, but only “giving to Caesar what belongs to Caesar”, by founding the first master's degree in Amfiteatru Economic Recommends AE Vol. 26 • No. 66 • May 2024 671 geopolitics in higher (economic) education and one of the very few in the country (either in history, sociology or political studies; in geographic higher education, we don't know if it exists), initially within the REI Faculty, it evolved under several forms and names depending on the major changes proposed to the level of higher education in Romania, but having “behind” the same team as today (Silviu Neguț, director and Marius-Cristian Neacșu, scientific secretary, later director/coordinator of the program): Geopolitics and Geostrategy (3 semesters), 2004-2005 (REI); Geopolitics and International Affairs (3 semesters), 2005-2008 (REI); Geopolitics and International Business and Economics (scientific research master's degree, 4 semesters), 2008-2013 (REI) and Geopolitics and Business (professional master's degree, 4 semesters), since 2013, in the Faculty of Business and Tourism, and which is continuing today. Within this master's degree, alongside the discipline of Geopolitics, other disciplines derived from geopolitics or geography, apart from regional specificities (Geopolitics of Romania, for example), taught exclusively by geographers, such as Geostrategy, Geostrategy of Resources, Geopolitics of Conflicts, Geopolitics and Cosmic Space, Global Issues, etc., were also created by the “hand and brain” of the Professor, who made up the first curriculum of the mentioned master's degree. Geopolitics was also taught during the 2000s in other master's programs at ASE (at the Faculties of REI, Marketing, Commerce), and nowadays in the form of “Geopolitics and Tourism”, particularly at the master's programs at the Faculty of Business and Tourism. And it was not only this institutional program, the “school of geopolitics at ASE” left behind disciples (for example, two of the geographers who teach today in this master's program are also graduates of the program, namely lect. Viorel Mionel and lect. Adrian Kanovici, both PhD), a teaching and research framework, a real geopolitical thinking environment, and many graduates, some of them, today, in important positions and who have honoured, as we should say, the “Silviu Neguț” school. The long CV or his opera. Professor Silviu Neguț has always been proud of his personal CV, long enough to make it difficult to read (always more than 20 A4 pages), not to mention what it contains, first and foremost by experiencing the satisfaction of his own efforts, their fulfilment in various forms and the idea that "he left something behind, he did not live in vain". “How much has he written?” is certainly a question that can be asked - I'd say he's written more books than others have read in a lifetime, over 200 titles as a sole or first author alone - but it's not the most relevant question, but really significant are the questions of “"what has he written?” and “in what context?”, what are the meanings of these works:  before 1989, when not everyone could publish and there were no “apartment publishers”, books appeared under the Professor's signature - when publishing was not even part of the “job description” - that somehow marked the lives of generations that did not have easy access to specialized information, such as Geographical Superlatives - small encyclopaedia, One Single Earth. Man and the Environment (1978), Footsteps on Earth The “Roots” of the Master of Geopolitics: prof. Silviu Neguț (founder), acad. Mircea Malița (titular of the "Diplomacy" course) and lect. Marius Neacșu (ASE, 2012) AE Silviu Neguţ, a human brand and a social phenomenon 672 Amfiteatru Economic (1983), The White Mirage - North and South Poles (1985, reprinted almost four decades later in 2023), Seekers of New Lands (1987, also reprinted in 2017, in a much more elaborate form and with a new title, The Encyclopedia of Explorers and Travellers of All Times and All the World), The Spectacles of the Earth (1989); It reveals from the very beginning the encyclopedic spirit, the affinity for records and for the strangest natural and human processes and phenomena with special meanings that give uniqueness to our terrestrial world and according to his own confessions: “I wrote primarily what I missed as a teenager”, “uncovering” the special curiosity of the later career as geographer, as teacher and as publicist who wanted to share with others the inner joy of life on such a beautiful planet.  then followed, Encyclopedias, obviously geographical, remaining forever associated as a name with the States of the World (States of the World from A to Z. Small Encyclopedia - 1975, States of the World. Small Encyclopedia - 1976, Encyclopedia of the States of the World - all subsequent editions up to a... XVI in 2020), the most famous and with the largest circulation, prefaced by the great personality Mircea Malița; Perhaps now, when everyone, from child to adult, holds a smart phone in their hand through which they can access an almost infinite library via the internet, these encyclopedias no longer say so much or seem so useful - although the reprinting of so many updated editions argues against this - but imagine what they meant when there was no... internet, Google or Wikipedia, in an ideologically grey and even later world?! How much has the world changed in the last half century, how much time has passed since the first edition, and how many times has the content changed, how many new states have appeared on the political map of the world? At a launch of one of the editions I witnessed the following confession: 'Professor, when I left for my post [as ambassador or official in one of our embassies abroad] I had in my suitcase, in addition to the essentials, the... “States of the World”. And that says it all... I owned a copy myself at the end of high school, in the 1990s, before I had the honour of meeting the Professor. From this landmark work have derived many other Encyclopedias of Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia and Oceania, the Americas, to which have been added, over time, The States of the European Union. Small Encyclopedia, Capitals of the States of Europe. Small Encyclopaedia, Encyclopedia of Explorers and Travellers, Small Encyclopaedia of Romania for Children, etc.  in the same context, Professor Silviu Neguț wrote as the first author Geography textbooks (manuals) for preuniversity education, for all middle and high school classes. How many generations of pupils have grown up with these textbooks? How many exams Silviu Neguț (1978), One Single Earth Horia Matei, Silviu Neguț, Ion Nicolae - spiritual fathers of the States of the World (ed. 2020) Amfiteatru Economic Recommends AE Vol. 26 • No. 66 • May 2024 673 and how many admissions to university, where geography was a subject, were given on their account?  then, the scientific literature was enriched with reference works under the same signature - Silviu Neguț - in several fields and subfields, such as quantitative geography (Mathematical modelling in human geography, 1997, based on his PhD thesis - on “old style”, presented in 1984 - and which meant the introduction of statistical analyses in the analysis of human geographical phenomenologies), human geography (with a homonymous treaty, Human Geography, 2011, published by the Romanian Academy Publishing House, an undertaking worthy of a collective with dozens or hundreds of members, but a single author..., which presents the theoretical and epistemological evolution of the field and deals with the main debates and issues of human geography as a science, as well as some scientific subfields/disciplines that fall under its umbrella), geography of tourism (Geography of tourism, 2004, plus other dictionaries and tourist guides), environmental geography, but, by far, Silviu Neguț's name has been and will remain associated with geopolitics – a kind of “queen” of his scientific concerns (Geopolitics, several revised and added editions, 2005, 2008, 2015, Geopolitics of Romania, 2004, Latin American Geopolitics, 2012 Geostrategy, 2022, the last three in collaboration, but as first author) - in a difficult post-communist context, where geopolitics was a word that still “frightened”, persisting in the 1990s the definition in communist literature (“reactionary, imperialist doctrine...”), and in the Romanian university environment, confusion was made, and still is made, between geopolitics and political geography, which is something else. As I was saying, without mentioning scientific articles or articles popularizing science, scientific communications (radio-TV broadcasts, more than 1,000, not by chance being nicknamed and recognized in the country as “the voice of Radio”, and this during the communist period have completed the publicistic spirit), the author's books signed by Professor Silviu Neguț can be measured, literally, in library meters. In addition, another gain is the unique way in which Professor Silviu Neguț writes, whether it is a course, a specialized book, an encyclopaedia or an article, the style is unique, charming, dense, with accents of definite literary value, totally lacking the “wooden language” or “terminological excess” or “linguistic abuse” so common in academic writings. The writing flows naturally, like a river, without bottlenecks, syncopations, knots... Yes, writing is an art, a talent that you either have or you don't... How many people speak beautifully, but can't put two words down on paper. You can also learn to write from practice, but the result is a tiresome one... And, after all, it is one thing to write for pleasure, it is one thing to write when you have something to say, and another to write because you have to write, or to write because it is a trend. Geopolitics (2015) and Geostrategy (2022) - two reference works in Romanian scientific literature