A country of strategic importance but not indispensable, involved in the war effort despite keeping its distance, Romania cannot congratulate itself enough in official discourse for having long foreseen the aggressive plans of Putin’s Russia. As usual, Romanian officials contend themselves with the dangerous illusion that nothing should be changed in their approach to the territory that separates Bucharest from Moscow.
Romania’s “Eastern” diplomacy got entangled in old-fashioned formulas
In fact, Russia’s war in Ukraine has clearly revealed Romania’s absence as a political factor in a number of countries that should normally be targeted by its strategic policy-making at various levels. Although the outcome of the war will dictate, at least in the short-run, the direction of Romania’s policies towards Moldova, Ukraine and Russia, coming up with a genuine “Eastern strategy” is extremely necessary, to say the least. Irrespective of how Putin’s murderous and warring spree ends, the problems generated by his regional strategy in the last decade and a half will continue to leave their mark, regardless of a regime change at the Kremlin. The enclaves of the “Russian world”, as Putin devised them, built on the enduring ruins of the Soviet imperial psychology, will not go away once the people who helped create them are gone. They will continue to manifest themselves, perhaps in a less aggressive manner, but most definitely in some form of resistance, as they are based on the deceitful assumption of the specificity of Russian “traditional values”, which are completely at odds with those of the Western world. Even if the political response of these communities will no longer be coordinated from a political center, the cultural and psychological mechanisms they exploit will continue to exist in their people and manifest themselves vigorously, particularly as these communities will face modernization processes. The dominant ideology on the territories of various enclaves under Russian control or traditionally present in the mindset of Russian speakers everywhere, from Russia to Moldova and Ukraine, the political psychology specific to the “Russian world” cannot be ignored or considered “a civilizational trait”. As for Russia, while most Russians continue to reason within the boundaries of the “Russian world”, although they no longer seem to form a majority, they don’t represent the most active social categories, nor those called upon to help “reconstruct” the country after the war.
One of the constant features of Romanian politics compared to Eastern states, with the exception of Moldova, that particularly warrants a separate discussion, is the genuine obsession of diplomatic “dialogue” in exclusively official rhetoric. Whether it was Ukraine or Russia, Romania contended itself to engaging in a ritualistic foreign policy, drawing on official formats of pseudo-dialogue, whose usefulness is strictly linked to paying official visits and touting them in public using a highly abstracted wooden language. The effective results of such an approach, which was more like hitting your head against a concrete wall over and over again, did not just fail to show. Romania’s very political relevance in this part of Europe has waned substantially. Its current involvement in supporting Ukraine, whilst important, is not born out of a political strategy, but is merely the role Romania was told to play by allies with real global decision-making power.
Romania will be able to gain influence in post-Putin Russia only if it restructures its diplomacy
The logical conclusion is the need to modernize Romania’s foreign policy, starting from its theoretical underpinnings and ending with the institutions meant to promote it. Romania’s EU and NATO membership clearly provides Bucharest with some access to regional and global decision-making, although it does not guarantee its contribution to this process, not even when it comes to issues with immediate consequences for Romania.
A first major step should be a broader and more comprehensive definition of national interests, one that should focus on the idea of democracy and civil liberties, a discourse at the center of which Romania’s national agenda should be more efficiently promoted, together with the goals of the society it addresses.
Such an undertaking would be equally useful for Romania’s domestic policy, all the more so considering we are dealing with the emergence of certain reflex decisions of public authorities, attesting to their weak adherence to this set of values. A very troubling aspect of the new draft laws designed to change the functioning of special services is the absence of any reference to the protection of civil liberties. These laws are merely concerned with “the efficiency” of the security system, as if it had been prevented from operating within optimal parameters until now for these very reasons.
Defined in a broader political context, Romania’s national interests would gain additional importance, which would also dictate a different dynamic for the mechanisms used to promote them. Wherever Romania was or continues to be represented by ambassadors whose career evolved beyond the limits and directions of “traditional” institutions, ambassadors such as Luca Niculescu and Emil Hurezeanu, the focus was not just on the dialogue with the political authorities of these states, but also on a consistent relation with civil society.
Although right now such as a strategy might seem to lack a final purpose, the process of reflection about the need to operate certain changes should start from the assumption of a post-Putin era, one that is certainly approaching. Putin’s removal or withdrawal from the helm of Kremlin politics, irrespective of the political orientation of his replacement, will automatically entail a genuine ideological revolution, as the new power will strive to negotiate a new type of compromise with Russian society. The first consequence will certainly be a re-evaluation of everything happening in Russia today, which will surely be carried out with a critical eye. All of Russia’s European neighbors, including Romania, will be called up when the time comes to pitch in and help modernize the mental and cultural framework of Russian society. Only at the end of a such a modernization process will Russian society be spared the temptation of authoritarian revisionism, for a while at least.
Romania will never become a great power, but it can exert soft power through culture and science
Romania is not a major political or military power, not even an economic one, nor will it likely ever become one. However, it can be far more influential in cultural, intellectual and scholarly terms than it is right now. For such an audacious shift in the orientation of Romania’s foreign policy to take place, the country needs to update its foreign policy tools, helping Romania move past the archaic red-tape of ministerial policy-making. Unfortunately, the Romanian Cultural Institute is entangled in a rather narrow vision of culture, and political oversight and the often biased appointment of people who are charged with administering Romania’s external cultural programs do little to overcome its biting narrow-mindedness. Such a cultural framework, designed in strictly national terms, at best with a local impact, cannot fuel the international flow of ideas and is by no means capable of putting Romania on the map of the world intellectual elite.
In the purely hypothetical situation where Romania wanted to change its approach to promoting its interests worldwide, it would still lack the institutions to make such a change consistent.
Romania urgently needs an agency meant to fund research projects and cultural initiatives bringing together experts and scholars from Romania and other countries where Bucharest has vital interests. Considering there is a European network that already concerns itself with such activities, the initiative might seem redundant. At first glance it may be, but the conceptual orientation of research topics would enable scientific progress in a number of areas where Romania is going around in circles. One Romanian-Russian research project regarding the relations between the two countries in World War I would inevitably bring up the question of the Romanian Treasury, sparing Bucharest the Moscow’s regular surprises, which “discovers” every now and then that it is home to Romania’s treasury. Let alone the fact that this type of scientific cooperation would break up the Russian historians’ monopoly on this issue, moving it further away from the biased approach of the political administration. Eventually, joint research projects funded by Romania could identify a number of areas of cooperation between the two countries’ professional elites, thus shaping up a rather different public perception of Romania compared to the one disseminated by the Kremlin’s propaganda machine for nearly a century. Prior to the Russian military action against Ukraine, which kicked off a process of standardization of society through political policing and radical indoctrination, the Russian intellectual elites enjoyed quite a large amount of freedom in conjunction with the state’s priorities, which the Romanian diplomacy failed to turn to its advantage.
Romania wants a democratic Russia
Engaging in a dialogue with Russian bureaucracy, seeking to alter the way Romania is perceived in this country by using the classical tools of bilateral relations is a useless undertaking. Best-case scenario, it could generate polite statements, without any follow-up. The negative image of Romania in Russia is a phenomenon that has to do with more than just with our country’s Soviet past. The official history of animosities between the two countries started in the second half of the 19th century, expanded during the Russian-Romanian-Turkish war of 1877-1878 and took on a dramatic scale during the World Wars. Despite Stalin’s attempts to culturally reprogram Romanians, the communist period, a time of equally significant strife, did not produce a mutual understanding of the two nations, cultural stereotypes turning out to be remarkably resilient.
With the exception of president Ion Iliescu’s desperate attempt at saving the Warsaw Pact, there is nothing in the history of relations between the two countries in the post-communist era that might have changed the status quo. The question of Bessarabia, often approached at bilateral level both in Moscow and in Bucharest in conflicting and propagandistic terms, could only lead to upholding the antagonistic relationship. Evident as Moscow’s agenda of maintaining the Republic of Moldova in its post-Soviet orbit – particularly using Transnistria as leverage – might have been, the end goal being to consolidate its influence in this country, it was equally clear Romania was incapable of effectively countering the antiquated and old-fashioned propaganda discourse of the “Russian world”. All this time Bucharest has been trying to promote the territorial integrity of the Republic of Moldova using the correct, yet ineffective tools, doing nothing, however, to dispel at least one of the “arguments” used as propaganda by the regime in Tiraspol. A campaign designed to identify the areas where Romania organized massacres and detention centers in Transnistria, more specifically venues of the Holocaust, would most certainly have required some sort of dialogue with Tiraspol authorities, beyond Bucharest. Had that happened, it would have been much easier to keep a lid on the situation, politically speaking.
When examined by historians instead of politicians and propaganda theorists, the shared past might engender certain episodes that are at odds with the common perception. But to reach them, the political agenda behind such initiatives should be relevant for both societies. The more modern Russian society gets, the better the prospects for Romanian-Russian relations, and the higher odds for solving sensitive disputes between the two countries. In order to make itself understood and heard by a society such as Russia’s, Romania needs to know what language to “speak”, based on insight into the functioning mechanisms and responses underlying such a society. Helping cultivate and consolidate democratic processes in the Russian society of tomorrow is a favor we would do ourselves first and foremost. At stake is not just accommodating the next political leaders of Russia. Whether they want to or not, they will govern a society built under Putin, and dismantling the mechanisms of dictatorship and war (which go hand in hand) will require far more resourceful efforts than merely criticizing the man in charge. The Russians will have to make an effort, hopefully being able to absorb their recent history with a critical eye. But it will also take an effort on behalf of all Europeans to act in order to make sure a dictator hopeful will never again take power. As it stands, there is no greater national interest for Romania, when examining relations with Russia, than the democratization of Russian society.
