Paper written in Romanian for the International Congress of the Society for Romanian Studies, Sibiu, July 2012. ”Europeanization and Globalization: Romanians in Their Region and the World”

Synopsis:

The author of this essay has been travelling to Romania at least once a year on average since the fall of communism. Every time she arrives there, she sees improvements that would have seemed impossible to envisage before 1989. And everytime she talks to family and friends who live in her native country she hears how bad things are in Romania. Is this the case of an outsider not seeing the whole picture, or rather the case of the insiders not seeing the forest for the trees? Possibly both… but the narratives of failure are pervasive and no ammount of pointing to difficulties in other parts of the world can assuage a certain conviction that the lot of Romanians is the worst. The accounts of what does not work are accompanied by comments stressing the uniqueness of being Romanian: “La noi ca la nimeni”, “Doar stii cum e la noi”, “La noi nu se poate”, or radically asking for the removal of the amorphous corrupt: “Da, e frumoasa tara, ce pacat ca-i locuita!” or “Unde esti tu Tepes Doamne…?”. 

Not only is the author’s assessment of visible progress confirmed by less subjective members of her foreign-born family (husband and daughter), many foreign visitors of Romania and the foreign media, but the development of aspects of Romanian life during the past two decades can be measured objectively along several coordinates (economic, freedom of speech and movement, civil society,  cultural output, education.)

This essay looks at the roots of the narratives of failure so frequently recounted by Romanians and analyses the context in which they arise; the types of challenges that seem so unsurmountable to many, at least at the verbal level; the frequency with which they occur in different age groups and social categories; it opposes them to stories of success in Romania and abroad, to the disbelief this success sometimes engenders and the pride it finally arises in people who refused to hold it possible in the first place.

It compares Romanian attitudes to European and American reactions to roughly similar challenges, drawing on experience gained during extensive professional and travel experience in these worlds, and on research carried out as part of non-profit work with educational organisations both in Romania and abroad. It incorporates interviews with Romanians living at home and in the diaspora.

This analysis is an attempt to understand why such narratives of failure persist after two decades of continuous, albeit slow development and to find out whether such narratives are just as strong in countries with a similar historical experience and/or geographical location. How does the globalized world impact these narratives?

Lastly, it proposes ways out of this frame of mind, by looking at the programs of institutions that have taken a lead in Romanian civil society and have been trying to shatter the myth of “We cannot do it!”.