Vivid Opinion December 2004

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OPINION
When the dust settles over the European-American, liberal-conservative schism, where will Romania be?

by Paul Wood
December 2004

You could almost feel the voters, media and political elites of Europe willing John Kerry to defeat George W Bush during the recent US election. In the event, the election result baffled and cast a palpable gloom on the majority in every developed industrial democracy in Europe. The headline on the front page of the British popular tabloid, the Mirror put the mood pithily: ''How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?'' The front page of the supplement to the upmarket Guardian was blacked out except for the words 'Oh God.'

Well how could this disaster have occurred? Very quickly the pundits had explanations and most identified the reason for the Republican victory: old time religion. Or, put more broadly, the cultural wars that have riven America since her collective nervous breakdown over the subject of race and segregation in the 1960s. Today the cultural issues that most inflame Americans are abortion and gay rights. It seems it was these issues, not Falujah or Abu Ghraib, that persuaded Americans to queue outside polling stations late into the night in scenes reminiscent of a Third World country holding an infrequent free election.

Bush's astute opposition to gay marriage, coinciding with referendums on the issue in 11 states, brought out many of those extra voters, many of whom were Latino, Catholic or black - three groups that traditionally vote Democrat. This one issue may have been crucial in giving Bush his tight victory in Ohio and thus his second term. Had Kerry, a divorced Catholic who favours abortion on demand, won the majority of the Catholic vote he would have won a famous victory. Abortion was a decisive reason why he didn't.

Only a few days earlier the incoming President of the EU Commission, Manuel Barroso, had had to withdraw his proposed team of commissioners because of the comments of one nominee, Rocco Buttiglione. During Parliamentary hearings on the rights of minorities, Buttiglione promised to defend the rights of gays ''even if I think homosexuality is a sin.'' For repeating a teaching binding on all Catholics the hapless Buttiglione lost his job and was described by the BBC as an 'ultra-conservative', an expression that the BBC's viewers understand means something very bad indeed.

For it is not only in America that cultural issues are paramount. In Western Europe too the political battle is no longer over wide disagreements on economics but on cultural issues such as scarves in schools, fox-hunting, euthanasia, and asylum-seekers. Yet the two continents seem to be moving speedily in opposite directions at the same time as if in some vast, unforeseen geological disturbance.

Where will Romania be when the new landscape solidifies? First of all, where is it now? Its communist past distances Romania a world away from any Western country, and the Orthodox Church makes it utterly different from the Catholic ex-communist states that recently joined the EU.

Communism preached atheism as a state religion, extolling sex equality but, from the 1960s onwards a rigid sexual puritanism that had no basis in Marxism-Leninism was enforced. After the Revolution, no politician, including those that claim to be Christian Democrats, could support a reintroduction of Ceausescu's ban on abortion.

Romanians are profoundly religious. (Although it was Eugen Ionescu who said that Christianity in Romania bore no relation whatsoever to Christianity in Catholic or Protestant countries.) Whatever the truth, Romanians consider rules as gentle hints and usually give at least as little thought as secular Westerners to the Christian sexual ethic. Only when it condemns homosexuality does the Church speak to the man in the street.

Prostitution in diverse forms is everywhere. Wife-battering is widespread. Abortions are common and in the early and mid-1990s an astonishing two-thirds of pregnancies were artificially terminated, although numbers are now falling. Adultery, at least for men, has always been regarded as the norm. The Church says little about these things. As for divorce, the Romanian Church allows seven marriages rather than the three the other Orthodox churches permit.

After 1989 a feverish social and sexual revolution was engendered by the end of the bans on abortion and contraception and the heady sense of freedom and openness to Western fashions. Now belatedly new fashions come from the West, brought to Romania with much else from the EU.

Homosexuality was until 2001 less than semi-legal. It was legalised for the benefit of the EU against fierce opposition from the Church, the nationalist right and the feeling of most of the country. Bounding forward to catch up with liberal thinking in much of the rest of Europe, discrimination on grounds of inter alia sex, race, religion and sexual orientation has been made illegal, a costless change that pleases the Brussels elite and makes no difference whatsoever to anyone's life. Engendering racial hatred and the distribution of racist material is likewise now illegal but much of what is said by nationalist politicians would be illegal in some Western countries. If the new EU constitution comes into force in Romania European courts will have to enforce anti-xenophobia provisions that may catch not only rants against gypsies but also valid Eurosceptic views.

Even the Romania Mare party, opposed to gypsies, Hungarians and foreigners in general has found it politic to do an about-turn. The leader, Corneliu Vadim Tudor announced that a rereading of the Bible had caused him to rethink his views on Jews and paid for a statue of Yitzhak Rabin to be erected despite howls of protest from the international Jewish community. Ironically one of the disclosures that seemed to cost Vadim dearly in the 2000 election was that he was not an Orthodox. To widespread surprise he was revealed to be a Baptist and therefore in the eyes of many voters not a true Romanian.

Belief in God had to be kept hidden by politicians under communism. Now it seems - as in the US - to be obligatory. Even President Iliescu discovered that he was a believer some time between his losing office in 1996 and his return to Cotroceni four years later. A key point in the 1996 television debate with his successful opponent Emil Constantinescu came when the latter asked, 'Mr President, do you believe in God?' Thrown off-balance, the usually unflappable Iliescu admitted to being a free-thinker. He was damaged.

During the Romanian election campaign, the PD/PNL presidential candidate Traian Basescu argued that legalising prostitution would bring it under control. ìRomania has become famous for human trafficking, prostitution and paedophilia and the state refuses to recognise these problems and take measures to stop them,î he said. This stance elicited a condemnation from the Romanian patriarchy which doesn't seem to condemn the sins of the post-communist ruling party. The ex-communists, heirs to Ceausescu's nationalist and puritanical take on communism, are now the social conservatives, the centre-right opposition the (relative) social liberals.

Government newspapers have accused Basescu of approving of homosexuality, a charge Basescu has denied, pointedly referring to the homosexuality of an unnamed prominent political opponent. While the politicians argue about such things to win votes in the country, the middle class in Bucharest know all about the ethics of the politicians.

The sad irony is that the application of the acquis communautaire will add more regulation and restrictions in an already surreally bureaucratic country. The reverse of the coin is that the panoply of regulations from Brussels, the non-discrimination rules, the health and safety rules, the rules that prevent Romanians slaughtering their pigs in front of their houses for Christmas will as often as not be ignored, circumvented or used as levers for eliciting bribes.

The same goes for cultural politics. It will change slowly in the direction of secularism, liberalism and feminism, a sort of cultural globalisation, certainly not towards the America of the Bible belt and the theo-cons.

Romania's heart lay with George Bush when it came to sending troops to Iraq. Its head knows that its future lies with Europe. Whereas once the wind blew from Moscow now it blows from Brussels. It will pay lip service to the words that Brussels wants to hear because it has no choice.

Romanians will never again enjoy as much freedom as they do today. Much will improve and some things will get worse but in the end, as at the beginning in 1989, conservative values, individual freedom and respect for private property will still be discounted.

Paul Wood runs Apple Search and Selection, an executive search company.

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