by Tony Judt
If Romania has hardly begun to think about its role in the Holocaust, this is not just because the country is a few years behind the rest of Europe in confronting the past. It is also because it really is a little bit different. The project to get rid of the Jews was intimately tied to the long-standing urge to “Romanianize” the country in a way that was not true of anti-Semitism anywhere else in the region. For many Romanians the Jews were the key to the country’s all-consuming identity problem, for which history and geography were equally to blame.
Peasants speaking Romanian have lived in and around the territories of present-day Romania for many centuries. But the Romanian state is comparatively new. Romanians were for many centuries ruled variously by the three great empires of Eastern Europe: the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman. The Turks exercised suzerainty over Wallachia (where Bucharest sits) and Moldavia to its northeast. The Hungarians and latterly the Habsburgs ruled Transylvania to the northwest and acquired the neighboring Bukovina (hitherto in Moldavia) from the Turks in 1775.
The Russians for their part pressed the declining Ottoman rulers to turn over to them effective control of this strategic region. In 1812, at the Treaty of Bucharest, Tsar Alexander I compelled Sultan Mahmud II to cede Bessarabia, then part of eastern Moldavia. “Romania” at this point was not yet even a geographical expression. But in 1859, taking advantage of continuing Turkish decline and Russia’s recent defeat in the Crimean War, Moldavia and Wallachia came together to form the United Principalities (renamed Romania in 1861), although it was not until 1878, following a Turkish defeat at Russian hands, that the country declared full independence, and only in 1881 was its existence recognized by the Great Powers.
From then until the Treaty of Versailles, the Romanian Old Kingdom, or Regat, was thus confined to Wallachia and Moldavia. But following the defeat of all three East European empires in World War I, Romania in 1920 acquired Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania, as well as part of northern Bulgaria. As a result the country grew from 138,000 square kilometers to 295,000 square kilometers, and doubled its population. The dream of Greater Romania—“from the Dniester to the Tisza” (i.e., from Russia to Hungary) in the words of its national poet Mihai Eminescu—had been fulfilled.
Romania had become one of the larger countries of the region. But the Versailles treaties, in granting the nationalists their dream, had also bequeathed them vengeful irredentist neighbors on all sides and a large minority population (grown overnight from 8 to 27 percent) of Hungarians, Germans, Ukrainians, Russians, Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Gypsies, and Jews—some of whom had been torn from their homelands by frontier changes, others who had no other home to go to. Like the newly formed Yugoslavia, Romania was at least as ethnically mixed as any of the preceding empires. But Romanian nationalist leaders insisted on defining it as an ethnically homogeneous nation-state. Resident non-Romanians—two people out of seven—were “foreigners.”
The result has been a characteristically Romanian obsession with identity.8 Because so many of the minorities lived in towns and pursued commerce or the professions, nationalists associated Romanianness with the peasantry. Because there was a close relationship between language, ethnicity, and religion among each of the minorities (Yiddish-speaking Jews, Catholic and Lutheran Hungarians, Lutheran Germans, etc.), nationalists insisted upon the (Orthodox) Christian quality of true Romanianness. And because Greater Romania’s most prized acquisition, Transylvania, had long been settled by Hungarians and Romanians alike, nationalists (and not only they) made great play with the ancient “Dacian” origins.9
Today the Jewish “question” has been largely resolved—there were about 760,000 Jews in Greater Romania in 1930; today only a few thousand are left.10 The German minority was sold to West Germany by Ceauşescu for between 4,000 and 10,000 deutschmarks per person, depending on age and qualification; between 1967 and 1989, 200,000 ethnic Germans left Romania this way. Only the two million Hungarians (the largest official minority in Europe) and an uncounted number of Gypsies remain.11 But the bitter legacies of “Greater Romania” between the world wars stubbornly persist.
In a recent contribution to Le Monde, revealingly titled “Europe: la plus-value roumaine,” the current prime minister, Adrian Năstase, makes much of all the famous Romanians who have contributed to European and especially French culture over the years: Eugène Ionescu, Tristan Tzara, E. M. Cioran, Mircea Eliade . . . 12 But Cioran and, especially, Eliade were prominent intellectual representatives of the Romanian Far Right in the 1930s, active supporters of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s Iron Guard. Eliade at least, in his mendaciously selective memoirs, never even hinted at any regrets. This would hardly seem a propitious moment to invoke him as part of Romania’s claim to international respect.
Năstase is not defending Eliade. He is just trying, clumsily, to remind his Western readers how very European Romania really is. But it is revealing that he feels no hesitation in enlisting Eliade in his cause. Eliade, like the Jewish diarist Mihail Sebastian, was an admirer and follower of Nae Ionescu, the most influential of the many interwar thinkers who were drawn to the revivalist mysticism of Romania’s Fascists.13 It was Ionescu, in March 1935, who neatly encapsulated contemporary Romanian culturalparanoia: “A nation is defined by the friend-foe equation.” Another follower was Constantin Noica, a reclusive thinker who survived in Romania well into the Ceauşescu era and has admirers among contemporary Romania’s best-known scholars and writers. Noica, too, suppressed evidence of his membership in the Iron Guard during the thirties.14
This legacy of dissimulation has left many educated Romanians more than a little unclear about the propriety of their cultural heritage: If Eliade is a European cultural icon, what can be so wrong with his views on the un-Christian threat to a harmonious national community? In March 2001, I spoke about “Europe” in Iasi to a cultivated audience of students, professors, and writers. One elderly gentleman, who asked if he might put his question in Italian (the discussion was taking place in English and French), wondered whether I didn’t agree that the only future for Europe was for it to be confined to “persons who believe in Jesus Christ.” It is not, I think, a question one would get in most other parts of Europe today.
The experience of Communism did not change the Romanian problem so much as it compounded it. Just as Romanian politicians and intellectuals were insecure and paranoid and resentful about their country’s place in the scheme of things—sure that the Jews or the Hungarians or the Russians were its sworn enemies and out to destroy it—so the Romanian Communist Party was insecure and paranoid, even by the standards of Communist parties throughout Eastern Europe.
In this case it was the Communists themselves who were overwhelmingly Hungarian or Russian or/and Jewish.15 It was not until 1944 that the party got an ethnic Romanian leader, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej— and one of the compensatory strategies of the Romanian Communists once installed in power was to wrap themselves in the mantle of nationalism. Dej began this in the late fifties by taking his distance from the Soviets in the name of Romanian interests, and Ceauşescu, who succeeded him in 1965, merely went further still.16
This led to an outcome for which the West must take some responsibility. Communism in Romania, even more under Dej than Ceauşescu, was vicious and repressive—the prisons at Pitesti and Sighet, the penal colonies in the Danube delta, and the forced labor on the Danube-Black Sea Canal were worse than anything seen in Poland or even Czechoslovakia, for example.17 But far from condemning the Romanian dictators, Western governments gave them every encouragement, seeing in Bucharest’s anti-Russian autocrats the germs of a new Tito.
Richard Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit a Communist state when he came to Bucharest in August 1969. Charmed by Nicolae Ceauşescu during a visit to Romania in 1978, Senator George McGovern praised him as “among the world’s leading proponents of arms control”; the British government invited the Ceauşescus on a state visit in the same year; and as late as September 19
83, when the awful truth about Ceauşescu’s regime was already widely known, Vice President George Bush described him as “one of Europe’s good Communists.”18
National Communism (“He may be a Commie but he’s our Commie”) paid off for Ceauşescu, and not just because he hobnobbed with Richard Nixon and the Queen of England. Romania was the first Warsaw Pact state to enter GATT (in 1971), the World Bank, and the IMF (1972), to get European Community trading preferences (1973) and U.S. most-favored-nation status (1975). Western approval undercut Romanian domestic opposition, such as it was. No U.S. president demanded that Ceauşescu “let Romania be Romania.”
Even if a Romanian Solidarity movement had arisen, it is unlikely that it would have received any Western support. Because the Romanian leader was happy to criticize the Russians and send his gymnasts to the Los Angeles Olympics, the Americans and others said nothing about his domestic crimes (at least until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, after which the West had no use for an anti-Soviet maverick dictator). Indeed, when in the early eighties Ceauşescu decided to pay down Romania’s huge foreign debts by squeezing domestic consumption, the IMF could not praise him enough.
The Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceauşescu’s freedom of maneuver. To increase the population—a traditional Romanianist obsession—in 1966 he prohibited abortion for women under forty with fewer than four children (in 1986 the age barrier was raised to forty-five). In 1984 the minimum marriage age for women was reduced to fifteen. Compulsory monthly medical examinations for all women of childbearing age were introduced to prevent abortions, which were permitted,if at all, only in the presence of a party representative.19 Doctors in districts with a declining birth rate had their salaries cut.
The population did not increase, but the death rate from abortions far exceeded that of any other European country: As the only available form of birth control, illegal abortions were widely performed, often under the most appalling and dangerous conditions. In twenty-three years the 1966 law resulted in the deaths of at least ten thousand women. The real infant mortality rate was so high that after 1985 births were not officially recorded until a child had survived to its fourth week—the apotheosis of Communist control of knowledge. By the time Ceauşescu was overthrown, the death rate of newborn babies was twenty-five per thousand and there were upward of 100,000 institutionalized children— a figure that has remained steady to the present. At the end of the twentieth century, in the eastern department of Constanta, abandoned, malnourished, diseased children absorb 25 percent of the budget.20
The setting for this national tragedy was an economy that was deliberately turned backward into destitution. To pay off Western creditors, Ceauşescu obliged his subjects to export every available domestically produced commodity. Romanians were forced to use 40-watt bulbs at home so that energy could be exported to Italy and Germany. Meat, sugar, flour, butter, eggs, and much more were rationed. Fixed quotas were introduced for obligatory public labor on Sundays and holidays (the corvée, as it was known in ancien régime France). Gasoline usage was cut to the minimum and a program of horse-breeding to substitute for motorized vehicles was introduced in 1986.
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.21 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.22
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.”23 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.”24
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 independen
t state of Moldova), and today only C. V. Tudor is demanding it.25 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 make “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.