Gabriela Adameşteanu - “What has happened to us?” The Rise of Nationalist Sentiments and Xenophobia in the New EU States of Central and Eastern Europe

Moment 0: December 21, 1989 
Romania’s was the first revolution broadcast live, a subject that impressed professional students of journalism so deeply that our live revolution has since entered scholarly curricula around the world. But Dinescu’s tense face still shocks each time the broadcast is aired. The Securitate guards had disappeared from the poet’s gate when the revolution broke out. Shortly after that, Ion Caramitru, the future Minister of Culture, showed up at Mircea Dinescu’s house with a troop of enthusiasts, and the ad hocgroup brought Dinescu to broadcast headquarters, where he was surrounded by Communist apparatchiks, people who arrived from the streets, adventurers, soldiers, and especially Securitate operatives. Time and again, Dinescu’s face expresses the terrible anxieties with which we all lived in those years. The angsts of December 1989 were, without doubt, the most powerful emotions in the life of our community – linked to the spilling of blood: over 1,000 dead, a statistic still unexplained and unpunished. 

Although not a religious person, in announcing the era of liberty, Dinescu used a metaphor I’ll never forget: God has turned his face toward Romania. The nation adopted his phrase. 

Dinescu spoke the words that came to his mouth; nevertheless, his speaking of God on the television of a state that had been demolishing churches up till then landed as a provocation, and it jolted us upright. Formed by an obligatory atheist education but also by a relaxed, domestic form of Orthodox Christianity, I think most Romanians understood the phrase as I did, in a rather neutral sense. In place of God, we could all very easily have put history or destiny or miracle – so that we might have said, it wasluck that turned its face to us. Luck: the concept aligns with our local fatalism. It was as if a miracle unexpectedly released us from suffering and humiliation. 

Nearly all of us were already resigned to the fact that like our parents and grandparents we wound die under communism – under the Ceauşescu dynasty – and the same thing would happen to our children. Generally speaking, in Romania one lived then with a sense of humiliation, the more painful because the other countries in Central and Eastern Europe had gradually found their paths toward liberty while we were sinking in the mud of dictatorial communism on the family plan. Even today, newly released testimony and documents go on confirming the dynastic rumors of that time: Ceauşescu was preparing to establish his son, Nicu, as the president of the country and the leader of the Romanian Communist party. 

I realized, in the years following the revolutions in Eastern Europe, that the West itself had not foreseen the Wall’s coming down – at least the part of the West personified officially by politicians and journalists. I had seen the road from capitalism to communism strewn with prisons and concentration camps. The opposite road, the way back, no one knew. 

What we particularly didn’t have to do was go back in time to re-create a vanished capitalism – as we thought in the first moment of freedom and as many of us still believe, unfortunately. Europe and America had evolved considerably since the moment when the Iron Curtain fell between us. In Romania, where passports were terribly hard to get, professors of foreign languages taught forms of French, English, German, and so on, barely intelligible then (or today) from out-dated, books, relics of the inter-war period, so that right then, when we thought we were prepared to communicate, in fact, we weren’t.

The Spontaneous and Organized Return to the Xenophobic European Culture of the Inter-War Years 
Central and Eastern Europe – along with Romania – didn’t need to hurry back to 1944, 1939, or 1919. They needed to arrive quickly at the mentality, technology and comportment of 1990 – or of today, in the United Europe of 2007. 

Here, I believe, is the key to many errors of the last decade in the East, but especially in Romania, the most isolated country in the Communist Bloc. 

I do not believe that there was a rise in nationalist sentiments and xenophobia after 1990, after the fall of communism, but rather a partial return to the local culture before communism, a culture itself impregnated with European xenophobia from the long history that led up to and included the Second World War. And, without being a partisan of conspiracy theories, I believe that some of the throwbacks were directed by re-invented groups positioned at the conservative extreme, groups led by people who were themselves members of the former Communist regime –manipulators, in other words, who did not want to lose their privileges. 

In Romania, the emblematic character in this domain is Corneliu Vadim Tudor, Ceauşescu’s court poet, Securitate collaborator, and founder of the Greater Romania party as well as the extremist review “Greater Romania / România Mare”. 

There exists a letter, which I published in “Revista 22”, addressed by Corneliu Vadim Tudor in the spring of 1990 to Petre Roman, then prime minister, in which he promises (if he is allowed to publish “România Mare”), to reduce the opposition press to silence, including the intellectuals belonging to the Group for Social Dialogue. 

Vadim was allowed to publish his review, which inundated Romanian public opinion for the length of a decade with dirty and xenophobic accusations, all of which instigated and brought to light an obsolete and embarrassing culture. Even during Ceauşescu’s National Communism, certain Securitate groups specialized, pretty much on the quiet, in the manipulation of racist stereotypes, prejudices, insulting phrases – an imagery dominated by fear and hostility to the foreign, and C.V. Tudor was even then a key player in that domain. Now, after the revolution, all the partially occluded defamations were suddenly liberated and came to the minds and spoke the language of people who had learned them from their parents. 

Spontaneous xenophobia, latent in the Romanian culture and mentality, I insist on underlining, was supported and utilized by groups of former Securitate operatives and members of the former conservative nomenclatura – those who didn’t want to lose their privileges in the new society. And they succeeded in large measure: some are in parliament as deputies, others are corrupt business people, others have landed in prison, and still others have been marginalized. In any segment of a population there exist winners and losers. 

Anti-Semitism without Jews 
This whole structure is best seen, in my opinion, in the matter of Romanian anti-Semitism without Jews. The same may be true in other Eastern countries. The violent, aggressive, anti-Semitic, vile language of the (Iron Guard) Legionnaire publications from before the Second World War was used with great public success at the outset by newspapers of the extreme Right, as it was in “România Mare”, even though the Jewish community had by then been greatly reduced with most of its members having left for Israel. 

In time, without disappearing, the “România Mare” phenomenon (which includes both the party and the publication) has lost amplitude. This is partly due to some reactions from the civil society. It is also due to reactions from successive governments – both civil and governmental reactions being insufficient, in my opinion. Mainly, though, the “România Mare” phenomenon cooled down in the course of lived reality, which annuls and refutes aggressive delirium. 

Anti-Semitism has moved its target, however, from the persona of the Jew to the interpretation of history and the politics of the present. Unfortunately, anti-Semitic stereotypes, especially along historical lines, also circulate today, even in the public space, in the mouths of some influential intellectuals. There are a couple of frequent theses: 1. Communism was brought to Romania by Jews. That’s why Jews are against denouncing Communist crimes. 2. Foundations abroad are run by Jews who do not permit research into the crimes of communism. 

Such ideas were enunciated even at a recent conference about “Anti-communism as a Moral Obligation.” The irony is that I, as a former, anonymous member of the Communist Party, am able to recognize even in the title of this conference, the enduring influence of Communist language. 

A commission of historians under the auspices of President Iliescu elaborated a “Report on the Holocaust in Romania” several years ago. Under communism, the subject of the deportations to Transnistria was not talked about. These deportations involved the Jews of Bucovina and Basarabia (today the Republic of Moldova), territories with which Romania was reunited in 1919 under the Treaty of Paris and which were lost after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, together with northern Transylvania. In the war years under dictator Ion Antonescu, Romania became Germany’s ally and lost a great part of its army on the eastern front between 1940 and 1944. During these years, the Jewish population of the new territories – Bucovina and Basarabia – was taken to concentration camps in Transnistria. The number of the dead amounted to between 200,000 and 400,000. 

Because the Jewish population in the old provinces wasn’t sent to German labor camps even though it suffered anti-Semitic legislation and several pogroms – and also because the information about the Transnistrian concentration camps is insufficiently known – in Romania, the idea that the Jews lived well in Romania before and, of course, after communism still exists. 

Unfortunately, the report on the Holocaust in Romania was insufficiently covered by the media for the Romanian population, which should know its own true history, hidden under successive dictatorships. 

Who are the Heroes? Who are the Traitors? 
I return now to the meeting between Romanian and Hungarian intellectuals that took place between the third and fifth of March 1990 near Budapest. As everyone knows, Romania and Hungary are neighboring countries that dispute possession of Transylvania, a territory that encompasses a largely Romanian population together with Magyars and Germans. It once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

Historically, Transylvania is a territory where ethnic groups engaged in mutual persecution/provocation, largely under the cover of religious promulgation, for Transylvania was the place where Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity met. At the end of the Eighteenth Century, half of the (initially Orthodox) Romanians in Transylvania solved the problem of belonging to a second class group/religion and managed to acquire the right to higher education and civil rights along with awareness of their Latinity by becoming Greco-Catholics. This bow to the predominantly Roman Catholic Magyar culture had the extra advantage of placing the Romanian converts outside the Vatican’s reach. Living exclusively in villages before that time, the Romanian majority had been persecuted and deprived of rights. The Magyars, in their turn, felt persecuted after Transylvania was recognized as part of Romania at the Trianon Conference of 1919. During the last World War, moreover (when the northern half of the Ardeal was given to Hungary as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact), atrocities took place in the Transylvanian zone that left traumas in the memories of both communities. At that time, too, northern Transylvania was stripped of its Jews. The Horthy administration sent the Jewish population to Auschwitz. All these tensions were revved up by Ceauşecu’s National Communism in the 80s. 

It was evident that, while Romania and Hungary escaped from communism in different conditions – Romania in a poor state after the shameful and ruinous Ceauşescu dictatorship, Hungary, much more independent and modern in its life after goulash communism – both countries had to use diplomacy to put out the fires of their historic pasts. 

The struggle for Transylvania was now carried on by means of arguments over historic treaties that purportedly and “scientifically” demonstrated who first set foot in the disputed territory. The Romanians say that they were the original owners in their quality as descendants of the Romanized Geto-Dacian population. The Hungarians claim pride of place because (the Hungarians say) the Romanized population fled out of fear to the south of the Danube when the hordes reached Transylvania. A useless struggle; no one was about to move borders. 

A meeting of the intellectuals of both countries seemed the best road toward conciliation, especially because among the Magyar intellectuals present, several had lived in Romania and had recently migrated to Hungary. Others continued to live in Romania. I specially remember the highly visible figure of Domokos Geza, director of Criterion, the publishing house for minorities. 

What is done at a gathering of this kind? The team issues a joint communiqué, naturally. We started writing it by negotiation. 
At that time, I was terrified if I had to speak in public. I had kept quiet in meetings all my life, my only consistent form of opposition. Moreover, beginning December 21, 1989, as each week went by I came to understand the realities around me in new ways. Now, for the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to see deliberate history in progress, with all its manipulations and inconsistencies. I was the only woman in our group, and I volunteered myself for the post of secretary-typist: it was still the era of the typewriter. Honestly, I wasn’t good for more, which isn’t to say that the rest of my colleagues understood better the way things stood – maybe with the exception of Mircea Dinescu, who has a natural sense of politics, as witnessed by the fact that from that day to this he has maintained relationships with the political upper echelon, without ever having held an administrative post. 

I felt like a typist with access to privileged information. In any event, at a given moment, I heard Dinescu expostulating with Domokos Geza, Dinescu and Geza being the ones who negotiated the communiqué point by point. At that moment of intensification I heard Dinescu say: Come on, Geza, don’t keep insisting on this! Don’t you realize how it will be for us when we return to Romania – you as heroes to your side (which is to say, the Magyar community in Romania) while we as traitors to ours? 

It was a key phrase for what would be a decade long debate. What were the rights of the Magyar minority, and how much autonomy would Transylvania have? The dispute over Transylvania, much utilized by the parties of the extreme right – as, for instance, România Mare – lost steam after the Democratic Union of Romanian Magyars (UDMR) began to participate in the government, no matter the results of the elections, and most specially after Romania became part of EU. 

At just the moment on March 4, 1990 when we arrived at a communiqué well-negotiated between Romanian and Magyar intellectuals, which is to say, just as the communiqué was ready to be transmitted to the representatives of the press, news arrived from Târgu Mureş, Romania. A real inter-ethnic war had broken out there between the equally distributed Magyar and Romanian populations. Television and front page news portrayed a wild scuffle. Suto Andras, a well-known Magyar writer, was wounded. A brutally beaten Romanian was presented by the international press as a Magyar victim, and so on. Self-styled as “Free”, Romanian Television unembarrassedly manipulated information. It would take years to wipe out the shame and frustration of the Târgu Mureş episode. More germane to this narration: former Securitate agents – never lacking in any dispute – xenophobia, and historic resentments had done their work before we had accomplished ours. 

In the following years, considerable evidence of the former Securitate agents’ involvement in the incident came to light. Let me hasten to add, moreover, that a new Romanian Information Service was created right after the conflict at Târgu Mureş. The “new” service had engaged many of its old employees. And the story goes on. Virgil Măgureanu, the chief of this new service had taken a seat on the panel of judges that had condemned Ceauşescu to death. How? Why? Mysteries of the revolution. 

Xenophobia: hard to heal 
Most xenophobic manifestations today are directed against the Rrom minority. In a sense, the gypsy problem is payment for historic guilt, but, of course, the Rroma are the real sufferers. The gypsies were the rulers’ slaves – slaves of the boyars, of the church, left as inheritance or sold, like the Afro-American population in the United States. Slavery was prohibited in Romania in the second half of the Nineteenth Century under pressure of the generation of ’48, composed of young boyars returned from studies in the West. In Romania, however, the freed slaves were not given land. There was no forty acres and a mule. The Rroma remained a poor population, a heteroclite community, partly sedentary, partly migratory, and sometimes enclosed in ancestral rituals. The press has recently announced that there is still a large group of unregistered persons in Romania, and, being unregistered, these people lack civil rights. 

On the positive side, there presently exist several Rrom parties with significant electoral power, scholastic legislation with reverse discrimination – to use an American phrase – as well as very active NGOs. Recently, one of them reacted rapidly and intelligently by chiding President Traian Băsescu for calling a journalist a stinking gypsy (it’s true, in a private conversation with his wife). The press and the Council against Discrimination asked President Băsescu to explain himself, as they did Prime Minister Călin Popescu Tăriceanu who had also committed a racist linguistic slip against the Rroma. At the general level, one finds the Romanian population expressing frustration against the Rroma because infractions by Rroma outside Romania are laid to the account of the Romanians by the foreign press. Ironically, as it turns out, a number of the law breakers are actually non-Rrom Romanians. 

Romanians who work more and more abroad are confronting for the first time systematic, racist attacks against themselves in western countries. An article recently published in a Romanian cultural review points to discriminatory tendencies in discussing Romanians in the Italian press. The article notes that the phenomenon has also been identified in Spain, another country where there is a large temporary Romanian work force. 

Xenophobia is linked to economic frustrations as well as to stereotypes resulting from lazy thinking, and it cannot be totally eradicated. Like an insidious disease, it migrates from one social territory to another. To speak of its manifestations with calm is to fight against it. 

Translated from Romanian by Jean Harris and Constantin Virgil Bănescu.