"We Romanians have no saints..."

My uncle, the distinguished engineer Mircea Dimitrie Ratiu, describes a public lecture delivered by a distinguished German sociologist on "Romanians" at the Humboldt University in Berlin where he was studying in 1943, shortly before his expulsion by Germany's Nazi authorities:
"Romanians" said this scholar (can anyone help me identify him?) "are unusual amongst the peoples of Europe because they have no saints...".

Uncle Mircea, now 85, has never forgotten that statement, because if true (and it probably is) it suggests that we Romanians have great difficulty relating to authority, particularly authority of a moral kind.... but perhaps also to authority of the temporal or political kind. Saintliness (whether Orthodox or Roman Catholic) after all, involves a degree of popular recognition whereas political authority requires none. If we Romanians give little or no popular recognition to either our spiritual or our political authorities, that leaves our politicians freedom to do as they please.....

St Paisie Velichovsky, St John Cassian, the holy apostle St Andrew himself may indeed have resided on what is today Romanian territory but our ancestors in these lands had nothing to do with their beatification. St Stephen the Great of Moldavia may be the notable exception, but don't we Romanians remember him primarily for his military prowess and the marvelous UNESCO heritage painted churches he left behind in Bucovina? Surely we see Stephen the Great as a successful ruler and church-builder, not I think, particularly as a moral authority.

Is there then something unusual about the way in which we Romanians relate to those in positions of authority, whether of the moral or political kind?

I have spent most of my life in western democracies: British, French, Swiss, German, American in particular - democracies where, with few exceptions, authority relates to a FUNCTION that is occupied TEMPORARILY. A British, French or Dutch mayor, for example, never loses, in either his or her own colleagues eyes, his or her citizen status. Everyone recognizes that when mayors' mandates end, they hand over their mayoral functions to the next incumbent. And this recognition of the temporary nature of their position of authority of course strongly affects the way such western mayors exercise their mayoral duties during their mandates.

Yet at this time, 20 years after the official fall of communism, I know Romanian mayors who exercise authority as if was an attribute of their PERSON rather than a mere function - and as if it was a status that they have somehow managed to render PERMANENT rather than temporary. The only jurisdictions where I have seen this phenomenon before include the so-called popular democracies of the pre-1989 soviet bloc, and today in some of the successor states to the Soviet Union, and unfortunately also in much of the Arab world.

It is astonishing to me how few citizens actually question this form of de facto personal dictatorship, even though, in theory, it is not supposed to exist any more - Romania, after all, since 1989 is an electoral democracy, now part of the wider EU community, a country in which our elected officials have to face the vote every four years.

So how is it possible, 20 years after the official end of communism, for those in positions of political authority to behave in ways that are more reminiscent of a former communist dictatorship than of a present day modern democracy?

1. Control of resources: Romanian mayors are heirs to the assets of the former communist regime. It is not unusual for mayors to control all land not already privatized (and themselves have the power to block further privatizations), hospitals, public transportation, utilities, roads, police, schools, sanitation, building permits, population registration, media (through block purchases of advertising), public sector employment and more...

2. Stifling of opposition: Romania's libel laws have yet to acquire teeth. In a post-revolutionary society, freedom of expression, at least for those in positions of authority, is unlimited. For ordinary citizens freedom of expression is fraught with danger. Through block purchases of advertising in the media and control of access to the corridors of local power, mayors are in a position to exercise extensive control over editorial content. Some more fawning editors do not hesitate to defame or slander a mayor's opponents. In my own five years in post revolutionary Transilvania I have seen reputations destroyed in this way.... prominent public figures, especially political opponents of ruling mayors, accused in the press of the most dastardly deeds, who have chosen, as a result, simply to withdraw from public life. I have had my own share of such treatment also....

3. Fear: On my return to Romania in 2004, local acquaintances surprised me by advising: "Here you have to be very careful what people think of you. If you upset those in authority, things could be very bad for you". Today I recognize that although the gulag and summary executions have ended, there are still, in this part of the world, mayors who rule by fear, just as their predecessors ruled by fear throughout Romania's 44 years of communism. Many of them were indeed junior officials under the previous, communist regime. In the town of Turda, Transilvania, for example, the pre-revolutionary communist party secretary Eugen Gergely recently estimated for me "that continuity between the communist and present-day city administrations is around 90%".

In spite of legislation that requires a minimum of accountability from elected officials, I have experienced decisions that are taken without citizen consultation; failures to respond to applications for planning (while mayors themselves build gin-palaces on their meager salaries); failures to respond to applications for holding events in public spaces; gross neglect of minority rights (particularly Roma); decisions that make no public economic sense (such as the spending vast public funds on festivals, while simultaneously blocking events that are privately funded and would therefore be free to the community); grandiose public schemes such as fountains in public parks when hundreds of homes are still without either water or drainage....

Yet out of fear, these issues are not debated in public. The media, in such communities, avoid any remotely negative references to their mayor. Any attempt to overcome this barrier is immediately cut short. This fear of retribution from those in authority is the main reason for the existence of this Blog. I myself can no longer write or say locally what I want about the state of society in this particular corner of Transilvania... Why? Because even though I support some of my own mayor's program and accomplishments, the fact that I do not support all of it, makes me, in his eyes, his public enemy: according to the old communist dictum, "those who are not for us, must be against us...". The democratic, pluralistic ideal of respectful agreement to disagree about how to reach a common goal was considered liberal-minded bourgeois clap-trap by Romania's communist rulers. It is idealistic nonsense to many of those who rule here today...

What risk do I run personally in telling the truth that everybody here knows, but no one dares tell? Out of self-protection I have chosen to maintain my British citizenship and my non-resident status. But members of my team have received threatening, anonymous phone-calls, as well as threats to their future livelihoods should they continue to work with us....

When it comes then moral authority, do we Romanians really have no saints? I cannot readily think of any. We have many saintly people. But they live quiet lives of seclusion in our thousands of convents and monasteries. As a people we are deeply religious, but our faith seems to have little impact on the conduct of our daily affairs. Orthodoxy is extraordinarily flexible and forgiving... and promises us a place of peace and light after death where we no longer have to face the pain or the nonsense I have described here.

But when it comes to temporal (ie political) authority we Romanians have historically tolerated for years leaders who in most cultures would be considered monsters: Vlad Tepes (the Impaler), Ceausescu. Small wonder that today we are willing to tolerate abuses of power by public servants - whether prominent prime-minsters or small-town mayors - with barely a whimper. For us Romanians the realm of the saintly and the realm of the political just don't seem to connect. Morals are for the birds - as long as no one catches you. "May God forgive him/her" we prayerfully repeat whenever any one dies.... as if we all agree how much we all need to forgive one another.

The Romanian diplomat and commentator Silviu Brucan famously predicted that it would take 20 years for the effects of communism to pass. Those 20 years have now expired. The Anglo-German political scientist Lord Dahrendorf equally famously observed that it would take at least 60 years for communism's damage to our E. European psyches and mentalities to pass.
My father, Ion Ratiu, author, politician and above champion of democratic ideals for his beloved Romania, eternally optimistic and ever pragmatic, advised us "not to worry about about what our neighbour is doing, but simply to strive to do better ourselves".

Perhaps if we really got down to that, one by one, we could indeed make this beautiful country of ours a better place for actually living in.