Romania and the European Union

How the weak vanquished the strong

Tom Gallagher

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719087455
• eBook ISBN: 9781847797131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Romania's predatory rulers, the heirs of the sinister communist dictator Ceauescu, have inflicted a humiliating defeat on the European Union. This book discusses policy failures in the areas of justice, administrative and agricultural reform and shows how Romania moved backwards politically during the years of negotiations.

1

The EU discovers Romania

Romania first made official contact with the European Economic Community (as it then was) at the height of the Cold War. In 1973 it managed to obtain preferential trading status from the EEC. This was long before Brussels established any formalties of this nature with other ‘People’s Democracies’ of Eastern Europe.¹ Geopolitical concerns motivated the EEC in its relations with Romania. It was a communist state, indeed a dogmatic one, modelled in its later stages on North Korea. But it was also a maverick one which appeared to have become semi-detached from the Soviet-led institutions of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon. Security issues would shape the relationship to an even greater extent in the late 1990s and beyond. Both under Nicolae Ceauşescu and most of his post-communist successors, the Romanian state had not dissimilar goals in relation to the EEC and later the EU. It wished to strengthen its international legitimacy by drawing closer to Brussels, acquire considerable economic benefits and strengthen its grip on the population at home. Before 1989, there was no interest whatsoever in wishing to transform state and society on the EU model (which was encapsulated in the 1993 Copenhagen criteria) and surprisingly little after 2000 when Romania found itself negotiating for full membership. Most of the time, Romania’s rulers had a clearer understanding of what they wished to obtain from the EU than vice versa. Throughout the long bilateral relationship, the EU really only engaged with Romania through a narrow political elite which had an exploitative relationship with much of the rest of society. This proved to be a severe handicap which prevented the EU from acquiring an understanding of Romanian realities outside the corridors of power.

In the 1980s, Romania–EU relations declined as the Ceauşescu regime, in its last dark phase, became deeply repressive and idiosyncratic.² In April 1989, the EU suspended its trade agreement with Romania because of human rights abuses.³ Within a year Ion Iliescu was well on the way to becoming the undisputed architect of post-communist Romania. He had been a contemporary of Mikhail Gorbachev’s at Moscow University in the early 1950s and, after a decade as President of Romania (1990–96, 2000–04), showed no sign of wishing to relinquish influence in his own party. It had tired of his paternalism and readiness to intrigue against younger successors but in his absence was finding it hard to maintain its national influence.

Iliescu and his team were hopeless administrators unable to accomplish the modernisation of their country but they were skilful masters of manoeuvre, able to preserve the interests of the party and state bureaucracy in times of unexpected change. Iliescu, by grabbing the reins of power from the dictator who had marginalised him in the 1970s and then establishing a successor regime, had shown political abilities of a high order. He and other second-ranking officials of the state and Romanian Communist Party (PCR) came to prominence just over a week after the eruption of unrest in the western city of Timişoara on 16 December 1989. Once it spread rapidly to Bucharest and other large cities, involving large numbers of people and producing a confused but violent response from the dictator’s arsenal of repression, Ceauşescu’s fate was sealed. Three days after fleeing the capital with Elena, his wife and co-ruler, both of them were shot in an improvised trial ordered by Romania’s provisional rulers on 25 December 1989. This sacrifice was meant to atone for their grotesque catalogue of misdeeds during the previous quarter of a century when Romania had become synonymous with their totalitarian exercise of power. They became the official scapegoats for a repressive system whose survival had depended on the active participation of millions of other large and small cogs in the dictatorial wheel.

Ion Iliescu’s first task was to restore order and establish the authority of the new group exercising power over the state bureaucracy and the sprawling intelligence services. In theory, there was no need to bother about the 3 million-strong Romanian Communist Party. It had been dissolved in one of the first acts of the National Salvation Front (FSN), the political vehicle which would take Romania into a new and uncertain political era. Indeed Romania was the only former satellite state where no successor to the Communist Party emerged. Instead, the FSN used the infrastructure, resources and personnel of the PCR to launch its own bid for power. It acquired vital popular endorsement in elections held on 20 May 1990, less than 20 weeks after the violent transfer of power. The harsh conditions of life which had been the norm during the dictatorship’s last years were relaxed by flooding the shops with consumer goods which had previously been exported in order to pay off the country’s foreign debt. But even if the first of many such populist gestures by Iliescu had not been made, it is likely that he would have won a mandate. The bulk of the population was defined by residual communist attitudes. This was inevitable in what had been a fully regimented society, one in which the regime intruded deep into the private lives of citizens and had insisted on public conformity. The 20 May result, which led to Iliescu being elected President with 85% support in a massive turnout, was challenged by civic activists and the remnants of pre-1945 parties. These protests were suppressed with considerable violence in June 1990. It was a sign of how ruthless Iliescu was prepared to be in order to shape the transition Romania was embarking on around a limited agenda of change. A procedural democracy would be permitted to take shape provided the interests of the old structures which had regrouped at the end of 1989 were not fundamentally affected. Iliescu was prepared to break his own rules when he in turn used violence to get rid of a rival who appeared to threaten his hold on power. In September 1991 the miners who had acted as a praetorian guard to crush civic protests in Bucharest in the summer of 1990 were summoned back to the capital to drive Prime Minister Petre Roman from office. By now, groups steeped in the ideological and institutional heritage of communism saw Iliescu and the FSN as providing them with a comfortable life insurance policy. Not only would they not need to account for their past sins but they could fully expect to prosper if the regime managed to consolidate itself. In 1991, the Parliament adopted a law on national security, sealing most of the Communist Party archives indefinitely. So there appeared scant likelihood that figures compromised by their ignoble conduct before 1989 would ever have to account for their crimes.

Iliescu and the FSN devised a new Constitution under which the President enjoyed more power than in any other former People’s Democracy. His authority extended to controlling senior appointments in the justice system so that the separation of powers which enabled the judiciary to operate independently from the executive was set aside. State institutions were given a makeover without, in most instances, any effort being made to increase their efficiency, or their accountability to anyone other than the ruling group. Some actions by Iliescu suggested that he was slow to assume that the West had emerged on top in the long-running contest with the Soviet Union. In April 1991, Romania became the only former Moscow satellite to sign a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union. It gave Moscow an effective right of veto over any Romanian alliance with a Western country. If it had not been annulled by the collapse of the Soviet Union six months later, it might have placed Romania more firmly in the Soviet sphere of influence than it had been in Ceauşescu’s time.⁴

Iliescu and his party devised the institutional architecture of post-communist Romania without forming pacts with the opposition in order to bestow legitimacy on the changes made. The National Peasant and Christian Democratic Party (PNŢCD), which would be the largest party after 1996, when Iliescu lost office, actually boycotted the 1991 referendum on the new Constitution in protest at it being a vehicle to consolidate FSN rule. Iliescu and the Party of Romanian Social Democracy (PDSR) went down to defeat in 1996 elections against a coalition of all their opponents barring the ultranationalists. The post-communists were penalised by voters for failing to honour their promise of offering social protection to vulnerable sectors of the population, the undertaking largely responsible for their earlier electoral successes. Runaway corruption and the incompetence of the 1992–96 government, led by Nicolae Văcăroiu, were impossible to conceal. An outspoken independent press, the main expression of the cautious liberalisation which gathered pace in the 1990s, exposed the shortcomings of those in power and helped to raise voters’ expectations.

There were widespread expectations that in 1996 a turning-point had at last been reached which would enable a genuine transition to political and economic pluralism to get underway. Without the replacement of Iliescu, it is almost impossible to contemplate the European Union agreeing to include Romania in the enlargement process which got underway at the Luxembourg summit in 1997 or recognising that it fulfilled the political criteria for entry. But by now the new ruling group had consolidated its authority. The coalition was too fragile and preoccupied with surviving in office to be able to substitute a fresh set of rules capable of weakening the hegemony of the PDSR. It and its supporters continued to exercise control of the economy. Privatisation had hitherto been allowed only if the newly private assets mainly went to the PDSR’s clientele. Prominent among the new capitalists had been former members of the intelligence services with access to hard currency and contacts in the unreformed state structure enabling them to benefit disproportionately from Romania’s uncertain lurch towards a market economy. By the end of the 1990s, private sector share of GDP in Romania, at around 60%, was well below the Central European average of 70%.⁵ The state sector of the economy provided another large support base for the PDSR. After a year of uncertainty, when the coalition attempted some bold economic reforms only to face social unrest and deepening internal strife, the PDSR may have had some cause to fear for the future. But by 1998 it was becoming clear that the government lacked the strength to uproot the old structures in any significant area of national life. Iliescu’s strategy of cautious democratisation without meaningful de-communisation remained largely intact. His opponents were in office but not in power. Indeed, this bitter taste of office would reconcile not a few of them to the PDSR playing a dominant role in national politics, thus reducing the dimensions of the hitherto strong communist versus anti-communist cleavage in national politics.

During the years when Iliescu and his allies were building a new set of structures with which to take Romania into the post-Cold War era, the EU’s attention towards Romania had only been spasmodic. The heroic images of demonstrators resisting Ceauşescu’s tanks had suggested that Romania was on the verge of a hopeful new era at the end of 1989. In January 1990, Frans Andriessen, the EU’s Foreign Affairs Commissioner, made the first official visit to the country following Ceauşescu’s overthrow, during which he was told by Iliescu that the FSN would hand over power and disappear for ever after elections.⁶ But the strong-arm methods used by the new rulers to assert their right to rule produced increasing foreboding in Brussels. Following the state-induced miners’ rampage in Bucharest in June 1990, Bruce Millan, the EU’s Trade Commissioner, stated that a deepening of ties would have to be put aside until ‘the achievement of an economic and political system founded on the same principles prevailing within the Community’.⁷ Romania was excluded from the Phare aid programme launched in 1989 to enable former Eastern bloc states to progress with the reconstruction agenda. Poland obtained 20.9% of the total Phare aid distributed up to 1996, compared with the allocation to Romania (which only had a slightly smaller population) of 10.9%.⁸ Poland and Hungary signed European association agreements with the EU in 1991. But this breakthrough only occurred for Romania in February 1993.⁹ The EU was of course preoccupied with completing the Maastr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The EU discovers Romania
• 2 Crafty natives lead the Eurocrats astray
• 3 The futility of EU funding
• 4 Labour of Sisyphus: administrative reform in Romania
• 5 Justice clings to its chains: 1989–2004
• 6 NATO, the EU and Romania’s strategy of duplicity
• 7 The EU at its most incoherent: April–December 2004
• 8 The EU regains and loses the initiative: 2005–07
• 9 Corruption and anti-corruption
• 10 The expiry of reform after 2007
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index