I was born in Romania. I love the place, a love that was born in the tales and lives of the communist era exile community in New York. I weep for Romania, a place cursed with everything necessary for success but a decent political class capable of running an honest government. The corruption there is degrading, morally corrosive, and sucks up much of the capital necessary for rebuilding what should be the gem of eastern europe and what it doesn't absorb, it mostly scares off.
I don't write about it much in my blog because it's depressing and, frankly, my audience is generalist and based in the US for the most part. It is not so interested in the small details of a small country perched between a glorious future and the abyss.
So why are you reading this? Steven Den Beste's to blame as his talk about France's pathologies have drawn me to a basic insight. As far as corruption goes, Romania is France without the money that came of being on the western side of the iron curtain.
Romania does have an advantage, though. It's centuries long history of being at the meeting point of three empires Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian, the necessity of prostrating in three directions at once drove it down to a much more base level than it is today. Corrupted, exploited, divided, it somehow rose and resurrected itself to encompass and surpass the old borders of the Roman province of Dacia to include the ancient lands of the free dacians. By conventional thinking, such a purposefully debased people should never have been able to manage such a feat. It should have been russified in the NE, reduced to impotent dhimmi minorities in the SE, and magyarized out of existance in the West. It didn't happen and the reason why is vitally important to the Pentagon project of eliminating the non-integrating gap and thus making america safe in the long term.
The reason, I believe, can be reduced to an exercise in national mythmaking that lasted centuries, and to some extent continues to this day.
Posted by TMLutas at February 24, 2004 01:20 PM