Democracy, Romanian style
Tismaneanu, Vladimir
When it comes to Romania, political squalor is taken for granted. But the transition to democracy didn't start out that way. In December 1989, Romania was the only Soviet bloc country where the...
...Otherwise, the future will be a continuation of the current fatigue, resignation, and cyclical patriotic hysteria...
...Competing secret services (at least eight) are still active, and it is often difficult for the public to discern who holds power...
...With money from the government, a laudatory documentary has been released entitled The Destiny of the Marshal...
...Still, many Romanians continue to voice strong criticisms of corruption, clientelism, the dismal economic situation, and the country's slide into authoritarianism...
...Released from prison thanks to presidential pardons, several of Ceausescu's former Politburo members are now prospering in (often murky) financial enterprises...
...The issue is not simply political justice, but the deep need for myth-breaking self-criticism...
...Restoring Antonescu's image is a symbolic counterpart to the methodical denigration of Romania's short-lived democratic episode of 194445...
...The secretary of state, Mihai Ungheanu, has a record of racist publications, charging Jews with a "Holocaust of the Romanian culture" during the Stalinist years...
...Why so much fuss about Romania...
...When Adrian Nastase, head of the ruling party and chairman of the Parliament's Chamber of Deputies, visited Washington, he bluntly stated that for his generation "the Antonescu issue is irrelevant" and that "any insistence on past atrocities is counter-productive...
...He recently proclaimed Iliescu to be a "stooge of the Hungarian traitors...
...The Democratic Convention (an umbrella for the major opposition forces) recently split...
...Second, because of Iliescu's association with communist-nationalist groups, the country's break with Ceausescuism has slowed significantly...
...Bucharest's rulers simply react with scorn...
...Mudslinging continues to poison public discourse, but this is not peculiar to Romania...
...These values are hardly compatible with having the revengeful, fiercely anti-Hungarian PUNR as a coalition partner...
...In the meantime, PUNR members run the ministries of education, justice, and agriculture...
...Exiled King Michael, who arrested Antonescu in August 1944 and brought Romania into the antifascist coalition, is portrayed as a "felon" and "coward...
...A campaign initiated by PUNR's nationalist extremists to prevent the appointment of the new U.S...
...Obsessed with ethnic purity, Funar is potentially Romania's version of Radovan Karadzic, the sociopath responsible for mass murder in Bosnia...
...The president, who fancies himself and his party as social democrats, has established a governing coalition with the country's most anti-Hungarian, antiSemitic, and anti-liberal movements: the Romathan National Unity party (PUNR), the Romania Mare (Great Romania) party, and the PSM...
...Or is he hostage to political forces that he can't manage fully...
...government official as "a manipulation by some emigre Romanians in the U.S...
...It is hard to concur with the official American optimism: efforts— sanctioned by Bucharest's government—to rehabilitate Marshal Ion Antonescu (Romania's proNazi wartime leader who was executed in 1946) have continued unabated, in spite of U.S...
...The idea of accountability has little resonance in Romania...
...Decommunization will necessarily entail defascization...
...Privatization goes slowly, and foreign investment is much less than in Central Europe...
...Still, Iliescu (and official Washington) argue that Romania is a quiet place, which in a way is true...
...One cause of the contemporary situation is the fragility of civil society...
...In reality, he seems to relish the situation...
...Acquaintances of the president claim that his values (often described as "Gorbachevite") can't be reconciled with the extreme nationalism of his current bedfellows...
...The problem remains the absence of an alternative vision for the country—a vision based on a realistic assessment of tradition, resources, and opportunities...
...Unlike other countries where one can speak of the "end of decommunization," Romania has yet to start it...
...To the fear, hatred, and selective amnesia generated by the ruling party's allies, the opposition must put forth a program of rights, truth, memory, and civic solidarity...
...For five years, a profoundly demoralized population has watched the former communist bureaucracy enrich itself, backed by a presidential regime that, while pretending to be the continuation of the December "breakthrough," has cynically revived and used xenophobic nationalism to undermine its opponents and create a false sense of ethnic unity...
...As for uncompromising, the consistency and authenticity of the revolution have been questioned by many Romanians, who are disgusted by the slow pace of reform and the return of Ceausescu's sycophants to power...
...The answer lies in the potentially explosive mixture there...
...Is Iliescu happy with this state of affairs...
...There are reasons to believe some of them...
...And somehow, democratic oppositionists will have to overcome their fissures and personal rivalries so that they can counter ethnocentric demagoguery and affirm the values of legality, responsibility, and individual freedom...
...This delusion is further accentuated when Iliescu's allies spew out patriotic venom at any suggestion that a cathartic exploration of the past might be useful...
...The current government is performing well and is doing what IMF experts want it to do...
...Even democratic intellectuals are reluctant to examine critically the pre-1944 legacy of military dictatorship, racist legislation, persecution of minorities, and so on...
...The political opposition, however, is fragmented and beset with personal rivalries...
...Research on crimes by the Romanian army and police in Transnistria during World War II is denounced as anti-Romanian, while blatant efforts to deny the Holocaust in Romanian territories are funded by the government-sponsored Romanian Cultural Foundation...
...Antonescu's myth is a crucial ingredient for the shaping of a new authoritarian political culture...
...In January, protocols for this "quadrangular" agreement were signed, though not a ripple of national or external indignation came in its wake...
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...If the opposition is unable to offer a united platform articulating the need for radical reforms, Iliescu will likely win again...
...The anti-Semitic Romania Mare party is in full control of the Ministry of Culture...
...Iliescu's acceptance of this award suggests how eerie the political landscape is, for chauvinistic extremists have entered the highest levels of government...
...Ungheanu has also accused this author of being on the payroll of American "Jewish plutocrats...
...In Funar's Cluj, economic and political corruption have flourished, together with grotesque attacks on the city's historical legacy (attacks aimed especially at Hungarian cultural influences...
...Romania's media are boisterous and vibrantly ouspoken—often to Iliescu's chagrin...
...American officials nowadays see Romania as a relatively stable entity in a world of shifting boundaries and ethnic turbulence...
...The convulsions of 1989 through 1991, SUMMER • 1995 • 319 Politics Abroad which included the frightening raids in Bucharest by miners guided by secret police officers, have not been repeated...
...In December 1989, Romania was the only Soviet bloc country where the revolution appeared to be both bloody and uncompromising...
...So far, so good: after all, there are neocommunists coming back in other countries as well...
...Although government, as well as opposition politicians, may admit that some problems existed, the predominant belief is that there was nothing fundamentally wrong before communism...
...Although there is no full-fledged restoration, and ordinary life is not as exacting as it was under Ceausescu, the very fact that there are rumors that Nicu, his son and would-be successor, is considering a run for the presidency in 1996 indicates an ongoing abnormality...
...PUNR's chairman is the mayor of the Transylvanian town of Cluj, the notorious Gheorghe Funar...
...Some polls show that Iliescu's popularity is dwindling and that many people are looking for a political alternative...
...Rumors and suspicions are rampant, especially about occult-like secret police operations...
...When I asked him, in June 1994, how Romania would get out of its current crisis, he smiled engagingly and replied, "What crisis are you talking about...
...Bloody it was, with over one thousand people killed, and President Ceausescu and his wife executed after a parody of a trial...
...ambassador, Alfred Moses, was even dismissed by a high U.S...
...Romanian decommunization will have to address the legacies of tribal nationalism, antiSemitism, and recalcitrant Stalinism, all of which converge in the country's political culture...
...First come the almost two million Hungarians, whose rights to self-management and cultural autonomy are denied by virtually all Romanian parties, whether in the government or in opposition...
...As Ambassador Moses puts it, erecting statues to this loyal ally of Hitler is equivalent to installing busts of Mussolini and Hitler in Italian and German plazas...
...In late January 1995, for instance, President Ion Iliescu, who came to power in December 1989, was the recipent of the "Man of the Year" award offered by Adrian Paunescu...
...Iliescu's real or fake exasperation with Funar was expressed when his spokesman Traian Chebeleu declared that Cluj's mayor belonged in a mental institution...
...But journalists are frustrated: the more they expose corruption, nepotism, and Byzantine clientist schemes, the less the effect...
...Nationalism of the ugliest sort is served up as balm for wounded social sentiments...
...Once committed to Leninism, he remains convinced that its luminous ideals still have something to offer...
...Much of this is the result of Iliescu's lingering hostility to pluralism...
...Meanwhile, under the protection of the ruling party, former Securitate (secret police) thugs have converted into successful businessmen...
...In other word, ghosts of both fascist and Stalinist pasts have been summoned to strengthen a government still unable to perceive the opposition as a legitimate partner in the political process...
...Romanian problems are linked to moral and institutional dilemmas, especially the lack of political imagination in a president allied with some of the worst political forces in the country...
...The mystique of the military hero, victim of Judeo-Bolshevik vindictiveness (bolstered, according to this demonology, by the 318 • DISSENT Politics Abroad treacherous "bourgeois parties" and the monarch), is used to legitimize the current ruling alliance...
...Paunescu, once Ceausescu's court poet, is currently a senator and vice chairman of the neocommunist Socialist Party of Labor (PSM) and also an adamant campaigner for the rehabilitation of the late dictator...
...Former dissidents have almost disappeared from the public domain, nauseated by this brazen return of some of the most repellent characters of the previous regime...
...congressional protests...
...This may be true, but the government also sets the agenda when it comes to matters vital for the transition to democracy: developing a civic culture, fostering tolerance, opening the economy to foreign investment, fighting corruption, and so on...
Vol. 42 • July 1995 • No. 3
