Ungaria Mare : încununarea glorioasă a unei istorii…

Comentariul meu nu are direct legatura cu articolul de mai sus. DAR !!!

Eu cred ca se pregateste o noua „istorie” a Romanei pt straini, pt oamenii obisnuiti din strainatate si poate pt alti politicieni nu prea educati, ca sa se legitimeze o noua destramare sau/si Invadare a Romaniei. Cititi acest articol al lui Bakshian. La baza, are o noua carte a lui Robert Kaplan, care este mult mai subtila decat articolul, dar scrisa in acelasi stil. Doar mai subtil. Este plin internetul de exemple in limba engleza. In franceza nu am cautat.

„Romania – a badly tossed salad of racial, religious
and cultural bits and pieces.”

„Published on The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org)

THE HAPHAZARD INVENTION OF ROMANIA

Aram Bakshian Jr.

March-April 2016

Robert D. Kaplan, In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond (New York: Random House, 2016), 336 pp., $28.00.

PRINCE METTERNICH once remarked, “the Balkans start at the Rennweg.”
The Hapsburg monarchy was a major player in the region for several
centuries, not least as the sovereign power in Transylvania, a major
part of modern-day Romania but Austro-Hungarian turf until the death of
the dual monarchy after World War I. Romania itself is the
quintessential Balkan country, a badly tossed salad of racial, religious
and cultural bits and pieces. Like most of its neighbors, Romania is
still struggling to reconstitute itself as a cohesive modern
nation-state along Western European lines. Unlike neighbors such as
Bulgaria, Moldova and the Ukraine, however, Romania has a vestigial link
to the West that goes back nearly two thousand years.

After a series of incursions from 101 to 106 A.D., the Roman
soldier-emperor Trajan annexed much of what is today Romania, giving it
full status as an imperial province, Dacia Felix (“Happy Dacia,”
referring to the Dacian tribes—happy or not—then inhabiting the area).
The Roman imperium only lasted 165 years, but that was long enough for
the natives to develop both a taste for good wine and a unique offshoot
of the Latin language that sets Romanians apart from their neighbors,
most of whom speak Slavic variants. To this day, anyone with a few years
of prep school Latin can make fragmentary sense of Romanian newspaper
stories, menus and shop placards; it really is a Romance language. It
also gives the Romanian consciousness—at least among the educated
class—a Western-oriented link that predates the heavy, and generally
repressive, Byzantine and Ottoman Turkish influences that would dominate
Romania long after the last Roman centurion was a distant memory.

At times this both inspired and clouded the vision of Romanian
intellectuals, as Robert Kaplan illustrates in his superb new book In Europe’s Shadow.
In analyzing an early historical work by the distinguished twentieth
century Romanian philosopher, Mircea Eliade, Kaplan notes that he
“became thoroughly smitten with the fascist and violently anti-Semitic
Iron Guard leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.” To the youthful Eliade,
Codreanu’s followers were, in his own words, “mainly a spiritual
movement meant to bring about the new man and pursuing our national redemption . . . ” Beware the zeal of an excessive user of italics.

Just as Kemal Ataturk encouraged house academics to weave a bogus
Turkish creation myth—one that erased traces of earlier Anatolian
cultures like the Greeks and Armenians and fabricated the narrative of a
Turkic presence long before that group had left the Asian steppes—so
late nineteenth and early twentieth century intellectual Romanian
nationalists concocted their own creation myth composed, in about equal
measure, of historical fact and romantic imagination. To understand this
mindset, Kaplan quotes another passage from Eliade that sums it all up:

“There are nations whose role in history is so obvious
that nobody has ever thought to question it. But there are also less
happy nations, who perform quite disagreeable missions without anybody
knowing it. A discreet obscure role like the one played by the
Daco-Romans’ descendants, the Romanians . . . Ignored, or misunderstood
at the best, the life of these nations is more intense. In addition to
its tragism (sic), their history is transfigured, one may say, by a
permanent divine presence . . . Incessantly attacked, they can only
think while defending themselves. Their history . . . is a permanent
war, for centuries on end, for their own survival. In each battle they
risk everything: their right to life, to religion, to their language and
culture.”

Partially true, but also self-pitying and self-deluded, Kaplan
compresses this Romanian mind-set into a single sentence of his own: “In
other words, not only have Romanians suffered more than other European
peoples, but their suffering has created a mystical martyrdom in their
souls.” More than one eastern European nation is still gripped by this
kind of self-composed myth, resulting in what might almost be called the
Evil Twin of American exceptionalism. No notion of a melting pot here.
Instead, most Eastern European national exceptionalism is based on the
real or perceived grievances of a religious, ethnic or racial group that
calls itself a nation while behaving more like a tribe. The fact that
most of the urban modernization and economic growth taking place in the
region during the twentieth century was in the hands of “alien” groups
like Greeks, Jews and Armenians virtually guaranteed an eventual
collision that would be ugly and bloody. The rise of fascism and Axis
wartime influence created the perfect storm in Romania where some of the
worst scenes in the Holocaust, wrenchingly but meticulously described
by Kaplan, were played out.

But the seeds were of an ancient planting. Wallachia and Moldavia,
the two Ottoman territories that would merge to form modern Romania in
1859, were long governed by a series of Phanariot voivodes, appointed by
the Sultans and backed up by Turkish garrisons, but drawn from the
ranks of the wealthy Greek population of Istanbul’s Phanar district
(hence the name “Phanariot”). Many of these surrogate rulers were
cultivated and presided over elegant courts. Like their erstwhile
subjects, they were Orthodox Christians, but they gained their jobs
through corruption and kept them by bleeding the local peasantry to
fatten both the Sultan’s coffers and their own. Thus the ruling and
administrative classes that would come to power in newly-born Romania
were shaped by a culture of arbitrary authority and oriental corruption
and shared little in common with the native peasantry, culturally or
even genetically. The result, to this day, is a country that prides
itself on its Western antecedents but is still a long way from achieving
a Western polity, and that remains steeped in corruption. All of this
is summed up pretty well by Sherban Cantacuzino, a Cambridge-educated
scholar whose name may bespeak Phanariot ancestry, and whom Kaplan
quotes:

“National traits are determined by race, climate and
topography. Frequent raids and invasions have made Romanians tough,
brave and resilient. Political instability, the uncertainty of what the
future holds, has made them intensely resourceful and practical, but
also wily and corruptible.”

This may help to explain why, for most of its existence as an
independent Balkan state, Romania has had the unenviable reputation of
being the most corrupt country in one of the most corrupt regions in the
world. I can remember being told by more than one old Balkan hand—and
only half in jest—that “Romania is kleptomania raised to a national
level.” I never took it seriously, though, until a surreal Washington
evening in 1975. At the frantic, last-minute request of the Atlantic
Council, I had agreed to act as host and chaperone for a night on the
town with Nicu Ceaușescu, the twenty-two-year-old youngest son of
Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaușescu. He was visiting the States as head
of the youth wing of the Romanian Communist Party, his father and mother
being great believers in keeping it all in the family. Nicu’s
reputation as something of a rake had preceded him, and I suspect that
one reason I was chosen to serve as his cicerone was that I was only
nine years his senior and in possession of a sturdy liver (Nicu would
expire of cirrhosis in Vienna in 1996).

I was to meet the Ceaușescu scion at the Mayflower Hotel and show him
the sights of Georgetown. In the lobby I quickly spotted a trio of
dark-haired young men who looked like they were trying to pass for
Italian. The first was a thin, rather nervous, bookish-looking fellow
with glasses. The second was smirky in a nondescript sort of way. And
the third had the tough, confident look of a senior apparatchik. Without
a moment’s hesitation, I walked straight over to the latter and
introduced myself. So much for intuition. He turned out to be Nicu’s
bodyguard, as his agitated interpreter hastily explained. Nicu himself
was the least imposing member of the trio. During the course of a long,
bibulous evening I managed to keep them away from the fleshpots of
Georgetown and persuaded them to settle in at Blues Alley, a fine old
jazz joint. The highlight of the evening came when the unfortunate
interpreter, whom Nicu and his bodyguard delighted in bullying as the
class nerd, had to visit the gents, leaving his suit jacket slung over
his chair. Nicu, with the finesse of a pro, quickly extracted the poor
fellow’s wallet and pocketed it. At my request, he later returned it,
but not before the interpreter, having discovered his loss, sweated it
out for half an hour: a minor but clear case of kleptomania at the state
level.

KAPLAN HAS spent a lot of time in Romania, and he has a knack for
seeking out local scholars, dissident intellectuals, relics of the
corrupt old order, and all sorts of other interesting and sometimes
rather rum characters making up the Balkan Salad of present-day Romania.
He has also read widely and deeply on his subject, something that sets
him honorably apart from the common run of journalists. Having visited
Romania in the 1970s at the high-water mark of the Ceaușescu regime, in
1989 when it was toppled, and in 2013 and 2014 with post-Ceaușescu
Romania still a work in progress, struggling to become a “normal”
European country, he can also draw on a layered series of impressions
gained firsthand and over time.

To appreciate just how unhappy Romania’s history is you have to
realize that the closest it ever came—and that wasn’t very close—to a
Golden Age was during the reign of its first king, Carol I, younger son
of the Prince of Hohenzollern Sigmaringen, one many small German
principalities of the day and a cadet branch of the Prussian
Hohenzollerns. Trained as a military officer, industrious, dedicated and
with a strong sense of duty—though not much else—Karl (Carol in
Romanian) was a stern but mostly benevolent ruler who brought a measure
of prosperity and modernity to the former Ottoman backwater, and
transformed his capital of Bucharest into an elegant belle époque city.
So much so that proud, Francophile Romanian aristocrats of the era
delighted in comparing their capital to the City of Lights. This was not
always to the gratification of Parisians, as illustrated in a short
exchange in The Debauched Hospadar,
an amusing erotic novella written by Guillaume Apollinaire on the eve
of World War I. As I recall it, a visiting Romanian boasts to a
Parisian, “Bucharest is like a little Paris,” to which the Parisian
replies, “Perhaps, monsieur, but fortunately Paris is not like a big
Bucharest.”

Romania’s first queen, a rather large, earnest, talented but loopy
lady drawn from another of Germany’s minor princely houses, threw
herself into her role as royal humanitarian and self-appointed poetess
laureate. Her poems, fairy tales and essays, were written under the pen
name “Carmen Sylva” and many of them were inspired by the beautiful
Romanian countryside and local folklore. She was widely read in her
time, not just in Romania but also in Europe and America. Before
suffering a mental breakdown, she also presided over a cultured circle
of courtiers and visiting poets, painters and writers. My paternal
grandmother was a friend of one of them, an Armenian painter and bon
vivant she always referred to as “Calouste the Artist” when he visited
Washington in the early inter-war years. He once hosted a private
banquet for her at the same Mayflower Hotel where I would meet Nicu
Ceaușescu, a far less cultivated guest, nearly half a century later.

But Romania was much more than courtly glitter in the reign of Carol
I. Although there was a bloody—and bloodily suppressed—peasant uprising,
there was also the first stirring of a “native” middle class as schools
were built and scholarships were made available to promising young
Romanians from humble backgrounds. Romania became a major petroleum
producer and the granary of the Balkans. The momentum of the age seemed
to favor gradual, peaceful progress as feudal Wallachia and Moldavia
started to cohere into a modern nation-state.

WORLD WAR I put an end to all that. King Carol I died in 1914, some
said of a broken heart, as Romania was pressured and bribed into joining
the Allies. King Ferdinand, Carol’s nephew and heir, a dutiful,
well-intentioned man of modest attainments whose main pleasure in life
was driving steam engines, had to flee the capital and spend much of the
war sheltering in Jassy while most of his country was occupied by the
Central Powers. And while Romania ended up on the winning side and
picked up Transylvania at the peace table, the country had been bled,
humiliated and destabilized. Meanwhile two lethal imps—Fascism and
Communism—had escaped from their bottles, and Romania became one of many
battlegrounds for fanatic supporters of both the new “isms.”

Throughout the interwar era, Romania experienced a political running
fever or walking pneumonia in which an ever-more-corrupt monarchy headed
by Carol II—a scheming, unstable opportunist who squandered the
prestige of the monarchy that his father and great uncle had
painstakingly amassed—alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, waged
war on the fascist Iron Guard and the Moscow-backed Romanian Communist
movement. It was a low-budget, slow-motion version of the more explosive
struggle going on in that other European periphery, the Iberian
Peninsula, during the Spanish Civil War.

Romania’s Franco would be Field Marshal Ion Antonescu, a ruthless
soldier-politician with genuine nationalist sentiment and, alas, equally
genuine anti-Semitism. Kaplan accurately describes him as “the Nazi-era
military ruler with a complex legacy (his alliance with Hitler was
based more on necessity than on philosophical conviction, even as he
fitfully began the process of switching sides in the midst of World War
II after the Nazis had been defeated at Stalingrad).” Perhaps the
biggest difference between Franco and Antonescu was geopolitical rather
than personal. Spain, thanks to geography and the diplomatic dexterity
of Franco, managed to stay out of World War II (Hitler once said that he
would rather have a tooth pulled than negotiate with Franco) and was in
a safe space far away from Russia in its aftermath. Antonescu—like
Romania—was forced into the war and ended up on the wrong side of the
Iron Curtain. He was quickly executed after a show trial. Romania’s
Communist era will be more familiar to most of today’s readers, although
Kaplan’s narrative gift and eye for the telling bit of color or
dialogue fill in many details and do a great job of evoking a
semiautonomous Marxist-Leninist regime that was only slightly less wacky
than Enver Hoxha’s Albania or the North Korean regime run by several
generations of a dynasty that combines the worst characteristics of
Stalin and the Kardashians.

WHERE DOES Kaplan see it all heading? A bit of atmospheric impressionism gives us some idea:

“In the center of a park [in present-day Bucharest] I
came upon a plaza, around which were arranged massive stone busts of
postwar Europe’s founders: Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer .
. . The sculptures, which had the monolithic, minimalistic style of
Easter Island heads, were powerful and mythic in their effect. These
were the liberal gods that offered a respite from history for this Latin
nation in the Balkans. United Europe meant not only the end of war: it
also meant a world of modern states—with all their impersonal legal
norms, which offered protection for everyone as a sovereign
individual—rather than a world of ethnic nations with age-old disputes,
which had been the curse of Romania all along. That, even more than
prosperity, was the underlying raison d’être of the European Union to
which Romanians so aspired.”

Kaplan’s closing reflections are by no means Panglossian, but they
are moving and offer some hope for the future. What, he asks, will
postmodernism bring to Romania, and, by extension, all those other
wounded former satellites in and around the Balkans?

“At the very least we can hope that the central horror of
the twentieth century—that ‘baroque synthesis’ of Communism and
fascism, as epitomized by the Ceaușescu regime, in the words of the
scholar Vladimir Tismaneanu—will not be equaled or even approached . .
.”

At journey’s end, looking across the Danube from the Hungarian side, Kaplan finds himself thinking of

“the Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica and his
disciples living in the Carpathian Mountains during the worst years of
the Ceaușescu regime, holding intense discussions that went on deep into
the night about Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Foucault, Hegel, and
Goethe—keeping the flame of humanism alive, since it was the canon of
Western philosophy and literature that constituted, in and of itself, a
hopeful rebuke to the low culture of Communism all around them . . . And
as I looked out over the nighttime Danube and its many bridges strung
with lights—I thought of an Orthodox priest I had met seven hundred
miles downstream on this same river . . . who had told me about the
Gothic-inspired roof of his wooden church, and how it indicated
Romania’s yearning for the West.”

A noble prospect, in both senses of the phrase.

Aram Bakshian Jr. is a former aide to presidents Nixon, Ford and
Reagan. His writings on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts have
been widely published in the United States and abroad.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Fototeca online a comunismului românesc
TagsHistoryRomaniaCommunismEastern EuropeRobert Kaplan

TopicsPolitics RegionsEurope

Source URL (retrieved on November 21, 2016): http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-haphazard-invention-romania-15265