Politics September 2005

POLITICS
Misery: Romania’s natural state

by Andrei Postelnicu
September 2005

Last spring I published an article in this magazine criticising a strategy of the former government that would have seen about 29 million euros spent on a range of idiotic projects aimed at improving Romania’s image abroad.
Several days after the piece came out the minister in charge of the so-called strategy called me. Annoyed, he explained to me that it was only a tentative project that had not been approved. So I had to explain to him that I didn’t care about that. What I had lashed out at was the mentality responsible for that enormity. Later on I heard that same minister complain that I had something against him. He added that maybe he had not done enough for me to ensure I would not criticise him.

The idea that I might have had another motivation except to attack him did not cross his mind. There must have been something else apart from indignation at bureaucratic stupidity.

That ex-minister’s desire to explain the world around him through the use of secret ploys and dubious conspiracies is shared by many Romanians. Politicians have often invoked occult forces as a justification for their own failures. These are the people who have pompously noted that there’s corruption in the West as well, and maybe the Enron collapse was worse than the FNI one in Romania.

Cheap bitching – as an evasion from a reality that confronts us with a reality we’d rather not face – is a disease that afflicts the rank and file, as well as the politicians. It’s what leads to newspapers concluding the Romanian national football team loses because the referee or the turf was against us. No explanation is too far-fetched – the coach’s icons were cured, there were women around – as long as it helps us avoid the painful conclusion that maybe our boys are just a crap team.

Another recent example is that of the people who, upon reading the article about the cop who took the president’s daughter’s driving licence away concluded that it was part of a campaign for the president. The thought that maybe there was a cop in Romania who is not afraid of laying the law down on presidential offspring.

This same mentality leads to the shooting down of any model offered as a possible escape from our endless transition. Countless reasons are cited to prove that what works “out West” won’t work in Romania, or that what happens there maybe isn’t that good or worth following at all. The fact that the people criticising have never seen the model in action does not stop them from criticising it.

On this note, one of Romania’s self-proclaimed opinion leaders maintained that the Western recipe of newspapers that do not mix opinion and news won’t work in Romania – even though there are more of those papers than the local variety in which every little news story is an opportunity to editorialise. And never mind that the Western papers are more profitable.

The common denominator of the examples given above is a sort of an appealing misery in which Romania has been wallowing for at least 15 years.

Another possible explanation could come from the fact that maybe these professional bitching extraordinaires have known an absolute truth, some model of perfection that makes reality pale. Their endless whinging is therefore nothing more than their desire to see Romania emulate the perfection that has been revealed to them. And because this vision of perfection is absolute, any compromise is not enough. In the context of this fundamentalist worldview, everything else stinks.

These are the people for whom nothing that happens in Romania is ever good enough. For them, splitting hairs is a passion.

This is not a plea against criticism, wherever it might come from. Criticism, if it’s constructive, can be one of democracy’s most useful features. But the constant moaning, which destroys everything without putting anything in place, is what makes misery Romania’s natural state.

Andrei Postelnicu is based in New York where he writes for the Financial Times.