Vladimir Mitev
Dumitru Borțun holds a PhD in philosophy and is a professor at the Faculty of Communication and Public Relations of the National School of Political and Administrative Studies in Bucharest – SNSPA, where he teaches the courses “Public Discourse Analysis”, “Semiotics. Theories of Language”, “Business Ethics” and “Corporate Social Responsibility”. In 2009, the National Alliance of Romanian Students’ Organizations – ANSOC awarded him with the title of Bologna Professor, awarded to professors who “are appreciated by students, add value to education in Romania and are role models for students”. In 2021, the President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, awarded him the Order of “Cultural Merit” in the rank of “Knight”, in the category of Scientific Research, “in appreciation for the important contribution made throughout his activity to the promotion of Romanian culture and national identity”. In 2023, the Association for Dialogue and Universal Values awarded him the “Peace and Dialogue Award”, for the actions through which he contributed to “the development of dialogue and tolerance in society”.
In this interview, Vladimir Mitev asks Dumitru Borțun how he sees the Constitutional Court’s decision, the Romanian state’s struggle with the legionnaires (far-right activists close to Giurgescu), failure and positive change in contemporary Romanian society. In his answers, Borțun often quotes books and concepts from social theory to give a better explanation. He talks about the inability of the Romanian state to overcome the merger of party and state (in the current situation of two parties, the PSD and the PNL), the retrograde ideas of late socialism that are still alive and being used by Georgescu, and the efforts to challenge this status quo. According to Borțun, Mircea Geoană and the Save Romania Union represent two attempts to challenge the omnipotent rule of the state bureaucracy. And if there is hope, it lies in the NGO sector, in the great potential of Romanian society to change from the bottom up.
Inevitably, the interview touched on the question of Russia in the Romanian mind. Vladimir asked why Romanian-Hungarian relations are so good if the Romanian elites and people view Russia negatively. Bortsun agreed with the observation about Romanian-Hungarian relations, pointing to the opportunism and hypocrisy of Romanian politicians as reasons for this situation.
The interview took place on 8 December 2024.
Mr. Borțun, the first round of the presidential elections took place two weeks ago and surprised everyone. Then in the presidential elections the cumulative result of the sovereignist parties was over 30%. And a few days ago, Romania’s Constitutional Court intervened in the electoral process. It seems that serious and systemic mistakes were made.
If we have to summarize and understand what happened, how do you interpret all these events? What has happened in Romania in the last two weeks?
It is about the balance between the rule of law and democracy, which very few governments or political regimes manage to get right. The rule of law means the supremacy of law. And the application of the law, whatever the situation and whatever the person. We are all equal before the law. Democracy means respect for the will of the majority, made known through the authorized institutions, the main democratic institution being Parliament.
The moment one of these two requirements is disregarded, the scales are tipped and it is to everyone’s detriment. Not to the detriment of some or others. The Romanian Government has been unable to prevent and correct the deviation. The Romanian Government was created by a very strange, bizarre coalition, which people say would have suited President Iohannis, to ensure a quiet mandate. His second mandate was a mandate without political problems, without conflict, without tension. But the result was what I am telling you.
First of all, there are the fascistoid statements, with reference to the Legionary movement of the 1930s, an anti-Semitic movement, or Marshal Antonescu, who was the head of the Romanian state during the military-fascist dictatorship, who ruled Romania in agreement with Hitler. Such laudatory statements were made a long time ago by some presidential candidates; Mrs. Diana Șoșoaca and Mr. Călin Georgescu made them. But the state has not reacted, even though there is legislation prohibiting such manifestations: Government Emergency Ordinance No. 31/2002 on the prohibition of organizations and symbols of a fascist, racist or xenophobic nature and the promotion of the cult of persons guilty of crimes against peace and humanity, Law No. 217 of 23 July 2015 amending and supplementing Government Emergency Ordinance No. 31/2002, and Law No. 157 of 2 July 2018 on some measures to prevent and combat anti-Semitism. The authorized institutions have not done their duty. That means not applying the law. Or to apply it only to certain people and not to others. That is an abdication of the rule of law.
Then, the fact that the elections were reset, the fact that an election timetable was made to suit those in power, is a violation of democracy. Because it was clear that the people who are in charge of Romania are not interested in Romania’s future, they are not interested in the democratic education of the population, they are guided only by their own interests. And so they have cynically trampled democratic principles underfoot in front of the entire population. What does that mean? That you have total contempt both for the people and for democracy. That’s what happened.
This was never going to lead to anything other than this pathetic shambles. First, you let Călin Georgescu stand as a candidate, you don’t notice his slippages and you don’t take any action about the malfeasance that was done behind his back to make him the winner of the first round. And now you are taking belated action, canceling the first round of the presidential election – so belated that in Australia and New Zealand voting had started for the second round in the moment of the Constitutional Court’s decision. And the state cancels the first round! So it’s absurd.
This absurd situation is explained by the fact that the Romanian state is not a functional state. It is a dysfunctional state. It is, as President Klaus Iohannis has called it, a failed state. It was not just a metaphor, in political science there is this concept, ‘failed state’. A failed state is one that cannot fulfill its function. This is very serious for a state.
Why did the Romanian state fail?
It’s because that was the legacy of the Ceausescu regime: a non-functional state. Why? The Ceausescu regime was characterized by the fusion of the state with the party. A single party. Socialist Romania had only one political party, the Romanian Communist Party. We had a state, but the state was simply governed by the party, according to party criteria and by party activists who were not the most competent in the field they were governing. The criteria of a party policy do not coincide with the criteria of a state that is supposed to be the representative of the citizens and represent the general interest. In all official speeches it was said: “state and party politics” or “state and party politics”. The two were always mentioned together, and some institutions had double subordination – state and party; we did not have a Ministry of Culture, but the Council of Culture and Socialist Education, a “party and state body”. There was also the accumulation of dual functions: the president of the General Union of Trade Unions (UGSR) was also the Minister of Labor (!), and the first secretary of the Communist Youth Union (UTC) was the Minister of Youth. Ceaușescu himself held two positions: General Secretary of the PCR Central Committee and President of Romania. At a certain point, the party became more important than the state. Towards the end of the regime, the party had come to be seized by two individuals, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena Ceaușescu. So the Romanian state was at the discretion of the presidential couple, self-proclaimed “geniuses from the Carpathian Mountains”.
Can you imagine the misfortune? The state was dissolved into a party, and the party was concentrated in the hands of the Ceausescu couple. When Ceaușescu and his wife died, so did the Romanian state. And it had to be reinvented. Those who did it were accused of having seized the revolution; in fact, they didn’t seize anything, they filled a staggering power vacuum. With whom? With a “squeeze army”, with what we had to hand. First of all, with former nomenclaturgists; when the world revolted, they turned to their sons, their descendants, and until now, the same Ceausescu principle has been followed, the mixing of state and party. It was also the principle most familiar to the army of state officials. So, yes, our state is still weak today, because its institutions respond to party orders, not to the objective requirements of administering state power; because decision-makers are appointed according to party criteria, not according to the criteria of competence and responsibility. It has gone so far that certain institutions are involved in the ruling party’s election campaign.
The current party-state, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), has infiltrated all public administration institutions – both central and local. Wherever you go, you find the PSD. More recently, after the government alliance with the Liberals (PNL), also the PNL, but less so. Everywhere there is this lid put over civil society, which is called the PSD-PNL alliance, everywhere you bump into their people, their clients, people who depend on them, people who vote with them and who form an oversized administrative class. We have an oversized state apparatus because it is in the interest of the party-state to increase its electorate.
Its electorate consists mainly of state and party functionaries, who work for it and depend on it with their salaries and their lives. That’s why I say that we have a kind of neo-Ceaușism, a Ceaușism without Ceaușescu.
It’s horrible. And depressing. Why is it depressing? Because Ceaușism itself was neo-Stalinism. So we now have today a neo-CeCaucasism, that is to say a neo-Neostalinism. And we know very well that Stalinism is a totalitarian regime, it has nothing to do with democracy.
At the beginning of our discussion, you mentioned that there is an imbalance linked to the rule of law and you described several actors who have contributed to the imbalance. Among them, on the one hand, you mentioned those who praise the legionaries, but also this merged party, which has become a new party-state (PSD-PNL). What is the force, or who are the political or social protagonists that can help restore balance in Romanian society?
NGOs and certain parties which, unfortunately, are not yet in Parliament, because the laws are made in such a way that it is almost impossible for them to enter Parliament. The only reforming party that managed to get through this barrier was the Union Save Romania (USR), which is a new party in the sense that it is not enslaved to this party-state paradigm. It is made up of competent people, smart, educated people who went to school in their own time, who didn’t take their baccalaureate at 40, who didn’t invent their university degrees, who didn’t plagiarize doctoral papers. So there is a healthier human background, made up of people who want to reform Romanian society in the sense of modernizing it and transforming it in the sense of the values of the European Union, that is to say the values of Western civilization. The problem is that these nationalists that I was talking about are lumping them in with everything they find in the ‘demonized West’, including paedophilia and LGBT. And they say that the Union Save Romania is satanic, it is against Christianity. That makes many Romanians who believe them not to vote for USR.
Fortunately, they got into Parliament, they are well off, but unfortunately, they still cannot set the tone in Romanian politics.
The USR leader, Elena Lasconi, made many gestures towards the religious aspect. She wore the cross, said she sees in the family the union between men and women, and so on. But let me contradict you: Mrs. Lasconi was not convincing in some domains of political competence.
Of course, you are right. Once because she does not correspond with the opinion of today’s members of the USR, or at least of the majority. It is a kind of… how shall I put it? In Romanian there’s an expression, “like fly in milk”. So she’s a bit of a bitch in the USR, she was proposed as leader with the idea that it had to be someone who would participate in the presidential elections in a situation of crisis in the party, precisely to pull the party up to get into Parliament. They had no image carrier, they had no message carrier. And they said, “Sir, she’s pleasant, she’s got a nice laugh, she’s got a nice smile, she’s got the words, let’s put her in, she’s a woman, she might win women’s votes, at least feminist votes. Let’s put her at the head of the party”.
But don’t think that Elena Lasconi resonates with the party’s ideas. What’s more, she shows the same hypocrisy that you see in the classical parties, the PSD, the PNL and others that… This hypocrisy is unacceptable. For the sake of winning votes, they’ll say anything. There’s a Romanian saying, “Shake hands with the devil until you cross the lake”. So you shake everyone’s hand. You make the Faustian pact. She made a pact with nationalism and the church for the sake of getting votes from the Orthodox faithful. USR was never such a party. It wasn’t for intertwining politics with religion, but neither did it promote atheism.
The massive priest’s cross worn in public by Elena Lasconi was meant to counterbalance the impression that the USR was against religion. If you remember, when a few USR ministers were sworn into the Cioloș government, when they were sworn in they refused to swear on the Bible. They refused, not because they are atheists or because they have something against the church, but because they are against the mixing of politics and religion, of state and church. In Romania there is another principle that is not respected and is being violated: the separation of state and church. The Constitution separates the state from the church. Unfortunately, this principle is not respected either. Here, the state intervenes everywhere, the church intervenes everywhere. You don’t see the inauguration of a state institution without a priest, for the sake of attracting votes. I mean it’s a form of propaganda to win over the popular classes, which are numerous. But that doesn’t mean there’s a sincere belief in God.
The Constitutional Court’s decision has been compared to a kind of restart of the political game. Do you think it is possible to restart the political system, at least in the sense of the cadres that are put in charge? Because everybody agreed that the parties had very bad cadres for the presidential elections. So do you think that it is possible to renew the political system from within, let’s say maybe with an internal discussion of the political elite?
They are not capable of serious internal discussion. They have always said that they draw conclusions after the elections, that they will analyze the results and draw the necessary conclusions. They have never followed through. They changed 2-3 people at the top of the parties and the rest they did as they knew how. Because, on the one hand, there’s probably a huge shortage of human resources, they have nowhere to choose other people who think differently; on the other hand, I think they are incapable of seeing themselves from the outside. To be able to see yourself from the outside, to analyze yourself in the context of a situation that you perceive in context, from above, you need education, you need culture.
It means that you have to be either an exceptional person in a professional field, where you have this professional experience that makes you think holistically, or you have to be a wise man, a man of great culture. No, there is no such thing in our political class. There have been a few cases of people who entered politics and got out quickly – most of them were actually rejected by the system.
There have been cases where they have gotten themselves into some embarrassing situation so that they can have the pretext to say that they are kicking them out of the party or changing them from their ministerial position, such as the case of Daniel Barbu, an eminent historian, who at one point was minister of culture. He was framed by some guys who linked up with him in the Old Town, you know him very well, and he got angry, had an uncivilized outburst and immediately you see, my goodness, he doesn’t deserve to be minister of culture. Just an example of hindering people who came with a different vision.
Another person of this type is Andrei Marga, former professor at the Babeș-Bolyai University, former rector of this university, former president of the Senate, a great man of culture, of German training, a man who thinks enormously, who has many books, many volumes of the history of philosophy, a man capable of understanding Jürgen Habermas and writing a monograph on him. You realize how capable he is, Jürgen Habermas is difficult to read both by the French and the English, only the Germans understand him. He is very difficult to translate. Andrei Marga was also able to write a whole book on Habermas’ life and work. Well, this man was not allowed to finish an education reform he started as Minister of Education.
And now, recently, when he had a separate opinion on the war in Ukraine, they jumped on him and accused him of all sorts of nasty things, treason, treason against the country, of softness and other things – who? Some individuals who are not even up to his knees academically. Next to him they’re nobody. But they were in the office. One of them, even being in the position of Romania’s Foreign Minister, criticized him for speaking in his own name, as if he had a ministerial function. He had no function.
If I understand correctly, there are different types of elites in Romania, as in many other countries in the region. There are elites formed more in socialist times, when education was better and it was more difficult to complete your education. And on the other hand, there are also new elites, who have graduated from “the school of transition”, so to speak. Are they better or worse?
Mr. Mitev, let’s not delude ourselves. The new elites are in the image of those who select and raise them. There’s not much difference. It’s like a historical curse. Unfortunately, we remain in a paradigm of Romanianism in which we are not dealing with genuine reactions. Neither in terms of democratic reaction, nor in terms of respect for tradition or…
Everything is a fake. That’s why people don’t trust anymore. That’s why 2 million people were able to vote against the system. Unfortunately they didn’t choose the right flag to march under. They have lined up under the banner of Călin Georgescu, who proposes a step back in time. A return to Romanian history.
From a philosophical point of view, this return is a utopia. It cannot happen and, from a political point of view, we have already seen the attempts that have been made, such as in Venezuela and Iran. Iran is suffering under the revolution led by Khomeini who wants to establish the order of the Caliphate of Mecca of 1400 years ago, the code of Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad, in the middle of the 20th century. It led to dictatorship, it led to popular militias, it led to the rule of the country by gangs of illiterate people with Kalashnikovs in their hands. This kind of utopia, that we are turning the world backwards, Hitler in fact, as a state, made a symbolic return to Walpurgia, to Siegfried, to the pre-Christian myths of the Germans. Mussolini made a return to the Empire, to the Roman Republic, he imitated Caesar.
So all these attempts to turn the history of a people back into the past are pathetic. So they found a leader, this Călin Georgescu, who doesn’t see forward, he sees backwards. And he thinks he can restore a legendary Romania, which I’m afraid never existed.
Isn’t this moment when Mr. Trump is coming to the White House and when the government will soon change in Germany as well, a good time for Romania to renew itself. Maybe politically, maybe in other senses. Maybe even in terms of social or economic reforms and so on. Is it not a good time for renewal, i.e. change?
No, it is not. The time is right, but I don’t know who to change. Because you see, this is Romania’s big problem. That this balance between the elite and the people is not always in favor of change. The people don’t want change. The people have this kind of ideology, an autochthonist, sovereignist ideology, because the people are educated by communist propaganda, by the historical movies made by the famous Sergiu Nicolaescu – about Stefan the Great, Mircea the Elder, Mihai Viteazu, about the Dacians and Romans, movies that have built a mythology of the genesis of the Romanian people, a heroic ethnogenesis, all Romanians, educated or not, have seen with their own eyes how the Dacians defeated the Romans, then the Romans conquered Dacia and the wonderful Romanian people was born. This mythology is still in the minds of many Romanians. I have already told you on another occasion, during the 40 years of the communist regime, 8 million people came from the countryside to the city. So, 8 million people who came from a historical and political lack of culture, came to the city where they came across Sergiu Nicolaescu’s movies and communist history textbooks. What to know? They knew that Romanians are extraordinary, they are the salt of the earth, they are brave, they are hospitable, that King Michael betrayed and fled the country with expensive paintings, with riches, all false things given by communist historiography, Ceausescu historiography, to be more rigorous.
So it is difficult to get such a mass of people to vote for a candidate like Mircea Geoană. Mircea Geoană, who is a prepared man, who went to school in his time, who has international relations, who left a very good impression in Washington as Romania’s ambassador to America, who left a very good impression at NATO as deputy secretary general, who is known around the world, would be very good for president of Romania. But who will vote for him? I don’t think anyone in the country knows him. Because we have half the population in the countryside. This is Romania’s problem: the lack of modernity, which manifests itself as a lack of urbanity, a lack of industrialization, a lack of democratic mentality.
Mircea Geoană was the only presidential candidate who said that he supported bringing Romania closer to the Weimar Triangle, i.e. these three countries, France, Germany and Poland, which are now the nucleus of the European Union. But on the other hand, there seemed to have been too many attacks against him. He himself has made some serious mistakes. Was his candidacy unwanted?
He was not wanted. Because he said he wanted to reform the political system. They realized they wouldn’t have the positions they had. They put all their guns on him. They put their guns abjectly. Because they didn’t for one moment commit to his programmatic ideas. They didn’t. He had a social project, he had a published book. He was not allowed to speak whenever he was invited. He was taken up with his brother-in-law who fled the country in pursuit of justice, of his doctoral thesis on whether or not it was plagiarized.
So it’s only these messes that concern his personal and family life. Not the country project. Because the others had no country project. If they had entered into dialogue with Mircea Geoană, they would have been disadvantaged.
There seems to be an oversensitivity in Romanian society to the subject called “Russia”, to the very notion, to the idea of Russia. How well does Romanian society understand what Russia means and how true is it that Russia is always against anything that is good for Romania?
There is a certain exaggeration here in the attitude towards Russia, but I would like to tell you that the historical experience of the Romanian people confirms that Russia has brought them nothing good or almost nothing good. My opinion is that this is not quite so. For example, during the Organic Regulations, in the first half of the first half of the 19th century, when the Russian Federation was in the process of organizing the Russian Federation. XIX (1829-1834), there were important reforms made by Pavel Kiseleff, a kind of governor of the Romanian countries. Then, if you like, I will give you a cultural detail – the French language was brought to Romania as a salon language, a language of bon ton, a cultural language of the elite, by Russian officers, not by the French.
I’ll tell you something else for which many people who think and speak from ideological clichés would accuse me. I am telling you that Soviet literature, which was largely proletcultist, also had an educational role. Educational, moral novels appealed to that generation. I was of a different era, but I found some books in my mother’s library. I know, “A True Man’s Tale”, “How Steel Hardened”, “On the Quiet Don”. They were famous titles in Soviet literature, but they were very educational. I only read Fadeev’s “The Young Guard” about teenagers fighting Nazi occupiers, but that book made me patriotic and made me think about how to serve my country better. So the fact that there was a Soviet literature translated from Russian, now it’s processed negatively, that we were a Russian under occupation. Yes, we were under Soviet occupation, but those novels didn’t do badly, they did well.
Not to speak of the translations of great poets, of Mayakovsky, of Esenin, of Ahmatova, of great writers like Ilia Ehrenburg, who wrote “Is Paris Burning?”. So there were great authors that I got to know thanks to the Soviet occupation. Some Soviet films, like “The Cranes Are Flying”, “Ivan’s Childhood” or “The Potemkin Cruiser” are recognized today as masterpieces of world cinema. So there were not only bad things, there were also good things, but Romanians don’t remember that, and they don’t even remember. When they talk about the Russians, they think of the Soviet occupation and they can’t think otherwise.
If Russia is a negative factor in Romania, why are Romanian-Hungarian relations so good, given that Orban is also accused of being pro-Russian?
Yes, it’s the same hypocrisy and duplicity that I was talking about in Romanian politicians. They are able to get along with anyone just to have advantages. They also got along well with Orban, they have good relations with Budapest, so that they can have peace in their country. Speaking of the UDMR (the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania – the Hungarian minority party – note of the translator). The UDMR is a kind of Pepelea’s nail of Budapest in Romania. So, if they get angry with us, the UDMR activates and starts demanding territorial autonomy.
If I have noticed correctly, Romanian foreign policy elites, at least with whom I sometimes interact, believe that Romania should play a more important role in the region. Why is this not happening? And who are, in your opinion, the politicians, the leaders, who can achieve such an increase in Romania’s importance outside the island that Romanians talk about, “a Latin island in a sea of Slavs”?
We don’t have the people. During Ceausescu’s time, when there was a Romanian foreign policy, we had some personalities in foreign policy. I’ll give you the example of Mircea Malița. He was a leading mathematician who left his mark on world mathematics. He was also a philosopher. He authored many volumes of wisdom that educated the masses, for which he also received the Writers’ Union Prize (1975); he published a series of volumes entitled “Grey Gold”, which refer to the human mind, to gray matter, to the brain, and which talk about how Romania could and should look in the future, up to the year 2000. So he was a man with a project, he had a project for society. A man of extraordinary diplomacy, which is why Ceausescu appointed him our ambassador to the United States. So such a man worked for Romanian diplomacy. He was also the Minister of Education (1970-1972), a position in which he did many good things, at that time quite visionary: he promoted the study of Western foreign languages, the study of computer science, the development of mathematics and computer science departments, he supported the introduction of the concept of “management” instead of “scientific management”. Such a man was a personality who could represent the country, who could carry weight when he entered somewhere and who could negotiate in Romania’s favor. At present, we do not have such a foreign minister, nor are the teams in the Foreign Ministry sufficiently prepared for diplomacy and, above all, for what is called ‘public diplomacy’, i.e. a kind of international public relations, which promotes the country’s image by all means, in all ways.
According to Călin Georgescu, Mircea Malița was his mentor…
He boasts. If he had been his mentor, Călin Georgescu would not be quoting legionaries now. Pardon me! He’s bragging because he was around him for who knows how long. It’s easy to say, “When I used to leave his place, every time I walked out the door, he told me to be dignified”. Bravo, sounds nice. But that implies that he had been to Mircea Malița’s 200 times and every time he was called that. Maybe it was only twice. And each time he told him to be dignified. Maybe once he went to take the forgotten card to his office, another time he went to bring an envelope. Excuse me. Excuse me. The mentoring you’ve had shows in other ways: in your thinking, your cognitive style, your verbal style. Georgescu has only the style of dress left. Călin Georgescu’s style of speaking, of thinking, of behaving doesn’t look like an apprentice of Mircea Malița. Malița didn’t talk like that, with short and sententious sentences: “Water is not taxed. Water is from God. God is not taxed”. Malița would not have summarized his project for society in three words, “Food, Water, Energy”. That’s not a national project, it’s a slogan.
Let’s talk a bit about the fight against legionnaireism, which is now becoming topical. Isn’t it a very present trend throughout Romanian society? The PNL, for example, had a candidate for mayor of Bucharest who was a legionnaire. The Romanian Orthodox Church canonized three legionary saints this year. Shamd. So how far will these measures that are being taken now, in the context of the social reaction to the rise of legionnaireism, be applied? How much will they succeed?
Yes, unfortunately, I’m not optimistic about that. Because we still can’t figure out the proportion of those who actually think like neo-Lionists. It’s very hard for us to tell. My impression, just an impression for now, is that there are people in all state institutions who think like that. And that Georgescu would not have been in pole position in the electoral campaign if he had not benefited from the complicity of some state institutions, including secret services. I am convinced that there are people in the secret services who think like that, because that is how they were educated under Ceaușescu, and Georgescu thought in this nationalist paradigm.
After the Revolution, Adrian Păunescu recounted that in a private conversation with Ceaușescu he mentioned a poet, Radu Gyr, who had been a legionary. Păunescu, circumspect, said to Ceaușescu: “He was talented, but he was a legionary”. The dictator replied: “Hey, Paunescu, remember from me: among the legionaries there were also great patriots”. So Ceaușescu had sympathy for the “great patriots” of the legionary movement; he was pushing the criminals aside and only the “great patriots”, i.e. the nationalists, to the fore. This shows that, in fact, the cultural and/or ideological paradigm in which the Romanian dictator thought and acted was nationalist, autochthonist, sovereignist. The secret services were also trained in the same paradigm
Many may consider this as normal: “it’s good, because intelligence officers must be great patriots, to serve the interests of the state”. This is true, but not in this legionary way. Because in the legionary way of thinking and acting, it was irrational, it was… the legionaries had a death cult and they ended up in murder. I am afraid that a victory of a character like Georgescu would bring such people to the surface, people who think like that would appear from who knows where and who would pluck up courage, would come out and organize themselves, perhaps become a movement and state policy. So my fear, and that of many people who know the history of Romanians in the last century, stems from the fact that we still do not know how many there are. I, for one, suspect that there are many more than people think.
As it was, in fact, in 1941. As the historian Aurică Simion points out in his book “The Political Regime in Romania between September 1940 and January 1941”, published in 1976, in the famous rebellion of January 1941, the Legionnaires were supported by state institutions, by state employees who sympathized with them. The Legionnaires could not have reached the Royal Palace square and fired on the palace if they had not been supported along the way, since they left from different parts of Romania, when they boarded the train with their weapons and the Romanian Railroad officials turned a blind eye, took them to Bucharest by special trains passing through stations with the signal on green and so on. They had the collaboration of people from CFR (Romanian state-owned railroad company – note of the translator), police, gendarmerie, secret services. Do you see the danger?
Georgescu is accused of being linked to Russia. Can we say that within the Romanian services there is a struggle going on between the West and Russia, to put it simply, or is it another division? How would you define this rift?
You are right. The two can overlap. Those who are for autochthonism and patriotism-nationalism are with Russia, because the paradigm of thinking is the same. It is the Orthodox paradigm, which holds that we are the guardians of the true faith, and the West, where there is the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Church, is demonized. The two churches are considered to have betrayed the “true faith” (orthódoxos = righteous faith) and then they enjoy very well with this mentality of Mother Russia and Great Romania and some such things that are part of symbolic thinking; the national-orthodox paradigm stands on a tacit philosophy, which not all its followers realize, but which is decoded by the sociologist Ilie Bădescu, a leading representative of it: that the nation is above historical evolution, it is a kind of universal constant: whatever happens, the nation remains the nation. It is a constant of historical evolution and it is above history, it is anhistorical. Ethnos is above anthropos, ethnos is eternal and defines us as a people.
This idealization is to put the nation next to God, who is also eternal and unchanging (he doesn’t change either). Theologians say that one of the gravest sins in Christianity is phyletism – making a false God out of the nation and putting him next to the living and true God. That’s when you’ve slipped from the Word of God, which counts as his children all people who believe in him and in the Son, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Now, this is what Russian nationalists do, this is what Romanian nationalists do, and probably Serbian, Bulgarian and Greek nationalists do, because the paradigm is the same: the interweaving of ethnicity with faith, the interweaving of the national ideal with the ideal of salvation.
What do you think is the name of the largest place of worship in Romania, which was recently inaugurated? The Cathedral of the Salvation of the Nation. The policy of the Orthodox Church has always been based on this faith and has always been intertwined with the history of these peoples. Indeed, at one time it was a factor of ethnic identity, it helped to form the national consciousness of these peoples and participated in their struggle for national liberation. But that moment has passed, and the Orthodox churches have been left with the pretense that without them these peoples are lost. Reason to participate, more or less directly, in political life.
Don’t you think that when Trump is back in the White House, exactly this current you speak of will be on the rise? It seems to me to fit ideologically?
Yes! That’s what Western analysts are saying, talking about the “Trump effect”.
What will this effect mean for Romania?
It will mean winning elections if you make them free. That’s why Brussels is careful to hang its sledgehammer over us like a sort of sword of Damocles, yes? Because that is what happened with the annulment of the elections. To be clear, it was a very tough intervention from Brussels. The EU leaders said to the Romanian leaders, “Do whatever it takes and stop them.” “Well, yes, but the law doesn’t allow us, we are violating the Constitution.” “Break it!”.
I need to say why. Because Brussels’ fear is seen differently. It’s not like us, that they lose their seats. For them, it’s the fact that it weakens the eastern flank of the European Union, which is based on a certain paradigm – global market, transnational corporations, Romania one of its markets. They also have NATO military bases here, for a possible reply to Russia. And what does that mean? Let some sovereignists come and say that they want to renegotiate the contract with the West and that they do not want war in Ukraine? They were immediately afraid of this. So they thought it was in the European interest. Ours think it in the interest of a class – a political class.
Do you expect then that if Trump and the European Union will have different interests in Romania, that an internal conflict in Romania will escalate?
That is happening. A confrontation is taking place in Romania between the European Union and …
Is this going to last throughout Trump’s presidency, or how?
I don’t know. I don’t know how long it will last. But in any case, the conflict has manifested itself here first, because Romania is the first state in the European Union to have an election. That is why Romania is the first state to experiment. It is the testing ground. It is here that this battle between the localist, isolationist current and the universalist, globalist current of the European Union is being tested.
Good. Let us conclude with this. Let’s say that there are two hypotheses – one positive and one negative – about what’s coming in Romania. Can you describe the positive version of what is coming? Could the negative version follow?
I don’t know. It’s hard for me to say. The positive hypothesis would be to finally have a democratic regime and to respect the rule of law. Romania would be run by some wise people, who really think democratically, not just pretending, to put an end to hypocrisy. Because hypocrisy comes from the fact that we do not apply the law. If we don’t apply the law, we pretend that we are against anti-corruption, but in fact we are saving our relatives, and Dragnea wanted to save himself by changing the laws of justice. So I hope we will get rid of these misleading speeches. If we move on to the correct application of the law, we also give up hypocrisy. If we give up hypocrisy we can build a solid democracy. More incipient, but genuine. Not like now, genuine and inauthentic. .
In Romania, we are living in the midst of a “sham democracy”. This is the title of a book published in the inter-war period by Mattei Dogan, a French political scientist of Romanian origin, who has a book, “Democrația mimată”, about the history of inter-war democracy in Romania. And he shows that it wasn’t really democracy, it was a “velvet dictatorship”. This is what the regime in Romania is now. That’s why it’s serious when I wasn’t surprised by these measures to cancel the elections, because it’s exactly the same way of thinking and acting. And it is not by chance that people voted for Georgescu. They revolted against hypocrisy, theft and lies, manipulation and demagogy; they were outraged by the feeling that they were being treated as second-class people, that they were being used, despised and lied to.
If we take out the neo-legionnaires, who seized the moment and who are not in the majority, we see that most of those who voted for Georgescu voted against the system. It is a hypocritical, lying, selfish system, which does not think about people, it only thinks about itself and its servants and which has driven 4-5 million Romanians out of the country, who left in search of work, but not only that: many Romanians emigrated out of moral revolt, out of anger at a deaf and dumb system which does not hear them and does not speak to them.
Okay, let me ask you again: who is this social force or segment of society that can initiate and achieve change?
NGOs. I tell you, Mr. Mitev, I walk around the country quite a lot and I see what is going on. I meet all kinds of people and I see before my eyes encouraging actions, activities and trends. It’s incredible the strength of Romanian society from the grassroots. It has an extraordinary force of rebirth, of reorganization.
It seems that Romanian society has reached a stage in its historical evolution where a bottom-up modernization can be triggered, unlike the one triggered by the revolutionary governments of 1848, which thought that they could modernize the three Romanian countries from top to bottom – a project that has not yet been completed. I think we need to be patient a little longer, because every society has a learning curve, a development curve, so Romanian society can also eventually manifest itself so strongly that it can stop the bureaucratic and police state effusions. Our state is a bureaucratic, i.e. anti-social state, which often acts against civil society, against its citizens. It is friendlier to transnational corporations than to its own citizens. Bureaucracy is, in fact, a self-empowering system that functions only for its own sake, only for itself.
The bureaucratic ethos was defined by the American sociologist Wright Mills: it is the mentality for which people are turned into figures. Bureaucrats and technocrats do not see the human problem behind a technical problem. They only see the numbers in columns and rows. If you close the table, they are satisfied.
That’s the bureaucratic ethos. You lose sight of the man. This kind of leadership of society can be counterbalanced by these people who work in NGOs. The NGO-ist is a very different human type, very different from the politician. He is a man who puts his heart into what he does and really believes in the cause he is fighting for.
Photo: Dumitru Borțun (source: YouTube)
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