Wiards (2002) supports Smith and Pickles (1998) view and presents some of the limitations impeding the theories of transition as a viable theoretical model for the post- communist world: the lack of attention paid to the impact of political culture during the transformation process, the failure to notice the important and dynamic changes that occurred under the previous regimes in the later years, the failure to notice that economically the post- communist countries were nowhere near to the ones in Southern Europe when the process of transition began, the failure to notice the lack of cultural and socio-economic base in the post- communist countries for the political and democratic transition, the lack of a clear conceptual distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian which resulted in very optimistic expectations for the changes in East/Central Europe.
If the transition theories cannot explain properly the changes in the post-communist world, what is the solution? Kollmorgen (2013) advances the idea that a new generation of
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transformation theories has been emerging since 1990s and proposes Post-communism and Europeanisation as coherent theoretical approaches.
The post-communism approach in Kollmorgen`s view has three components, which emphasize the internal pressures on the post-communist countries. The first component derives from the theory of totalitarianism and emphasizes the socio-cultural and particularly the cultural legacies of communism. The second component evolved from the Eastern European area studies before 1989 and is based on two fundamental claims: 1) the communist world was dominated by significant regional and national differences which led to different paths of transformation and variants of post-communism and 2) the region`s socialist past has not been erased after 1989 but it played a fundamental role in the new processes which led to a particular type of transformation. The third component of post-communism is interested in the global dimension of post-communism.
If we apply this explicative model to Romania, we can easily see why this country is today one of the post-communist Eastern European countries still struggling to become a full democracy. The latest report about nations in transit released by Freedom House indicates that Romania is a semi-consolidated democracy, significantly behind other post-communist countries considered fully-consolidated democracies: the Baltic countries, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia (Freedom House b, 2015). While aiming to become a fully functioning democracy and comply with the external requirements as an EU member state, twenty-five years after the fall of Communism, Romania still has a long way to go.
A few particularities make Romania a unique case. The violent way the Communist regime fell (or appeared to fall) in Romania is a distinctive mark that set Romania apart and defined its future evolution on different coordinates. All the acts and the facts that led to the fall of Communism in other countries, the “Round Table Agreement” in Poland, the “democracy package” adopted by the Hungarian Parliament and the multiparty political system and radical revision of the Constitution approved by the Hungarian Centrum Committee plenum; the Fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany and the non-violent student and popular demonstrations called the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, contrast to the demonstrations and street fights in December 1989 in Romania that ended with the trial and execution of the Ceauşescu and his replacement by another product of the communist system.
35 Communist Romania
The bloody end of the Communist regime in Romania is seen as being the result of a few particularities that differentiate the Communist regime in Romania. The violence accompanying the change of regime in Romania in 1989 is seen first of all as a consequence of the fact that given the toughness and the repression perpetuated for four decades by the Romanian Communist regime, the model of negotiated transition “could not be adopted by either the opposition forces or the Communist Party in December 1989” (Ciobanu, 2007:1433). As Andrei Plesu points in a plastic way, “the events on December 1989 found Romania unprepared. Romanians were more adapted than they thought to life under a dictatorship; they did not have illusions about an eventual change and they had never seriously reflected on a normal political alternative” (Andrei Plesu, 1996).
Behind Andrei Plesu`s words lie the reality of a society emerging after 45 years in the hands of a despotic regime organised by a profiteer class (nomenclature) around a supreme leader, which stripped the country of any rule of law and pluralism, destroyed any democratic political parties, disintegrated any free trade unions or political movements that might have challenged them (Presidential Commission, 2006). A murderous regime by essence, Communism in Romania promoted a policy of social extremism using assassinations, deportation, incarceration and forced labour in order to destroy the traditional social classes. It left behind an estimated 2 million victims, most of them belonging to the bourgeoisie, landlords, intellectual and students as well as to the peasants that stood up against collectivisation (Presidential Commission, 2006: 637). Ethnic, religious, cultural and sexual minorities vanished, persecuted, sold, deported and exterminated as was the case of the Jewish and German minorities (Presidential Commission, 2006: 635,637). Communist Romania created camps for its orphans and children with handicaps and introduced aberrant rules concerning “rational feeding” leading to the starvation and misery of the entire population, as moral and material misery and fear became instruments to support Communist power. At its last moments in December 1989, the supreme leader, approved and supported by his party, ordered the massacre of the protesting crowds (Presidential Commission, 2006: 637).
The Media in Communist Romania
The mass-media occupied a small place in Communist Romania. They remained very underdeveloped, with reduced television transmission and unappealing newspapers dominated
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by propaganda and the Ceauşescu cult of personality (Nelson, 1990). The very same Romanian Radio and Television which would play an essential role during the 1989 December Revolution were part of a mass-media owned solely by the Communist Party, at the end of a process which started with nationalising the means of mass-communication. The freeway towards manipulation was opened by centralised resource distribution under the control of a small group of people which fixed the distribution criteria according to its own interest as well as by the fact that the party had allowed the exercise of censorship, the control of media messages before their distribution, so speeding the decline of any freedom of information (Coman, 2010).
Lack of alternative, lack of choice, limited size and poor quality were the main consequences, and they had a dramatic effect for any normal process of media development. They emerged from sinister measures enforced by the communist total ownership and control over the mass-media: paper quotas established by the annual plan, newspaper and magazine production limited to the number decided by the party, the denial of the possibility of any alternative publication, strictly limited number of radio and television frequencies, strictly limited number of broadcast programme hours, total control over transportation, telecommunication and means of production. All these measures assured the enhancing of Communist propaganda as the means of production assured rapid broadcasting of the Communist mass media products and the elimination of any products considered “unacceptable” (Coman, 2010).
Post-Communist Romania
Post-communist Romania started under an extreme polarisation of politics inherited from Ceauşescu`s regime and perpetuated long after 1989 into late 1990 within a troubled political party. An interesting description of the Romanian political party system, which indicates where Romania was placing itself a few years after the Revolution, is offered by Kitschelt (2001). He states that significant cross-regional variations had become visible by the mid-90s as the successors of the communist parties in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland had become modern social-democratic parties and had started to develop social and economic reforms, while the Romanian and Bulgarian counterparts were still engaged in authoritarian and populist practices. Kitschelt explains the differences between these two categories as being the result of the interactions between historical legacies, institutions and party systems. He thinks that the patrimonial Communism, specific to Romania, based on repression and a corrupt bureaucratic apparatus, had consequences for the transition from Communism, as the post-
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communist transition was led by just a section of the elite facing a weak democratic opposition (Kitschelt, 2001).
The extreme polarisation of politics supported by a troubled political party system probably would not have had a long life without a low intensity citizenship, where political authority is not exercised according to legal norms, but engages in practices typical for clientelism, patronage and corruption (Ciobanu, 2007). This created a very permissive environment which allowed the rapid conversion of the old communist elite into the business elite. The analysts noticed the emergence of the new class of rich, and explanations were sought to identify the causes and origins. The Romanian analyst Alina Mungiu-Pippidi noticed that there was a considerable overlap between the new rich and the political class, or at least a very strong bond based upon inter-locking common interests, so that economic advantages were gained through political patronage (Mungiu-Pippidi, 1997).