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Marko Papic

Romania: Bad Memories and Hope

In school, many of us learned William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus. It concludes with the line, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” This is a line that a Victorian gentleman might bequeath to an American entrepreneur. It is not a line that resonates in Romania. Nothing in their history tells them that they rule their fate or dominate their soul. Everything in their history is a lesson in how fate masters them or how their very soul is a captive of history. As a nation, their hopes are modest and their expectations tempered by their past.

This sensibility is not something alien to me. My parents survived the Nazi death camps; returned to Hungary to try to rebuild their lives, then found themselves fleeing the Communists. When they arrived in America, their wishes were extraordinarily modest, when I look back on it. They wanted to be safe, to get up in the morning, got to work, get paid—to live. A small suburban home was beyond imagining, but in America, the unimaginable was practical. However, they were never under the impression that they were the masters of their fate, even if they retained ownership of their souls. Their fate, mostly bad and then good, was always in the hands of others. This is the soil Romania springs form.

Geopolitics and the Politics of Self-Mutilation

It must be understood what the world did to Romania. Begin with geography. The Carpathian Mountains define Romania, but in an odd way. Rather than serving as the border of the country, protecting it, the Carpathians are an arc that divides the country into three parts. To the south of the mountains are the Wallachia plains, the heart of contemporary Romania, where its capital, Bucharest, and its old oil center, Ploesti, are located. In the east of the Carpathians is the Moldavian Plain. To the northwest of the Carpathians is Transylvania, more rugged, hilly country.

And this is the geopolitical tragedy of Romania. Romania is divided into three major parts, none able to easily defend the other militarily. Romania is one nation divided by its geography. Transylvania, therefore, came under Hungarian rule in the 14th and 15 centuries [This happened in the 11th century, when Stephen I of Hungary integrated Transylvania into his Kingdom, and it also became an Ottoman vassal in the 16th century]Agreed with Powers and the later by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Wallachia came under Ottoman rule as well as Austro-Hungarian [I could not find a period in which the Austro-Hungarian Empire controlled Wallachia]. Agreed, with Powers, it was formulated into Romania as an independent state in 1878 following the Congress of Berlin. Moldava came under Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian rule [Could not find a period of Austro-Hungarian rule].Agreed, I don’t know any either. About the only time before the late 19th Century that Romania was united was when it was completely conquered. And the only reason it was conquered was when some empire wanted to secure the Carpathians to defend themselves.

Some of us nations experience geopolitics as an opportunity. Most of humanity experienced it as catastrophe. Romania has been a nation for a long time, but on rarely a united nation state. After becoming a nation-state in the late 19th Century, it had a precarious existence, balanced between Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Russia, with Germany a more distant but powerful reality. It spent the inter-war years trying to find its balance between monarchy, authoritarianism and fascism, and never quite found it. It sought safety in an alliance with Hitler, and found itself on the front lines in the German invasion of Russia. To understand the kind of ally it was bear this in mind. When the Soviets launched their great counter-attack at Stalingrad, they launched their attack over Romanian (and Hungarian troops). The Soviets attacked where they did because Romanians and Hungarians neither wanted to be there nor die there this sentence unclear to me. I like it They did anyway regardless of their wishes.

All of this led to Romania’s occupation by the Soviets. The Romanians developed a unique strategy toward the Soviets. On the one hand they wanted autonomy from the Soviets. The Hungarians rose up against the Soviets and were crushed, and the Czechoslovakians tried to create a liberal communist regime that was still loyal to the Soviets, and were crushed. The Romanians actually achieved a degree of autonomy from the Soviets in foreign affairs. They were quite close to the Americans in the 1970s. The way the Romanians got the Soviets to tolerate this was that the Romanians built a regime more rigid and oppressive than even the Soviet Union This appears false, at least judging by death toll (which is how this statement will be taken, even if you mean to measure regime rigidity/oppression by another measure than death toll). The Socialist Rep of Romania totals about 500,000, considerably less than China, USSR, DPRK, Cambodia, and several others. What would be more accurate would be to say, “the Romanians built a regime that was more rigid and oppressive than any other in Europe except for the Soviets.” I agree we keep it as it is… George means more rigid than the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, so we may want to qualify it by saying “post-Stalinist” The Soviets could live with this. They knew NATO wasn’t going to invade, let away through Romania. So long as the Romanians kept their public in line, the Russians could tolerate their maneuvers. Therefore Romanians ultimately created a regime of remarkable brutality. Romania retained theirits national identity and freedom for maneuver, but at a stunning price in freedom and economic well-being.

Contemporary Romania cannot be understood without understanding Nicolas Ceacescu. He called himself “The Genius of the Carpathians”. He may well have been, but if so, the Carpathian definition of genius is idiosyncratic. The Romanian communist government was built around communists who had remained in Romania during World War II, in prison or in hiding. Not really unique… Yugoslavia was the same thing This was unique in Eastern Europe. Stalin didn’t trust communist who stayed home and resisted. He preferred communists who had fled to Moscow in the 1930s and had proven themselves loyal to Stalin by their betrayal of others. He sent Moscow communists to rule the rest of the newly occupied countries that buffered Russia from the West. Not so in Romania, where native communists ruled. After the death of the founder, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, another Romanian communist who stayed in Romania ultimately took over, Nicolae Ceausescu. This was the peculiarity of Romanian Communism that made it more like Tito’s Yugoslavia in foreign policy, and more like a bad dream in domestic policy. Agreed

Ceausescudecided to pay off the national debt. His reason seemed to flow from his foreign policy. He did not want to be trapped by any country because of debt. He paid the debt by selling nearly everything that was produced in Romania to other countries, leaving his countrymen in staggering poverty. Electricity and heat were occasional things, and even food was scarce in a country that had a lot of it. The Securitate, a domestic secret police whose efficiency and brutality was impressive, suppressed unrest. Nothing worked in Romania as well as the Securitate.

Herta Muller is a Romanian author who writes in German, as she was part of Romania’s ethnic German community. She won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2009. One of her books is The Appointment, takes place in Romania under the Communists. It gives an extraordinary sense of a place ruled by the Securitate. It is about a woman who is living her life, working, dealing with an alcoholic husband while constantly preparing for and living in dread of appointments with the secret police. As in Kafka, what they are looking for, what she is hiding is unclear. But the danger is unrelenting and permeates her entire consciousness. She is constantly preparing for her appointment with them. When you read this book, as I did in preparing for this trip, you understand the way in which Securitate tore apart a citizens soul—and you remember that this was not a distant relic of the 1930s, but was still in place and sustaining the Romanian regime in 1989.

It was as if the price that Romania had to pay for autonomy was continually punching itself in the face in other words, to be more austere to themselves than external oppressors were to them, thus depriving enemies of at least some of their ability to inflict pain. Even the fall of communism took a Romanian path. There was no velvet revolution here, but a bloody one, where the Securitate resisted the anti-communist rising under circumstances and details that are still hotly debated and completely unclear. At a certain point they saw that all was lost, the Ceausescus (his wife Elena was also a piece of work would change to “had a mysterious personality” requiring a work of psychological genius to unravel) were executed by someone Someone? Don’t we know that it was the revolutionary committee? and the Securitate blended into civil society as part of the organized crime that was mistaken for liberalization in much of the Communist world by Western academics and bankers.I know the piece is already longer than the usual weeklies but this point is worth elaborating upon a bit

Romania emerged from the nightmare of the prior 70 years of ongoing catastrophe by dreaming of simple things, and having no illusions that these simple things were either easy to come by or something that they were in control of. As for much of Eastern Europe, but perhaps with a greater intensity, they believed that redemption lay with the West’s multi-lateral organizations. If they were permitted to join NATO and especially the European Union, their national security needs would be taken care of along with their economic. They yearned to become Europeans because simply being Romanian was too dangerous.Nice!

Becoming a Normal European

In thinking of Romania, the phrase “institutionalized prisoner” comes to meind. In the U.S., It is said that if someone stays in prison long enough, he becomes “institutionalized,” someone who can no longer imagine functioning outside a world where someone else tells him what to do. For Romania, national sovereignty has always been experienced as the process of accommodating itself to a more powerful nation. This might have been the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. So, after 1991, Romania searched for the “someone else” to which heit? could subordinate itself. Even more important, Romania imbued these entities with extraordinary redemptive powers. Once in NATO and the EU, all would be well.

And of course, until recently, it has been well, or well in terms of the modest needs of a historical victim (“victim” is a loaded word and implies that the things that happened to Romania should not have happened to it. I’d suggest something like “lightening rod”). The problem that Romania has is simply that these sanctuaries are in many ways illusions. It looks to NATO to defend it, but NATO is an hollowed out entity. There is a new and supposedly ambitious (nothing ambitious about it) NATO strategy, which sets a global agenda for NATO. Long discussed, it is an exercise in meaninglessness. NATO’s continental members have vestigial militaries. At most they could put token forces in the field, and they won’t even do that. The United States, Turkey and (for now) Britain FRANCE (needs to be added, we argue it in most of our analyses and it is correct. France is a potent military power compared to the rest and certainly compared to the UK) have the real military forces in NATO. The others mostly have symbolic forces as well as many diplomats available for meetings. The major continental powers are cutting their already puny forces. A global strategy for NATO ultimately means American intervention coupled with French and German criticism and avoidance of burden-sharing. NATO is a consensual organization, and a single member can block any mission. The divergent interests of an expanded NATO guarantee that someone will block everything. NATO is an illusion that comforts the Romanians, but only if they don’t look carefully. The Romanians seem to prefer the comforting illusion because it brings with it a formal guarantee that, they hope, will be backed by the United States.

As for the European Union, there is a deep structural tension in the system. The main European economic power is Germany. It is also the world’s second largest exporter. Its economy is built around exporting. For a country like Romania, economic development requires that it take advantage of its wage advantage. Lower wages allow developing countries to develop their economy through exports. But Europe is dominated by an export superpower. Unlike the post-war world, where the United States absorbed the imports of Germany or Japan without needing to compete with them, Germany remains an exporting country exporting into Romania and leaving precious little room for Romania to develop its economy.

Romania should be running a trade surplus, particularly with Germany, at this stage of its development. But it is not -- In 2007 it exported about $40 billion worth of goods and imported about $70 billion. In 2009 it exported the same $40 billion but cut imports to only $54 billion but still negative. 40 percent of its trade is with Germany, France and Italy, its major EU partners. But it is Germany where the major problem is. And this is compounded by the fact that a good part of Romania’s exports to Germany are from German owned firms operating in Romania.

During the period of relative prosperity in Europe from 1991-2008, the structural reality of the EU was hidden under a rising tide. In 2008 the tide went out revealing the structural reality. It is not clear when the tide of prosperity will come rolling in. In the meantime, while the German economy is growing again, Romania’s is not. Existing in a system where the main engine is an exporter, and the exporter dominates the process of setting rules, it is difficult to see how Romania takes advantage of its greatest asset—a skilled work force prepared to work for lower wages. AMEN.

Some of Romania’s price is being paid in the inability to develop new housing patterns. When you walk down the streets of modest neighborhoods, you find an interesting thing. Counting the apartments and the number of cars parked helter skelter around these apartments, you can see that there are substantially more cars than apartments. Buying an apartment in Romania can be incredibly expensive by American standards. A very modest three bedroom apartment goes for about $400,000. This means that children do not move out of their parents home for quite a while. The same is true in the suburbs where small cinderblock houses exist cheek to jowl with their neighbors costing even more to buy. This is not unique to Romania but it is intense there.

This might make for close families, but it also can make for tense ones. In the meantime the money that should be saved for apartments is spent on cars. The sight of Audis on streets of extremely modest apartments is striking. The money that there is being spent on imported cars instead of being saved. The problem is not the cost of construction. It is the cost of land. Europe’s compact cities, made more compact in Romania because it lacks a vast system of autobahns and interstates that drive American and German land costs down by making land accessible, create high costs for low square footage. In Romania it is particularly tense and oddly seems to contribute to an import surge where there should be an export surge. Buying German cars in excess seems more rational to Romanians than saving. This last point about saving seems unconnected with what goes before, may just need a bit more explanation (for instance, saving in order to improve their home?). Otherwise, I see two potential problems with this paragraph. One, you haven’t mentioned that there is a desire to appear wealthy or successful, and cars are better status symbols than homes, which other people rarely see – this is at least worth mentioning. Two, if the price of residential property or rent is high, then nice cars in front of modest looking houses is not incongruous (the modest looking houses are expensive, suitable to an income that can also afford a nice car).

Add to this the regulatory question. Romania is a developing country. Europe’s regulations are drawn with a focus on the highly developed countries. The laws on employment guarantees mean that Europeans don’t hire workers they adopt them. That means that entrepreneurship is difficult. Being an entrepreneur, as I well know, means making mistakes and recovering from them fast. Given the guarantees that every worker has, there is no (need to recover? Unclear here if you’re talking about the worker or the employer) recovering from mistakes, and no agility for small entrepreneurs. Romania should be a country of small entrepreneurs, and it is. But there is extensive evasion of Brussels—and Bucharest’s—regulation. It is a grey market that creates legal jeopardy, and therefore corruption in the sector that Romania needs the most. Imagine if Germany had the regulations it champions today in 1955. Could it possibly have developed into what it is today? There may be a time for these regulations (and that is debatable) but for Romania, it is not now.