Some thoughts ahead of the 2024 elections in Romania

As the Russian Federation’s attack on Ukraine has been destabilizing the East Europe region, an old polarization between Occidentalism and Russophilia resurfaced with renewed might, drawing on the broader populist current sweeping across Europe and many other parts of the world. 

In the face of aggression and expansionist tendencies from the Russian Federation, the choice many East European people and countries face is a constructed bleak binary: do we surrender to one imperial actor or another? In other words, do we turn towards NATO, the European Union, and the USA, or towards the Russian Federation (and China?)?

This binary seems to be reflected in different, though related, terms in domestic politics: do we vote for nationalist populists who are also sometimes pro-Russia, or do we vote for neoliberal Occidentalist pro-EU parties? As the choice seems increasingly urgent and, in many cases, already made, I seek to make sense of my complicated thoughts and feelings as a Romanian academic living in the UK. Whilst I will refer primarily to Romania, my sense is that many of these considerations might reflect broader trends, tendencies and worries across the region. I would be very interested to hear what academics and activists from other spaces think about this.

--------

I started my PhD in October 2020, a month before the far-right AUR [the Alliance for the Union of Romanians] was elected to the Romanian Parliament for the first time. This development in Romanian politics naively shocked and saddened me: how could this happen, I asked myself over and over. I had just completed a master’s dissertation looking at eugenics in interwar Romania, and I could see so much of AUR’s rhetoric and legitimating logics reflecting that of the Antonescu regime. It took me three years of ruminating on this question and reflecting on the history of the Romanian state to realise that the answer was simple: stark economic disadvantage – resulting into, amongst others, mass migration – combined with a two-century old history of racist nationalism.

-------

AUR, and its like-minded peers, is one of many symptoms of the rough transition from failed state-mandated socialism to failed late capitalism and integration into a painfully unequal world. 1989 and its aftermath promised democracy, stability, meritocracy and prosperity; instead, it delivered a butchered economy – unemployment, mass migration, poverty, deindustrialization, debt en masse – and overall social insecurity. 

We may, of course, blame some of these on the corrupt elites and the bureaucracies that took charge of the post-1989 transition. To this, we may add the representatives of Western hegemony, such as NATO, the World Bank and the EU, who couldn’t get their hands onto these new democracies, eager to try out capitalism, fast enough. This pairing made in hell left many people disillusioned, disempowered, distrustful of democratic institutions and, quite simply, poor. The state of welfare and social systems in Romania is deploring, and proven over and over through high rates of alcoholism, corruption, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, school absenteeism, unemployment etc.

Political parties and leaders that promise an overhauling reform, enter this landscape frequently and promise the people of Romania a break with this failed transition -- a break which would result into a life good enough to make us not want to migrate.  

In the wake of the Colectiv tragedy, USR [the Union Save Romania] did exactly that. It promised Western-like democracy through the language of the Enlightenment: technocracy and rational expertise. I hate to admit it, but I queued in London for 7 hours to vote for USR on my 21st birthday, filled with the hope that this might be it. Later, it became clear that USR is a massive failure; one must simply look at how they polled over time. 

My diagnosis is that this is not just because USR has no political vision or coherent programme – though this is true – but also because USR were too arrogant to actually listen to the concerns of the people living in Romania. They adopted a very uncritically Occidentalist approach, essentially hoping that they could run on a self-orientalist political platform which justified the situation of the Romanian state through the inherent incompetence and corrupt selfishness of Romanians, rather than through the realities of the cruel capitalist developments since 1989, including repeated austerity. USR silenced the critiques of the EU and the West as merely irrational, fringe and irrelevant, and ignored the ways in which Romania’s integration into the liberal capitalist world order created inequality and dependency both between Romania and the West, and within Romanian society.

Just like USR came with its diagnosis and promises for a society in dire need, AUR does exactly the same. The difference is that AUR lends credence to concerns over Romania’s relationship with the West, and platforms the anger and genuine disappointment of those people left behind by the transition. Unfortunately, it does so in extremely dangerous nationalist terms with no real political solutions, bringing forth the two centuries of racist nationalism and promoting a very biologically essentialist understanding of what it means to be Romanian. And, clearly, it does so persuasively.

I am not of the opinion that Romanians are inherently nationalist and racist, in the same way that I think no ethnic group is inherently nationalist and racist. However, in these economic and social conditions, where millions of Romanians live and work abroad – something the current government does virtually nothing about – it is easy to see why a party calling for the union of all Romanians seems appealing to people who are fed up with the status quo, and whom no other political party addresses directly.

To sum up, the current state of affairs in Romanian politics is tragic, though not surprising, and the options for the 2024 parliamentary, local and presidential elections are dire. On the one hand, we have an uncritical appreciation of neoliberalism and the hegemonic West represented by USR and PNL (and UDMR); on the other, we have 10 (!) parties fighting over which can be the most Eurosceptic, Christian Orthodox, racist and fascist of them all, with varying degrees of keenness on the Russian Federation. 

Left over is PSD, a little bit of both, the enduring symbol of economic nationalism, clientelism, nepotism and the bureaucratic status quo. 

The binary between two hegemons and worldviews I mentioned in the introduction seems to preside the political landscape in Romania.

-------

I would argue that the failure of the 1989 transition is not just a political and economic one, but also a failure of the political and historical imagination: a failure to believe that we can exist in a productive in-between, outside of the binary mentioned in the introduction. This ideological void resulted in parties like USR and AUR seeming like the only solution to acute economic and social crises.

It is my core belief, that, as activists and intellectuals, it is our duty to not let the political landscape in our countries become fully polarized between neoliberalism and Western hegemony, and fascism and the Russian Federation. Another world must be possible, a world where the choice is not between the two imperialisms of the Russian Federation and the USA(+EU). 

It has pained me to see many academics and public figures present the West – the EU, NATO and the USA – as the holy grail which will protect us from the Russian Federation in the wake of the war in Ukraine. I have even been to a conference where an esteemed historian acted as a mouthpiece for the EU in a keynote, uncritically presenting pictures of EU leader almost as icons, saviours of the Europeanness of Ukraine. Such poverty of the intellectual and political imagination perpetuates the notion that, as South East Europeans, we have only the sad binary choice between imperialisms, one that is often made for us through the game of geopolitics.

We need to stop accepting this binary and (re)introduce the notion of South East European agency into our academic and political vocabularies. We need political agendas that tackle growing household debt, mass migration into exploitative and precarious jobs in the West, income inequality and lack of trust in democratic institutions – political programmes and visions that take seriously the reality of what it means to live in, for example, Romania.

More broadly, I think we need to start making it believable that to be South East European is not to be the vassal of either the West or Russia, that this is a false choice imposed upon us over the decades and centuries.

What would a world in which post-communist countries stood in solidarity in a non-aligned bloc look like?

What would it mean to think together, share resources, rely on each other, and fight the notion that we are mere geopolitical pawns?

What would it mean to respect our respective dignities as groups that come together autonomously, but also exist in solidarity?

What would it mean to reject the false notion that we can only be safe and prosperous by being exploited by Western corporations and banks?

It is these kinds of questions we must ask of ourselves, of each other, and of the public spheres we are part of.

The role of the intellectual and the activist is to routinely remind the public that another world is possible. If we don’t do that, parties such as AUR occupy the public imaginary with nationalist racist tropes, lying to the public that only racism and nationalism can solve their issues.

To fight this, we must show how non-aligned solidarity between spaces and cultures can be an antidote to imperialisms and exploitation. The toughest struggle is that over commonsense.

17/01/2024