Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

DRAGOº PETRESCUto fragile economic growth, beginning only in 2000. As Daniel Dãianu hasconvincingly argued, to pursue this positive trend, Romania needs a moreactive public policy and an intellectual and organizational mastering ofdevelopment programs. 69The fourth statement reads as follows: “The process of democraticconsolidation, although cannot be reversed, can be slowed down, if notstopped.” The social and economic problems Romania faces today deepenedwhat Hirschman has called fracasomania, or the “failure complex,”a concept that refers to “the conviction that all attempts at solving thenation’s problems have entered in utter failure.” As Hirschman suggests,the “failure complex” impedes “the change and the perfectibility of existinginstitutions.” 70 In such circumstances, one might witness the return ofthe ethnocentric radicals, whose national-populist rhetoric never lost itsappeal to the “losers” of the economic transition, with disastrous consequencesfor the process of democratic consolidation. In fact, the argumentof the “perpetual failure” to reform the economy and raise the standardof living of the population, to fight corruption and to enforce law andorder, to join NATO, and to participate in the free movement of persons(Romanians are subject to humiliating procedures in order to get a visafor the Schengen space) has already been utilized in the 2000 elections bythe national-populist leader of the Greater Romania Party (GRP),Corneliu Vadim Tudor, against the candidates of the democratic parties. 71ConclusionsTo paraphrase a famous question, “what is to be done” to overcome the difficultand urgent problems discussed above, to avoid bloody ethnic conflictsand to ease the process of democratic consolidation in Romania? Obviously,the answer is by no means simple, and there are no quick solutions tosuch a question. Nevertheless, a rational analysis should prevail. The Americanpolitical scientist Kenneth Jowitt argues that a solution resides in adoption:of Eastern Europe by Western Europe. It would be also useful toremember his rhetorical question: “Is there any point of leverage, criticalmass of civic effort – political, cultural, and economic – that can add itsweight to civic forces in Eastern Europe and check the increasing frustration,depression, fragmentation, and anger that will lead to country- andregion-wide violence of a communal type in Eastern Europe?” 72 However,the same author notes that the solution he proposes “would require enormousimagination, coordination, and intrusion of Western Europe’s (and, ina significant way, the United States’) part: a massive economic presence,provision for major population shifts on the European continent, and intracontinentalparty cooperation and action.” 73290