by Tony Judt
Romania is perhaps the hardest: a place that can only overcome its past by becoming “European,” which of course meant joining the European Union as soon as possible. But there was never any prospect of Romania meeting EU criteria for membership in advance of joining. Thus Brussels is constrained to set aside its insistence that applicant countries conform to “European” norms before being invited into the club. In Romania’s case there is no alternative. Romanian membership will cost Western Europeans a lot of money and will expose the union to all the ills of far-Eastern Europe. In short, it will have been an act of apparent collective altruism, or at least unusually enlightened self-interest.
But without such a willingness to extend its benefits to those who actually need them, the union would be a mockery—of itself and of those who place such faith in it. The mere prospect of joining, however dim, led to improvements in the situation of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania and has strengthened the hand of reformers—without pressure from Brussels, the government in Bucharest would never, for example, have overcome Orthodox Church objections and reformed the humiliating laws against homosexuality. As in the past, international leverage has prompted Romanian good behavior.26 And as in the past, international disappointment would almost certainly carry a price at home.
In 1934 the English historian of Southeastern Europe R. W. Seton-Watson wrote, “Two generations of peace and clean government might make of Roumania an earthly paradise.”27 Today that is perhaps a lot to ask (though it shows how far the country has fallen). But Romania needs a break. The fear of being “shipwrecked at the periphery of history in a Balkanized democracy” (as Eliade put it) is real, however perverse the directions that fear has taken in the past. “Some countries,” according to E. M. Cioran, looking back across Romania’s twentieth century, “are blessed with a sort of grace: everything works for them, even their misfortunes and their catastrophes. There are others for whom nothing succeeds and whose very triumphs are but failures. When they try to assert themselves and take a step forward, some external fate intervenes to break their momentum and return them to their starting point.”28
This essay on the condition and prospects of Romania first appeared in the New York Review of Books in November 2001. It has since been republished in Romania, where it provoked a certain discomfort—not least for the somewhat provocative title of the NYR version: “Romania: Bottom of the Heap.” Among the considerable private correspondence generated by the essay was at least one letter of appreciation . . . from Princess Brianna Caradja (the scantily clad aristocrat described in the opening paragraph).
NOTES TO CHAPTER XV
1 I am deeply grateful to Professor Mircea Mihâies for bringing Plai cu Boi to my attention.
2 For an excellent discussion of Tudor’s politics and a selection of cartoons from Politica and România Mare, see Iris Urban, “Le Parti de la Grande Roumanie, doctrine et rapport au passé: le nationalisme dans la transition post-communiste,” Cahiers d’études, No. 1 (2001) (Bucharest: Institut Roumain d’Histoire Récente). See also Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, “The Return of Populism—The 2000 Romanian Elections,” Government and Opposition 36, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 230-252.
3 For data see The Economist. World in Figures. London: 2001 edition.
4 For an evocative account of life in interwar Bukovina after its reunion with Moldavia in 1920, see Gregor von Rezzori, The Snows of Yesteryear (New York: Vintage, 1989).
5 The infamous prison at Sighet, in the Maramureş region on Romania’s northern border with Ukraine, has been transformed into a memorial and museum. There is full coverage of the suffering of Communist Romania’s many political prisoners, rather less reference to Sighet’s even more notorious role as a holding pen for Transylvanian Jews on their way to Auschwitz. This was not the work of Romanians—the region had been returned to Hungary by Hitler in August 1940—but the contrast is eloquent.
6 “The behavior of certain representatives of the Rumanian army, which have been indicated in the report, will diminish the respect of both the Rumanian and German armies in the eyes of public [sic] here and all over the world.” Chief of Staff, XI German Army, July 14, 1941, quoted in Matatias Carp, Holocaust in Romania: Facts and Documents on the Annihilation of Romania’s Jews, 1940-1944 (Bucharest: Atelierele Grafice, 1946; reprinted by Simon Publications, 2000), 23 n8. There is a moving account of the deportation of the Jews of Bukovina and Bessarabia, the pogrom in Iasi, and the behavior of Romanian soldiers in Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999; first published 1946).
7 See Carp, Holocaust in Romania, p. 42n34, and 108-109. Radu Ioanid accepts the figure of 13,266 victims of the Iasi pogrom, based on contemporary estimates. See his careful and informative The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 86.
8 See Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), an important book.
9 The reference is to the Imperial Roman province of Dacia. Romanian antiquarians claim that Dacian tribes survived the Roman occupation and maintained unbroken settlement in Transylvania; Hungarians insist that when the Magyars arrived from the east in the tenth century the place was essentially empty, with Romanians coming later. For what it is worth, both sides are probably in error. Meanwhile, the Dacia motorworks in 2000 was still manufacturing a Romanian car—the Dacia 1300—familiar to middle-aged Frenchmen as the Renault 12 (first appearance: 1969). The Hungarians have nothing remotely so ancient with which to compete.
10 Whatever the Jewish “problem” was about, it had little to do with real or imagined Jewish economic power. The accession of Bessarabia and Bukovina in 1920 added hundreds of thousands of Jews to Romania’s population. Most of them were poor. The Bessarabian-born writer Paul Goma describes his father’s response to the Fascists’ cry of “Down with the Jews!”: “But how much further down could our little Jew get than the village shopkeeper?” See Paul Goma, My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest (London: Readers International, 1990), 64. Nevertheless, according to Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, founder in 1927 of the League of the Archangel Michael (later the Iron Guard), “The historic mission of our generation is the solution of the Jewish problem.” Codreanu is quoted by Leon Volovici in Nationalist Ideology and Anti-Semitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s (New York: Pergamon, 1991), 63. Codreanu was homicidal and more than a little mad. But his views were widely shared.
11 In 2001 the Hungarian government passed a status law giving certain national rights and privileges to Hungarians living beyond the state’s borders. This has understandably aroused Romanian ire at what some see as renewed irredentist ambition in Budapest; from the point of view of the Hungarians of Transylvania, however, the new law simply offers them some guarantees of protection and a right to maintain their distinctive identity. For a sharp dissection of identity debates and their political instrumentalization after communism, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), notably chapter 3, “Vindictive and Messianic Mythologies,” 65-88.
12 Adrian Năstase, “Europe: la plus-value roumaine,” Le Monde, July 23, 2001.
13 On Sebastian, Eliade, and the anti-Semitic obsessions of Bucharest’s interwar literati, see Peter Gay’s review of Sebastian’s Journal, 1935-1944: The Fascist Years (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000) in the New York Review of Books, October 4, 2001. For a representative instance of Eliade’s views on Jews, see for example Sebastian’s diary entry for September 20, 1939, where he recounts a conversation with Eliade in which the latter is as obsessed as ever with the risk of “a Romania again invaded by kikes” (p. 238). Sebastian’s diary should be read alongside that of another Bucharest Jew, Emil Dorian: The Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary, 1937-1944 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of Ameri
ca, 1982).
14 On Noica see Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), chapter 7, “The ‘School’ of Constantin Noica.” Ionescu is quoted by Sebastian, Journal, 9.
15 Among the most important leaders of the Romanian Party, first in exile in Moscow and then in Bucharest, until she was purged in 1952, was Ana Pauker, daughter of a Moldavian shochet (ritual slaughterer). See Robert Levy, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
16 See the comprehensive analysis by Vladimir Tismaneanu, “The Tragicomedy of Romanian Communism,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 3, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 329-376. Khrushchev, who had little time for Romanians, sought to confine them to an agricultural role in the international Communist distribution of labor; Dej and Ceauşescu preferred to secure national independence via a neo-Stalinist industrialization drive.
17 On the peculiar sadism of prisons in Communist Romania, see Matei Cazacu, “L’Expérience de Pitesti,” Nouvelle Alternative 10 (June 1988); and Lena Constante, The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; first published in French by Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 1990).
18 For the American story, see Joseph F. Harrington and Bruce J. Courtney, Tweaking the Nose of the Russians: Fifty Years of American-Romanian Relations, 1940-1950 (New York: East European Monographs/Columbia University Press, 1991). Even The Economist, in August 1966, called Ceauşescu “the de Gaulle of Eastern Europe.” As for de Gaulle himself, on a visit to Bucharest in May 1968 he observed that while Ceauşescu’s Communism would not be appropriate for the West, it was probably well suited to Romania: “Chez vous un tel régime est utile, car il fait marcher les gens et fait avancer les choses.” (“For you such a regime is useful, it gets people moving and gets things done.”) President François Mitterrand, to his credit, canceled a visit to Romania in 1982 when his secret service informed him of Romanian plans to murder Paul Goma and Virgil Tanase, Romanian exiles in Paris.
19 “The foetus is the socialist property of the whole society” (Nicolae Ceauşescu). See Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Ceauşescu is quoted on p. 65.
20 Romania’s abortion rate in 2001 was 1,107 abortions per 1,000 live births. In the EU the rate was 193 per thousand, in the U.S. 387 per thousand.
21 And Le Corbusier.
22 From a Transylvanian perspective, Bucharest is a “Balkan,” even “Byzantine,” city. I am deeply grateful to Professor Mircea Mihaies, Adriana Babeti, and the “Third Europe” group at the University of Timişoara for the opportunity of an extended discussion on these themes in October 1998. Our conversation was transcribed and published last year, with a generous introduction by Professor Vladimir Tismaneanu, as Europa Iluziilor (Iasi: Editura Polirom, 2000), notably 15-131.
23 R. G. Waldeck, Athene Palace (New York: Robert McBride, 1942; reprinted by the Center for Romanian Studies, Iasi, 1998). The quote is from the reprint edition, p. 10.
24 For Cioran see E. M. Cioran, Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 1779: “Ce qui m’a le plus déprimé, c’est une carte de l’Empire ottoman. C’est en la regardant que j’ai compris notre passé et le reste.” The letter to Ceauşescu is cited by Kathleen Verdery in National Ideology Under Socialism, 133. For Ionescu’s bleak prophecy, see Radu Boruzescu, “Mémoire du Mal—Bucarest: Fragments,” Martor: Revue d’Anthropologie du Musée du Paysan Roumain 5 (2000): 182-207.
25 Note, though, that in 1991 Adrien Năstase (then foreign minister) committed himself to an eventual reunification “on the German model.” Likewise President Ion Iliescu, in December 1990, denounced the “injuries committed against the Romanian people” (in 1940) and promised that “history will find a way to put things completely back on their normal track.” See Charles King, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture (Stanford, Stanford University/Hoover Institution Press, 2000), 149-150. The Romanian-speaking population of destitute Moldova would like nothing better. But Romania just now does not need to annex a country with large Russian and Ukrainian minorities, an average monthly wage of around $25 (when paid), and whose best-known export is the criminal trade in women.
26 Repeal of anti-Jewish laws was the price of international recognition for the newly independent Romanian state in 1881. In 1920 the Versailles powers made citizenship rights for Jews and other non-Romanians a condition of the Trianon settlement. In both cases the Romanian state avoided compliance with the spirit of the agreement, but nonetheless made concessions and improvements that would not have been forthcoming without foreign pressure.
27 R. W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Roumanians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), 554; also cited in King, The Moldovans, 36.
28 E. M. Cioran, “Petite Théorie du Destin” (from La Tentation d’Exister), Oeuvres, 850. The French original reads: “Il y a des pays qui jouissent d’une espèce de bénédiction, de grâce: tout leur réussit, même leurs malheurs, même leurs catastrophes; il y en a d’autres qui ne peuvent aboutir, et dont les triomphes équivalent à des échecs. Quand ils veulent s’affirmer, et qu’ils font un bond en avant, une fatalité extérieure intervient pour briser leur ressort et pour les ramener à leur point de départ.”
CHAPTER XVI
Dark Victory: Israel’s Six-Day War
Thirty-five years ago this summer, in one of the shortest wars in modern history, Israel confronted and destroyed the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, established itself as a regional superpower, and definitively reconfigured the politics of the Middle East and much else besides. Since we are still living with its consequences, the Six-Day War itself seems somehow familiar. Its immediacy was reinforced until very recently by the presence at the head of Israel’s government of one of the generals who played an important part in the victory in 1967, and by the salience of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (occupied in the course of the campaign) in contemporary international politics. The detailed implications of Israel’s lightning victory are etched into our daily news.
In truth, however, 1967 was a very long time ago. Hitler had been dead just twenty-two years, and the state of Israel itself had not yet celebrated its twentieth anniversary. The overwhelming majority of today’s Israeli citizens were not yet born or not yet Israelis. Nineteen years after its birth, the country was still shaped by its origins in turn-of-the-century Labor Zionism. The only leaders whom Israel had known were men and women of the Second Aliyah, the Russian and Polish immigrants of the first years of the twentieth century; and the country was still utterly dominated by that founding generation and its sensibilities. A time traveler returning to Israel in 1967 must traverse not just time, but also space: In many crucial respects the country still operated, as it were, on Białystok time.
This had implications for every dimension of Israeli life. The kibbutzim, curious communitarian progeny of an unlikely marriage of Marx and Kropotkin, dominated the cultural landscape no less than the physical one. Even though it was already clear to some observers that the country’s future lay in technology, in industry, and in towns, the self-description of Israel drew overwhelmingly on a Socialist realist image of agrarian pioneers living in semiautarkic egalitarian communes. Most of the country’s leaders, beginning with David Ben-Gurion himself, were members of a kibbutz. Kibbutzim were attached to national movements that were affiliated with political parties, and all of them reflected, to the point of caricature, their fissiparous European heritage: splitting and re-splitting through the years along subtle doctrinal fault lines.
Political conversation in Israel in those years thus echoed and recapitulated the vocabulary and the obsessions of the Second International, circa 1922. Labor Zionism was subdivided over issues of dogma and politics (in particular the question of Socialist Zionism’s relationship to Communism) i
n ways that might have seemed obsessive and trivial to outsiders but were accorded respectful attention by the protagonists. Laborites of various hues could indulge such internecine squabbles because they had a monopoly of power in the country. There were some religious parties, and above all there were the “Revisionists,” the heirs of Vladimir Jabotinsky and his nationalist followers, incarnated in Menachem Begin’s Herut party (the forerunner of today’s Likud). But the latter were in a permanent minority; and anyway it is significant that Begin and his like were still referred to disparagingly as “revisionist,” as though it were the doctrinal schisms of the early twentieth century that still determined the colors and the contours of Israeli politics.
There were other aspects of Israeli life and Zionist education that echoed the founders’ European roots. On the kibbutz where I spent much time in the mid-1960s, a fairly representative agricultural community in the Upper Galilee affiliated with one of the splinter parties to the left of the main Labor Party (Mapai), the concerns of the early Zionists were still very much alive. The classical dilemmas of applied socialism were debated endlessly. Should an egalitarian community impose sameness? Is it sufficient to distribute resources equally to all participants, allowing them to dispose of these according to preference, or is preference itself ultimately divisive and taste best imposed uniformly by the collective? How far should the cash nexus be allowed into the community? Which resources and activities are communal in their essence, which private?
