These days, George Soros announced the handover of control over his philanthropic and political activities. Even in recent years, up to the age of 92 that he is now, the philanthropist and thinker played an important role in the global debate about the ways that separate good from evil. The role of George Soros for the evolution of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe until the accession of the states of the region to the European Union (if we stick to this aspect) was invaluable. Unbelievable in the past, in recent years George Soros has been subjected to terrible slander, in several cases, even by those who have benefited from his largesse. In 2018, in the context of the anti-Soros campaign, which also covered Romania, the quarterly New Journal of Human Rights showed his solidarity with George Soros by awarding him “for exceptional achievements in promoting human freedom and dignity.” IN Praise submitted then and continued now, the reader finds essential information about the merits of the patron and thinker, about what and what we owe him. Given the special timing of George Soros’ retirement from philanthropic and political activities, I suggest Contributors.ro reissue Praise since 2018.

Gabriel Andreescu

Award New human rights journals “For exceptional achievements in the promotion of freedom and human dignity” this year was awarded to George Soros. This distinction testifies to the devotion with which the thinker and philanthropist perceived the values ​​of freedom and dignity, the consistency with which he supported them, the quality of the intellectual project of an open society, to which he gave a practical dimension for decades. .

We call at the beginning of this Praise George Soros’ exceptional involvement in what one expert called “the opening of the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe to the free flow of ideas and scientific knowledge from around the world.” George Soros also spurred change in the region until 1989 by funding Charter 77, Solidarity and dissidents from the USSR. In 1984, he set up in Budapest, with an allocation of 3 million dollars, the Open Society Institute, a veritable laboratory for researching the ways in which a community that had previously been a prisoner of a totalitarian system finds its way to a free society.

George Soros participated in the structuring of post-communist democracy in all countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Year after year, he financed tens of millions of dollars to non-governmental organizations dealing with human rights, equal opportunities, intercultural dialogue, and environmental activism. He supported a free press wherever it was threatened. In the early 1990s, when bales of opposition newspapers were being thrown from trains in post-communist Romania and brave journalists were being kicked out of pro-government publications, the philanthropist offered scholarships for vocational training, newsprint and media.

In Romania, where a police regime has destroyed any vestiges of formal civil society, a local foundation founded in 1990 by George Soros called the Open Society Foundation directly helped initiate and support the first NGOs. The public structures he founded, such as the Resource Center for Ethnocultural Development from Cluj, the Euroregional Center for Democracy from Timisoara, the Partnership Center for Equality and the Legal Resource Center, defined the priorities for the new Romanian democracy and the ways of effective advancement. .

Humanist, George Soros paid special attention to vulnerable sections of the population. In fact, philanthropy began with the sponsorship of scholarships for black youth in South Africa during the apartheid years. He is the author of the largest individual initiative to help the Roma community in history. On his initiative, with the involvement of the World Bank, the Roma Education Fund was established in 2005. The organization annually sponsors about 100,000 Roma pupils and students. He connected the Council of Europe with the creation of the European Roma Institute. This prompted the European Union to develop a continental strategy to help Roma communities, offering several million dollars as a starting point. In the wake of the refugee crisis, Soros advocated for European countries to take responsibility for people fleeing their homelands for their lives, and his Open Society Foundations launched aid programs.

In particular, George Soros promoted university life in the field of humanities and socio-political sciences to strengthen the social responsibility of the academic world. He supported, by financing, the dialogue of teachers from the former communist region with colleagues from the West. His funds covered projects of scientific and cultural content. He created the Central European University, the largest European investment in the university sphere of a private individual, which will soon become one of the most prestigious universities in Central and Eastern Europe, to which several generations of researchers and young university professors owe their preparation and training. specialization in social and humanitarian subjects. It should be remembered that in the 1990s, a significant number of young activists or scientists, also from Romania, trained in the West with the support of the Open Society Foundation, which offered them scholarships for research and professional retraining, money for books and technology. training, money for educational programs. We would not leave in the column “and others” the fact that George Soros preserved and processed the archives of Free Europe through Open Society Archives. But we stop here a series of facts and things that lead along the red thread of funding to the philanthropic thinker. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro

Of course, it was not George Soros who personally founded or coordinated the thousands of organizations belonging to a global network designed to stabilize democracy where it was still fragile; or what made visible the theme of equality – gender, race, sexual orientation. But it was Soros who conceived, followed and developed the “project of principles”, “project of values” in the dual capacity of a visionary personality and a very practical person. It was as successful as a plan of this magnitude could be. There is a polite formula for decent people admitting their mistakes, speaking on behalf of a community full of results: if something goes wrong, it’s their fault, not everyone else’s. Or, we should say, in the case of George Soros, the formula should be reversed: if something bad came out of his practical “open society” project, it was not bad because of him.