A country like abroad – but which abroad?
The presidential elections and their annulment have brought the political polarization in Romania to a peak unseen in the last two decades. The polarization is all the more feverish when it comes to Romania’s international orientation and geopolitical status: do we want to be with the West or with the Russians? That seems to be what the public debate seems to boil down to now, and whatever you say on the subject automatically places you, in the eyes of the world, in one camp or the other.
The politics of the excluded third is at an all-time high. With a few exceptions, the majority of Romania’s progressive area seems to have capitulated to this Manicheism precisely when it was more important than ever not to do so, but to offer an alternative discourse – or at least to put some fundamental questions on the table.
To remove any doubt from the outset – I don’t know a single leftist, in Romania or elsewhere, who would want to “be with the Russians”. Putin’s Russia is the land of authoritarian neoliberalism with imperialist ambitions. But this unequivocal criticism does not necessarily imply uncritical and unconditional adherence to the West. From the outset, we need to clarify what we are talking about here. The term as such usually refers to a relatively homogeneous civilizational entity in terms of values, interests and destiny. It is an ideological chimera designed to conceal two internal fractures within the West: the first, between the ruling and ruled classes in each country; the second, between the stronger and weaker countries. The ruling classes and powerful countries that benefit from existing power relations have a vested interest in obscuring these fractures.
Moreover, the political idea of the ‘West’ is part – along with other hegemonic concepts such as ‘homeland’ or ‘national interest’ – of the ideological scaffolding that makes the poor kill and die in foreign lands for the benefit of the rich and makes weak countries like Romania believe that the imperialist interests of rich countries are also their interests.
So which West are we talking about when we express our adherence to it? Are we talking about some generic values that we all resonate with (liberty, equality, fraternity) or about the few Western powers that trample on those values?
For more than a year now, the genocide in Gaza has been sponsored and financed by those powers, led by the USA. It is a barbarity that violates international law and shatters any illusions in the ‘rules-based international order’. The arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for Netanyahu has already been defied by several European chancellors, led by France. Which West are we aligning ourselves with in this specific situation: the International Criminal Court or the Western powers that are facilitating – with money, armaments, media exposure and legal immunity – the greatest tragedy of our times?
Then, on what is this supposed dichotomy between Romania’s ‘Western path’ and the coming to power of the extreme right based? More and more Western countries have recently taken the latter path.
The nationalist right is now in government in Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands and (again) in the US; in France and Sweden, it is making and breaking governments. We wanted a country like out there and, in this respect at least, we have almost succeeded. Even in the EU institutions, embraced as a guarantor of democracy, the situation is deplorable.
The June elections gave us the most reactionary European Parliament ever, and the European Commission now has a vice-president from Meloni’s party. Frontex, the agency responsible for EU border security, is directly responsible for the thousands of refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea over the past decade. The far right doesn’t even need to be at the helm for its most sinister policies to be implemented by an increasingly radicalized centre-right. If we dig deeper, we find American-style neoliberal capitalism which, through the international forums of post-war American hegemony (IMF, World Bank, GATT), has further increased economic inequalities – both between and within countries.
To paraphrase from the classics, you don’t talk about the resurgence of the far right if you remain silent about neoliberalism.
An entire social science literature demonstrates the causal link between the economic insecurity caused by neoliberal policies and the electoral success of right-wing populists – both of which are very much Western phenomena.
Fascism was born in the West, as were colonial crimes and the two world wars. The state that has invaded and bombed more countries in the last half century than all the others combined is still a Western state. Stop waiting for the barbarians, they have been with us for a long time.
Well, what does all this have to do with the good of Romania? We can answer from two perspectives.
Let’s start with the normative one, which should underpin any left worthy of the name. Deleuze said in an interview that to be right-wing is to perceive the world first from the perspective of yourself and your family, then from the perspective of your social class, then from the perspective of your country and only then, if you have the time, from the perspective of the world itself. To be left-wing is the complete opposite: to perceive the world first and foremost from the perspective of the world itself, i.e. to adopt precisely the universalist (which also means anti-Eurocentrist) perspective that is part of the laudable legacy of the West.
If we want to remain within this normative register of the left and universalist humanism, then we must condemn the abuses and crimes of all imperialisms. That means condemning Russia for invading Ukraine, for interfering in electoral processes in other countries, for political assassinations on demand, for supporting brutal dictators like Assad, etc. But it also means condemning the US (and its Western European allies seemingly devoid of any geopolitical agency these days) for the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for supporting other brutal dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, for the genocide in Gaza which it facilitates in crucial ways, etc.
From this normative perspective, therefore, the correct and consistent position is one of opposition to both imperialist and aggressor powers, not opportunistic allegiance to one of them. In normative terms, there is no lesser evil between powers responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
But if instead we adopt a pragmatic, Realpolitik-type perspective, what is Romania’s immediate interest in terms of national security?
Not to be dragged into the war in Ukraine. If we want to be pragmatic, then Romania’s pragmatic choice is to stay as far away from this war as possible. And if we accept, from this Realpolitik perspective, that the US great power logic explains the illegal wars in the Middle East or the 750 military bases spread all over the world, then does the same great power logic not also explain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to prevent the expansion of a rival imperialist bloc?
I emphasize, we are talking here about explanations, not justifications. Explanations must avoid double standards. In this context, by aligning itself with an imperialist power (the USA), is Romania not falling even more clearly into the line of fire of the other imperialist power (Russia)? Paradoxically, in our desire to stave off the Russian threat, do we not end up feeding that very threat? Is it not possible to have a policy of the included third party, in which Romania would pursue a diplomacy that would cautiously balance between the great powers? Is such diplomacy preferable not in spite of, but precisely because of our vulnerable geopolitical position?
These are elementary questions, but rational and constructive debate on them has become virtually impossible in a public sphere as polarized as Romania’s. Geopolitical manicheism is so prevalent and aggressive that simply putting the issue in the terms outlined above is met with accusations and invective that nip any possibility of debate in the bud (as with other taboo subjects such as the communist legacy, the transition to capitalism, taxing the rich, EU membership, etc.).
We want to defend democracy from Călin Georgescu, but it is precisely these undemocratic tendencies in civil society, which demonize any deviation from the dominant dogma, that have pushed many into the arms of someone like Georgescu. If they are labeled as Putinists anyway for questioning the appetite for war of the domestic and Western elites, why not vote for a Putinist candidate anyway? Of course, that doesn’t mean that the solution is Georgescu-style ethno-religious and fascist fascist “sovereignism”. In addition to his admiration for war criminals and mysticoid lucubrations, his socio-economic vision is, as I have argued here, a petty-bourgeois utopia in which Romania becomes a country of small and medium-sized, state-supported employers. Nothing is mentioned about better wages and working conditions for workers.
We can only deduce that exploitation and austerity will continue even more steeply. What we are dealing with here is a deeply reactionary sovereignism, where the foreign masters of the country are being replaced by domestic masters. No man or group on the left can resonate with that (though some have, to their shame).
In this case, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend – it’s just another enemy. A left that doesn’t understand the need to oppose any right, be it nationalist or neoliberal, that doesn’t offer an alternative to both, has betrayed its own raison d’être.But many ordinary people, who would otherwise resonate with a left-wing economic agenda, are attracted to sovereignist rhetoric because it is the only one in the mainstream that addresses their otherwise (partially) legitimate grievances. Just because Georgescu’s proposed solution is wrong doesn’t mean that the diagnosed problem is invented. And the broken clock shows the correct time twice a day.
Yes, Romania does occupy a subordinate place in the EU, whose legislative architecture imposes structural limits on the development of peripheral countries. European funds are an irrefutable but collateral benefit.
They are compensation for the neoliberal policies that condemn an already precarious society to perpetual dependency and underdevelopment: low taxation of the rich and corporations, de-regulation of the labour market and the low wages that result from it, privatization of state ownership, the practical impossibility of devising an industrial policy that is competitive with the major industrial powers that dictated the terms of European integration from the outset, and so on. In the context of these neoliberal policies and power relations within the EU, we cannot be a country like the outside precisely because the ‘outside’ has no interest in poorer countries catching up. Instead, it has every interest in subordinating poorer countries to extract financial, material and human resources.
Take the example of the free movement of people, a hard-to-deny benefit of EU membership that many of us have enjoyed. But again, it is a contingent benefit. Migration is, first and foremost, a mechanism for the extraction of human capital from poor countries to rich ones – the transfer of cheap labour, both by its willingness to work for lower wages than native workers (including much lower unionization rates) and by bringing in highly skilled workers (doctors, engineers, etc.) whose qualifications have already been acquired in the country of origin.
The UK, for example, is allocating less and less funds for training nurses precisely because it knows it can import nurses already trained in other countries. At the other end of the bridge, emigration is a valve through which countries in poorer countries relieve the pressure to invest in jobs, public services and infrastructure. But it is also an additional source of foreign investment in the form of remittances sent home by emigrants: for years now, the diaspora has been the largest foreign investor in Romania’s economy (€6.5 billion in 2023, an all-time record).
In short, free movement has a dual function of strengthening neocolonial relations between countries and neoliberal structural policies at home. Otherwise, yes, we are all happy to stop queuing for visas. Of course, the solution is not immediate exit from the EU.
Today, in Romania, there is no strong left-wing capable not only of taking government but also of taking the reins of a project of economic and geopolitical emancipation. In the specific context in which we find ourselves, leaving the EU under the helm of a Georgescu would be deeply reactionary in nature, with absolutely disastrous socio-economic effects (as I have said in past debates on this subject). But this does not mean that we should shy away from open discussion of the issues raised above – both in terms of Romania’s position in the EU and the more general character of the EU and the Western powers we want to emulate. Ignoring or minimizing these issues will only fuel the attractiveness of dangerous charlatans like Georgescu or Simion.
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