Reappraisals (43 page)

Traveling in Moldavia or in rural Transylvania today, fifteen years later, one sees the consequences: Horse-drawn carts are the main means of transport, and the harvest is brought in by scythe and sickle. All Socialist systems depended upon the centralized control of systemically induced shortages. In Romania an economy based on overinvestment in unwanted industrial hardware switched overnight into one based on pre-industrial agrarian subsistence. The return journey will be long.

Nicolae Ceauşescu’s economic policies had a certain vicious logic— Romania, after all, did pay off its international creditors—and were not without mild local precedent from pre-Communist times. But his urbanization projects were simply criminal. The proposed “systematization” of half of Romania’s 13,000 villages (disproportionately selected from minority communities) into 558 agro-towns would have destroyed what remained of the country’s social fabric. His actual destruction of a section of Bucharest the size of Venice ruined the face of the city. Forty thousand buildings were razed to make space for the “House of the People” and the 5-kilometer-long, 150-meter-wide Victory of Socialism Boulevard. The former, designed as Ceauşescu’s personal palace by a twenty-five-year-old architect, Anca Petrescu, is beyond kitsch. Fronted by a formless, hemicycle space that can hold half a million people, the building is so big (its reception area is the size of a soccer field), so ugly, so heavy and cruel and tasteless, that its only possible value is metaphorical.

Here at least it is of some interest, a grotesque Romanian contribution to totalitarian urbanism—a genre in which Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Trujillo, Kim Il Sung, and now Ceauşescu have all excelled.
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The style is neither native nor foreign—in any case, it is all façade. Behind the gleaming white frontages of the Victory of Socialism Boulevard there is the usual dirty gray, precast concrete, just as a few hundred yards away there are the pitiful apartment blocks and potholed streets. But the façade is aggressively, humiliatingly, unrelentingly uniform, a reminder that totalitarianism is always about sameness; which is perhaps why it had a special appeal to a monomaniacal dictator in a land where sameness and “harmony”—and the contrast with “foreign” difference—were a long-standing political preoccupation.

Where, then, does Romania fit in the European scheme of things? It is not Central European in the geographical sense (Bucharest is closer to Istanbul than it is to any Central European capital). Nor is it part of Milan Kundera’s “Central Europe”: former Habsburg territories (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Galicia)—a “kidnapped West”—subsumed into the Soviet imperium. The traveler in Transylvania even today can tell himself that he is in Central Europe—domestic and religious architecture, the presence of linguistic minorities, even a certain (highly relative) prosperity all evoke the region of which it was once a part. But south and east of the Carpathian Mountains it is another story. Except in former imperial cities like Timişoara, at the country’s western edge, even the idea of “Central Europe” lacks appeal for Romanians.
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If educated Romanians from the Old Kingdom looked west, it was to France. As Rosa Waldeck observed in 1942, “The Romanian horizon had always been filled with France; there had been no place in it for anyone else, even England.”
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The Romanian language is Latinate; the administration was modeled on that of Napoléon; even the Romanian Fascists took their cue from France, with an emphasis on unsullied peasants, ethnic harmony, and an instrumentalized Christianity that echoes Charles Maurras and the Action Française.

The identification with Paris was genuine—Mihail Sebastian’s horror at the news of France’s defeat in 1940 was widely shared. But it was also a palpable overcompensation for Romania’s situation on Europe’s outer circumference, what the Romanian scholar Sorin Antohi calls “geocultural Bovaryism”—a disposition to leapfrog into some better place. The deepest Romanian fear seems to be that the country could so easily fall right off the edge into another continent altogether, if it hasn’t already done so. E. M. Cioran in 1972, looking back at Romania’s grim history, captured the point: “What depressed me most was a map of the Ottoman Empire. Looking at it, I understood our past and everything else.”

An open letter to Ceauşescu from a group of dissident senior Communists in March 1989 reveals comparable anxieties: “Romania is and remains a European country. . . . You have begun to change the geography of the rural areas, but you cannot move Romania into Africa.” In the same year the playwright Eugène Ionescu described the country of his birth as “about to leave Europe for good, which means leaving history.”
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The Ottoman Empire is gone—it was not perhaps such a bad thing and anyway left less direct an imprint on Romania than it did elsewhere in the Balkans. But the country’s future remains cloudy. About the only traditional international initiative Romania could undertake would be to seek the return of Bessarabia (since 1991 the independent state of Moldova), and today only C. V. Tudor is demanding it.
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Otherwise politically active people in Bucharest have staked everything on the European Union. Romania first applied to join in 1995 and was rejected two years later (a humiliation which, together with a cold shoulder from NATO, probably sealed the fate of the center-right government). In December 1999 the EU at last invited Romania (along with Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Malta, and Turkey) to begin negotiations to join.

Along with Bulgaria, Romania finally entered the European Union on January 1, 2007. But it will prove a hard pill for Brussels to swallow. The difficulties faced by the German Federal Republic in absorbing the former GDR would be dwarfed by the cost to the EU of accommodating and modernizing a country of twenty-two million people starting from a far worse condition. Romanian membership in the EU will bring headaches. Western investors will surely continue to look to Budapest, Warsaw, or Prague. Who will pour money into Bucharest? Today, only Italy has significant trade with Romania; the Germans have much less, and the French—oh irony!—trail far behind.

Romania today, Mr. Năstase’s best efforts notwithstanding, brings little to Europe. Unlike Budapest or Prague, Bucharest is not part of some once-integrated Central Europe torn asunder by history; unlike Warsaw or Ljubljana, it is not an outpost of Catholic Europe. Romania is peripheral, and the rest of Europe stands to gain little from its presence in the union. Left outside it would be an embarrassment, but hardly a threat. But for just this reason Romania is the EU’s true test case.

Hitherto, membership in the EEC/EC/EU has been extended to countries already perceived as fully European. In the case of Finland or Austria, membership in the union was merely confirmation of their natural place. The same will in time be true of Hungary and Slovenia. But if the European Union wishes to go further, to help
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“European” countries that are not—and this is implicit in its international agenda and its criteria for membership—then it must address the hard cases.

Romania is perhaps the hardest: a place that can only overcome its past by becoming “European,” which of course meant joining the European Union as soon as possible. But there was never any prospect of Romania meeting EU criteria for membership in advance of joining. Thus Brussels is constrained to set aside its insistence that applicant countries conform to “European” norms before being invited into the club. In Romania’s case there is no alternative. Romanian membership will cost Western Europeans a lot of money and will expose the union to all the ills of far-Eastern Europe. In short, it will have been an act of apparent collective altruism, or at least unusually enlightened self-interest.

But without such a willingness to extend its benefits to those who actually need them, the union would be a mockery—of itself and of those who place such faith in it. The mere prospect of joining, however dim, led to improvements in the situation of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania and has strengthened the hand of reformers—without pressure from Brussels, the government in Bucharest would never, for example, have overcome Orthodox Church objections and reformed the humiliating laws against homosexuality. As in the past, international leverage has prompted Romanian good behavior.
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And as in the past, international disappointment would almost certainly carry a price at home.

In 1934 the English historian of Southeastern Europe R. W. Seton-Watson wrote, “Two generations of peace and clean government might make of Roumania an earthly paradise.”
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Today that is perhaps a lot to ask (though it shows how far the country has fallen). But Romania needs a break. The fear of being “shipwrecked at the periphery of history in a Balkanized democracy” (as Eliade put it) is real, however perverse the directions that fear has taken in the past. “Some countries,” according to E. M. Cioran, looking back across Romania’s twentieth century, “are blessed with a sort of grace: everything works for them, even their misfortunes and their catastrophes. There are others for whom nothing succeeds and whose very triumphs are but failures. When they try to assert themselves and take a step forward, some external fate intervenes to break their momentum and return them to their starting point.”
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NOTES TO CHAPTER XV