Once the badlands of neoliberal Europe, Romania has become its bustling frontier. A post-communist mafia state that was cast to the bottom of the European heap by opinion-makers sixteen years ago is now billed as the success story of eu expansion.footnote1 Its growth rate at nearly 6 per cent is the highest on the continent, albeit boosted by fiscal largesse.footnote2 In Bucharest more politicians have been put in jail for corruption over the past decade than have been convicted in the rest of Eastern Europe put together. Romania causes Brussels and Berlin almost none of the headaches inflicted by the Visegrád Group—Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia—which in 1993 declined to accept Romania as a peer and collectively entered the European Union three years before it. Romanians consistently rank among the most Europhile people in the Union.footnote3 An anti-eu party has never appeared on a Romanian ballot, much less in the parliament. Scattered political appeals to unsavoury interwar traditions—Legionnairism, Greater Romanianism—attract fewer voters than do far-right movements across most of Western Europe. The two million Magyars of Transylvania, one of Europe’s largest minorities, have become a model for inter-ethnic relations after a time when the park benches of Cluj were gilded in the Romanian tricolore to remind everyone where they were. Indeed, perhaps the aptest symbol of Romania’s place in Europe today is the man who sits in the Presidential Palace of Cotroceni in Bucharest. Klaus Iohannis—a former physics teacher at a high school in Sibiu, once Hermannstadt—is an ethnic German heading a state that, a generation ago, was shipping hundreds of thousands of its ‘Saxons’ ‘back’ to Bonn at 4,000–10,000 Deutschmarks a head. 
Yet this year has seen the largest public protests in Romania since Christmas 1989. A citizenry which for decades offered minimal resistance to Ceauşescu now marches en masse, in cities across the country, against the successors to his machinery of rule. The immediate spur was not corruption per se, but parliamentary attempts to void judicial crackdown on it. A February 2017 bill proposing to decriminalize bribes amounting to £38,865 or less—the exact figure involved in an ongoing investigation of Liviu Dragnea, president of the Partidul Social Democrat (psd), the largest party in Romania and linear heir to the Communist Party—drove, in a few hours, thousands of Romanians onto the streets. In Bucharest they marched to Parliament, hoisting up effigies of psd politicians in striped jumpsuits and proclaiming: ‘You rats!’, ‘May the National Anticorruption Directorate take you next!’, ‘Down with this regime of thieves!’ Three million Romanians have left their country in the last decade, the greatest internal flow within the eu.footnote4 The protesters, some of whom continue to gather on Sunday evenings in the major cities, are the young who stayed behind, part of a swelling middle class that no longer believes it must leave Romania in order to have a European future. Most work in a private sector that emerged largely unscathed from the economic crisis, whereas one in five public-sector jobs cut in Europe in 2010 were slashed from Romania.footnote5 They vacation abroad, speak several languages and have often spent time at a Western university. Multi-ethnic harmony, prospering economy, vibrant civil society: what more could Brussels ask? Romania is so well regarded that Juncker has chosen it for the historic first post-Brexit summit of the eu, to be held in Sibiu on 30 May 2019—the day after Britain’s formal departure—for a grand upward look at the future of a united Europe.
It would be an overstatement to speak of a Potemkin republic. But behind the fair appearances, many—perhaps most—realities are darker. Of all East European countries, Romania is endowed with the greatest variety of natural resources. The Carpathian Mountains which wall off the northwestern province of Transylvania from Wallachia, in the south, and Moldavia, in the east, boast some of the last primeval forests of Europe. The Danube Delta offers a fabled reservation of endangered bird and fish species. The Ploieşti oilfields contain the oldest commercial well on earth—Bucharest’s streets were the first to be illuminated by kerosene—and still hold unknown reserves, closer to ground level than in any other country ringing the Black Sea. The fertility of the soil is legendary. But little of the country’s potential wealth has found its way into the hands of its people. Arguably the last real peasantry to be found within the eu works what was once the breadbasket of the Ottoman Empire: two in five Romanians live in the countryside; one in three survive off agriculture; many have never left their villages and only a minority have access to mechanized farming equipment.footnote6
The value of their land, however, has not been lost on Brussels, which has overseen the funnelling of Romanian wealth westward for a generation. Prior to its eu accession in 2007, entire sectors of the economy were picked off by multinationals. The Romanian banking system was taken over by Société Générale, Raiffeisen and the Erste Group. Its energy sector fell to Österreichische Mineralölverwaltung of Vienna and České Energetické Závody of Prague. Its steel manufacturing went to Mittal, its timber production to the Schweighofer Group, its national automobile, the Dacia, to Renault. Much of what isn’t yet owned by Western concerns has been laid bare for their disposal. In 1999, the Canadian mining company Gabriel Resources won dubious rights to excavate Roşia Montană, the largest open-pit gold mine in Europe. Its exploitation requires the stripping away of its status as a unesco heritage site, the demolition of four surrounding mountain peaks and a handful of nearby villages, and the carving out of a pit half the size of Gibraltar for holding cyanide-laced run-off; the Romanian state is being sued by Gabriel Resources for $4.4 billion in profit losses for forestalling this process.footnote7 By 2010 the largest private owner of trees in Romania was Harvard University, which six years earlier had started buying up enormous swathes of forest that had themselves been seized by mafia intermediaries on bogus claims of pre-communist ownership; sold off to Ikea, tens of thousands of acres were sawn down, probably never to be recovered.footnote8 In 2012, residents of some fifty villages in the Banat, the fertile corner of western Romania that brushes up against Serbia and Hungary, woke up to find that their ancestral plots of land had been seized through another legal subterfuge by Rabobank of Utrecht.footnote9 There are dozens of such cases. Few have been compensated.
Meanwhile, beneath the surface of democratization, the authoritarian tenor of Ceauşescu’s rule persists in Romania’s powerful security forces. The Securitate, the most ruthless police force in the Warsaw Pact, has been rebranded and is now run by a generation of operatives whose average age is 35, trained at special intelligence universities. They are, in many cases, the children of the 16,000 Securitate members who provided the backbone of the Romanian state after 1989, having emerged as the undisputed winners of the ‘revolution’ of that year. At least nine of these new services exist. The predominant one, the Serviciul Român de Informaţii (sri), monitors Romanians internally; with some 12,000 operatives, it has double the manpower of any equivalent agency in Europe and, with military-grade espionage equipment, conducts upwards of 40,000 wiretaps a year.footnote10 The older generation of Securitate agents managed the privatization schemes of the 1990s; they are now shielded by the younger cohort from legal oversight. This interlocking of economic influence—four out of the five richest Romanians have a Securitate background—and legal inviolability—Romania’s judiciary is too dependent on the sri to prosecute it—allows the deep state to operate with impunity. The security services have vast stakes in telecommunications and big-data collection. They oversee their own ngos, run their own tv channels and have their people on the editorial boards of the major Romanian newspapers and across the government ministries. The permeation of the state by these networks comes to light only occasionally. In October 2015, a nightclub fire in Bucharest killed sixty-four, more than half the deaths due to infections contracted later at a local hospital. Why? The hospital’s disinfectants, concocted by a company called Hexi Pharma to which the government had granted a monopoly, were diluted with water, rendering them useless. This first scandal was soon overtaken by a second: Hexi Pharma, a front company, was run by the secret services.footnote11
There is, undeniably, a longue durée behind all this. The only nationals east of the Adriatic to speak a Romance language, the only speakers of a Romance language to disavow the primacy of the Pope, the Romanians are also alone in recent political descent from Byzantium. For the Ottomans outsourced rule of their Danubian provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia to a handful of deposed Greek families, who in large part controlled the country as late as the 1930s, some six decades after Romania’s recognition as a nation-state by the European powers at the Congress of Berlin. In the rest of the Balkans, Turkish conquest had all but destroyed the local landowning class, leaving a mass of tax-paying smallholders in the countryside once Ottoman rule receded; uniquely in Romania, a boyar aristocracy that had lorded it over the serfs for three hundred years remained intact. There, the national struggle was not a question of evicting the Sultanate, but of how this mass of Romanian-speakers might gain control over the territory it inhabited, a stretch of land reaching over five hundred miles from the Tisza to the Dniester, where it formed an overwhelming majority. From this viewpoint, urban minorities were seen as the main obstacles. The Greeks were the least populous of them. More numerous and obstructive were Jews, Germans and Hungarians. ‘We want a national state, not a cosmopolitan state, not a Danubian America’, declared Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s national poet, in 1880.footnote12 Ethnic homogeneity, however, meant sacrificing the progress that could only come from these minorities. The dilemma was sharpened in 1920 by the Treaty of Trianon which awarded Romania, as a belated ally of the Entente, chunks of territory from neighbouring lands, more than doubling the size of the country; the paradoxical effect was to surround ethnic Romanians with much larger and more prosperous minority populations, who now made up 27 per cent, compared to 8 per cent in 1914.footnote13
Romanian Marxists saw the culprits for the plight of the country elsewhere. For their outstanding representative, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea—born in 1855 to a Russian-Jewish family in southern Ukraine, fleeing to Iaşi in 1877 to escape the Tsarist political police—Romania’s problem was not the overbearing economic power of its minorities. It lay in the neoiobăgia, ‘neo-serfdom’, which a Romanian elite had imposed on the Romanian masses. In 1864 Alexander Ioan Cuza, the Domnitor, ‘ruler’, of Romania and a veteran of its 1848 revolution, had in theory enacted a sweeping agrarian reform, releasing peasants from manorial servitude and granting them a third of the soil. Two years later he was ousted in a coup that put a minor branch of the Hohenzollerns on the throne, with Great Power backing. In practice the class of landholding boyars, though lavishly compensated for Cuza’s reform, circumvented its effects, converting peasant debts into labour obligations, and superimposing on a primitive feudal agriculture a parasitic capitalist system, to create what Dobrogeanu-Gherea called a ‘dual regime’. Legally, the Romanian peasant had stopped being a serf; economically, little had changed. Aspirationally Westernized, in the manner of the Tsarist nobility, Romania’s Francophone elites now amassed increasing power, while claiming that Romania was becoming more and more like a European state. For the nationalist intellectuals grouped around Titu Maiorescu, Eminescu and others in the Junimea [‘youth’] literary association, plugging Western solutions into the country’s historical problems was only allowing them to fester. Romania’s constitution was copied from Belgium’s; its legal system was the Code Napoléon. But what had any of this done for a country which still resembled nothing so much as the Russia of the 1850s? For Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Romania could break out of its cycles of feudalism only through swift industrialization. For conservative adversaries like Maiorescu the solution was more straightforwardly populist and atmospheric: raising the Romanian peasant to the rank of national hero.