Tom GALLAGHER,

Romania and the European Union:

How the Weak Vanquished the Strong,

Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2009, 304 pp.

Tom Gallagher has taught at the Department of Peace Studies, Bradford University for many years. Among the books he wrote let us cite just some of them: Outcast Europe: The Balkans, 1789-1999, Routledge, 2001; The Balkans after the Cold War, Routledge, 2003; Theft of a Nation: Romania since Communism, Hurst & Co, 2005/ Modern Romania, New York University Press, 2005; The Balkans in the New Millennium: In the Shadow of War and Peace, Routledge, 2007; The Illusion of Freedom: Scotland under Nationalism, C. Hurst, 2009. Gallagher is a respected figure in the intellectual circles both in Romania and abroad, and one of the few non-Romanians capable to perform deep analyses of the Romanian political evolution. The architecture of this book includes ten chapters plus an introduction and conclusions: 1. “The EU discovers Romania”; 2. “Crafty natives lead the Eurocrats astray”; 3. “The futility of EU funding”; 4. “Labour of Sisyphus: administrative reform in Romania”; 5. Justice clings to its chains, 1989–2004”; 6. “NATO, the EU and Romania's strategy of duplicity”; 7. “The EU at its most incoherent: April–December 2004”; 8. “The EU regains and loses the initiative: 2005–07”; 9. “Corruption and anti-corruption”; 10. “The expiry of reform after 2007”.

In this appreciated and prize winning book published in 2009, two years after Romania’s accession to the European Union Gallagher’s main argument is that in 2007 (the year or Romania’s EU accession) this country was unprepared and unreformed (apart from surface cosmetic changes). In 2013 the book needs perhaps a new review in order to grasp from a four year perspective the accuracy of its sharp and often bitter observations. At the time when it was published the book was a great success, in my view, thanks not only to the accuracy of the investigation, but also to its direct and coloured language, as well as to its propose to unveil the Byzantinism of Romania’s political elites. A wide range of public would be interested in reading this academic investigation promising to show the way an unscrupulous oligarchy was working behind the scene to trick the EU rapporteurs masquerading the progresses toward the country’s Europeanization through promises, discourses, strategies, programs, …sometimes bribes (consisting not only in money, influence or fake privatizations of strategic companies, but also in prostitutes), but leaving meanwhile the core of pre-existent structures almost untouched.

Vasile Pușcaș, the former EU negotiator for Romania, is surprisingly tolerant with the many “facts and figures”, inconsistencies and speculation this essay is made up of (and perhaps to which it owes much of its success). He considers the book useful as an alternative to the Romania’s EU accession issue. On the general background of official enthusiasm and festivity which characterized both Romanian and EU official discourses during and after the accession, Vasile Pușcaș considers this book as a “cold but refreshing shower which is as troubling as it is enlightening”.[1]

Instead of a real, genuine European integration, the outcome was a process of “pseudo-Europeanization” or “Euro-Balkanism,” as Gallagher plastically calls it (without explicitly defining the “genuine European integration in a Central Eastern European context”). Most of the ideas we find in this book are founded on fresh arguments picked from the Romanian domestic political scene. More precisely, Romania’s membership in the select political club of clean corruption, free democratic and prosperous countries was the biggest battle won by Romania’s domestic “power-networks”.

The main ideas exposed in the 10 chapters of this book can be summarized as follows:

The European Commission’s well paid civil servants were incompetent, superficial and simply unaware of the real political and economical realities of this country, and if they were actually aware of the major inconsistencies they were either accepting several compromises, or turning a blind eye to evidences. The only real interest of the EC officials was to see Bucharest complying with the economic conditions, whereas they paid much less attention to the country’s political conditions. I would say that this is not surprising as far as political conditionality is tricky, open to debate more difficult if not impossible to be measured. Hence, as there were no severe political troubles, it is unsurprising that EU officials were less rigorous on these aspects, just as they were in the case of other candidates accepted in 2004.

Even today the EU does not have a credible methodology to measure the level of the corruption in a certain candidate state, and on the other hand the accession procedures for a new member state are not adapted to the specificity of a particular country, as it was the case of Romania.

DG External Relations has its share of responsibility, as it is depicted by Gallagher as a bureaucratic body taking mechanical decisions based on stereotype formal reports, and not on front line, up to date in-depth information. The lack of communication and coordination between the delegations of Bucharest and Sofia is also blamed for the inconsistency of the reports and the entire monitoring system.

Then the book is systematically analysing (perhaps like no other political analysis of Romania) the domains of administrative reform, justice reform or agricultural reform or privatization, which, in Gallagher’s opinion were all as many failures. Even more surprisingly, Gallagher considers that politically Romania not only did not succeed to make any progress, but also in some areas it stepped back during the negotiation years (corresponding to the SDP’s and Adrian Năstase’s rule). In one of the most interesting chapters, “Crafty natives lead the Eurocrats astray,” Gallagher is particularly eager to expose his non dissimulated antipathy for the Social Democratic Party, PSD in Romanian (the largest party in Romania, with most of its rulers being former leading members of the Communist Party). The political reforms were again neglected thanks to the relative economic progresses and accelerated privatization which allowed the EC to grant Romania the so much needed status of “functional market economy”. In conclusion, Romania was allowed to enter the EU with more compromises than any other candidate state, even with a lower status than Bulgaria.

1. BOOK STRENGTHS

As some critics have noticed one of the major strengths and added value of this book is that it focuses on actual key political figures and their personalities rather than on institutions, which is normally the research feature in academic studies of EU policies. However this major strength is carrying one of its major weaknesses (which is anyway inherent to such an approach). The focus on personalities and individuals often drives the entire investigation into a disputable speculative field, many assertions looking like cheap scandal magazine gossip, not to say personal attacks.

Günter Verheugen, the commissioner in charge of enlargement during the negotiation with Romania and Bulgaria is characterized as being an arrogant top EU official who from the altitude of his chair was too high to see the “details” on the “ground” related to corruption cases or administrative miss-management.

The book offers a unique list of documented failures of the state to meet its promises and obligations performed by the Romanian politicians at that time, and a unique of its kind and alarming radiography of European Commission practices, methodologies and civil servant professionalism.

Although many of the information revealed by Gallagher is quite well known and debated for years by specialized Romanian political analysts and intellectuals, the very fact that a prestigious British scholar succeeded to bring them together in a synthesis book about one of the list known and often neglected EU country (despite its size and economic weight) is salutary. Additionally, in my view, another major strong point of the book (confirmed by the “time test”) resides in the fact that the author is not only criticizing the EU performance, but he also offers credible solutions.

Here are some quotations from the book: What could the European Union have done? At least seven things:

• “it could easily have asked the Romanian government
• “it could have created task-forces to improve the capacity of key parts of ministries and regulatory agencies which needed to function in a competent way if the country were to have a chance of holding its own against competitors”;
• “it could have created a different form of regional system in order to allow for the successful distribution of pre-accession funds”;
• “it should have given education a prominent place in the accession strategy, in light of evidence that poor countries can recover quickly from underdevelopment when this is done”;
• “it should have emphasised conditionality as much in political areas as economic ones. A longer period should have been allowed before particular areas of the national economy were opened to foreign competition”;
• “it should have customised rules for the right to use pre-accession funds in a way that suited Romanian conditions (rules that were made far simpler, and funding access more resistant to interception by corrupt power-brokers)”.

In sum it’s a unique of its kind synthesis of explained and interpreted facts and figures from a little known corner of Europe useful for academics, practitioners or just for the public with professional, intellectual or business interests in Romania.

2. WEAKNESSES

In my view, many of the carefully documented corruption cases, state capture, hidden lobbyism and bribery of the Romanian political elite in this “typical Balkan” country are depicted out of their context, and are unidirectionally and selectively presented in order to demonstrate an initially assumed hypothesis (a procedure usually avoided by professional historians).

Many observations and analyses in terms of language and presentation style seem to be rather preloaded from the Romanian scandal press than from a moderate scholarly work based on facts and evidences, presented in a certain context and then compared to other CEE countries from the region and then with the similar problems encountered in the EU 15. The bombastic language and expressions used in this book correspond rather to apocalyptic scenarios than to a scientifically documented work. Forced parallelisms like the one with Mussolini’s Italy in 1922, expressions like “red counties”; “absolute control over the law and order”; “uncontrolled capitalism” etc, are alarmist, and exaggerated. One of the final “verdicts” labelling the EU accession of an essentially unreformed Romania as “one of the biggest setbacks for democracy seen in Europe since 1945”, is not only bombastic and easy to dismantle, but also again unexpected from the pen of a professional historian. As many reviewers have already noticed, Tom Gallagher's book is “a look back in anger at a decade-long story of deceit and betrayal. Anger is generally a bad counsel in writing the sort of book that gets published by university presses”.[2]

The lack of comparison with other EU countries is another major deficiency of the book. Devoting more space to the failings of other EU members might have produced a less apocalyptic view on Romania. There are indeed other EU member states renowned for their administrative inefficiency, where the justice system has many failings, where organized criminal networks are powerful, and where the relationships between politicians and major business interests are notorious, or where progressively fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media. And all this in spite of decades of old EU membership. Paradoxically, the streets of London or Belfast during the 70’s or early 80’s with sometimes more than 10 bomb attacks per day would not have looked more apocalyptic than Bucharest in 2009.

The general conclusion which depicts the Romanian political elites as specialised in venality and the Europeans as specialised in incompetence is a flashy, but inaccurate assertion. The venality is not the exclusive attribute of the Romanian ruling elite or administration, and the EU bureaucrats are not necessarily incompetent. Indeed, no one denied the need for continuous transformation and improvement of the European Commission, but the book as such does not seem to have done much research on the EU officials point of view, being almost entirely sourced from media debates.

Some assertions in the book will question the author’s familiarity with the EU basic procedures. Tariff barriers were lowered far more quickly than was the case with Spain and Portugal when they joined in the 1980s. According to the European Act (1993) there was a 10 years transition period which gave Romania in theory enough time to prepare its economy for the competitive pressures of EU market. Moreover, there is no connection between the EU membership and the removal of protective tariffs. Romania today is a low-wage, high-tax economy in which purchasing power had fallen by nearly 50% since 1990. In 1989 the Romanians had been weighed down by shortages, but household costs such as rent and heating usually did not exceed 10% of an average income. Both the fallen purchasing power by 50% as compared with 1989 and the assumption that the household costs such as rent and heating did not exceed 10% of the average income are wrong because the author generalizes them. Gallagher forgot to mention that it might have been the case perhaps with the rents paid in nationalized houses (where the rent was rather symbolic) and not the case of real rents (after 1990 most of those houses were sold to their rent payers at symbolic prices).

Finally many of the assertions made in this book are contested by the evolutions occurred these last four years. More precisely, during the economic crisis it was not Romania (nor Bulgaria or other Eastern European new member states) who put the entire EU in trouble by destabilizing the euro as the Greed sovereign debt crisis did. The budgetary deficits of Romania as well as her public debt is smaller than those of other EU member states, the severe budgetary cuts and sacrifices were understood and largely accepted by civil society with no street turmoil, there were also no escalation of far right xenophobic discourses attitudes or actions (as it was the case in some well quoted EU western democracies). Withal, the predicted invasion of Western Europe by Romanian delinquents did not occur either. In fact, the statistics show that actually the level of criminality among the Romanian expats is within the average of other nations. Additionally, in Romania in the last two years more parliamentarians have been convicted of corruption than anywhere else in the EU.

The recent Cyprus financial crisis seems to confirm that if there is a serious thereat addressing the European Construction it will not come from Romania as professor Gallagher suggests in this book. With an unemployment level of around 8% (as compared to 27% in Spain, Greece or south Italy), with a hard working community of expats and a political class and civil society too eager to keep in this part of Europe what it was so badly needed and looked for in the last two centuries Romania seems to be rather the docile sheep among the EU member states and in terms of size and strategic importance one of the greatest and most important investments the EU made for its own future.