Volume 9 Number 4

Fall 2000

Feature

Romania
     Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

It was Douglass North, I think, who said that the past becomes intelligible only when viewed as a story of institutional evolution. In other words, the choices of today and tomorrow are molded by decisions made in the past. One conclusion we ordinarily draw from this truism is that, when given the opportunity, societies should select institutions that fit their needs. Later on, they will be unable to alter their initial choices in fundamental ways.

The situation in today’s Eastern Europe, viewed from this perspective, represents an affront to common sense: countries as different as Lithuania, Romania, and Hungary have relinquished their elementary right of choice, or at least the right to tailor their choices to their own special needs. Under outside pressure, they have purchased a sprawling, one-size-fits-all, and continuously changing institutional package known as the acquis communautaire—the EU’s massive regulatory framework. The EU is a voluntary alliance of member states operating under common rules and acting, in some policy areas—such as immigration into the Schengen states or monetary policy in Euroland—almost like a single state. It is only natural that would-be members are required to adopt the acquis. But some aspects of this state of affairs do not ring true, or feel harmonious, to the applicant countries.

One questionable feature of the enlargement process is the adequacy of a single package to the needs of applicants as different as Slovenia, Romania, and Cyprus. Some history may be of interest here. On the occasion of the Luxembourg European Council summit, on December 12 and 13, 1997, the heads of state—the Government of the Fifteen—decided to launch the process of enlarging the EU to take in five countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Cyprus, stressing that this enlargement was to be seen as a global, inclusive, and evolutionary process, to be conducted in stages on the basis of rhythms appropriate to each applicant country and in line with each country’s degree of preparedness.

Applicants were initially evaluated according to the so-called Copenhagen requirements (see the essay by Milada Anna Vachudova in this issue). These evaluations were grouped together, along with other proposals accompanying the accession process, in a document entitled "Agenda 2000." In its recommendations to the member states, the commission made a distinction between those countries that were in a position to incorporate the acquis communautaire in the medium term and those that were not. At the Helsinki European Council’s summit (December 10 and 11, 1999), the West European heads of state decided to approve the commission’s new accession strategy (submitted on October 13, 1999) and opened negotiations with all the applicant countries of Central and Eastern Europe, thereby abolishing the distinction between "ins" and "pre-ins." This new strategy, approved by the European Parliament on December 16, 1999, aimed at creating an incentive for the governments of applicant countries to accelerate the introduction of the acquis communautaire. The new strategy was also designed to increase public comprehension and acceptance of necessary, if painful, reforms.

But these efforts and the possibility for complex adjustments during the enlargement process did not alter the basic reality: the countries queuing up to join the EU differ from one another quite sharply. The Baltic states have only a brief history of statehood and belonged for more than half a century to the Soviet Union. The countries of southeastern Europe, such as Romania and Bulgaria, are rural societies with a history of totalitarian communism. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic have all been communist, but their postwar regimes were not consistently "totalitarian." The level of urbanization in the Czech Republic or Slovenia, countries with their past in the Habsburg Empire, is close to the EU average. About 5 percent, or just below, of Czechs and Slovenians are still employed in agriculture, compared to 40 percent of the Romanian population, with high figures for Poland, Bulgaria, and Lithuania as well. It has been calculated that the cost of subsidizing Polish agriculture alone, under current EU policy, would break the EU budget, which is already committing huge subsidies to Western farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy or CAP. The presence in the queue of Malta (with its history of befriending the Chinese) and Cyprus (with its former dictator, Archbishop Makarios) merely adds a splash of color to the already variegated array of applicant countries.

The principal reason why the West’s heads of state followed the commission, accepting the decision to move toward eastern and southern enlargement, is political. Enlargement was (or was thought to be) essential to the policy of "stabilizing the Balkans." After first deploying in Kosovo an expensive UN force with an unclear mandate, however, the stability pact has now been reduced to almost nothing, although its European boss, Bodo Hombach, is not shy about congratulating himself in his reports. Europe’s main contribution to the Balkans is its trumpeted "commitment" to bring them into Europe. But resources for this ambitious enterprise are either missing or cannot compare to the amounts invested by Europe more than a decade ago to incorporate Greece, Spain, or Portugal into Europe. This time, the revolutionary project of enlargement was not accompanied by an equally revolutionary increase in EU expenditures.

The main concern of Europeans in the year 2000 was the success of a far more interesting and—so far—ambiguous enterprise, namely the European common currency or euro. Not even agricultural policy, which had strong critics even before enlargement began, has received so much attention or undergone such serious modifications. So the decision to enlarge eastward stopped short of becoming a full-fledged or major policy initiative, comparable with the previous decision to include Mediterranean Europe or the adoption of euro. Europe seems to have a proclivity for indulging in policies that, on inspection, turn out to be rather rhetorical. Europeans can speak of switching from NATO to a common defense policy, while not increasing military spending by a cent. Similarly, they speak of stabilizing the Balkan states by encouraging them to stabilize themselves.

There is nothing particularly wrong with that. Postcommunist states are grown-ups, and they should recognize and act upon their own interests. In fact they do: these poor countries have committed huge funds to become part of "Europe" and to be forever walled-off from Russia’s sphere of influence. Even the poorest of them are doing better because they at least have some goals, in contrast to the CIS countries, that have no goals at all and continue to stray aimlessly. But might not Eastern Europe have done better without the possibility of EU membership? What would have happened if the states of Eastern Europe, instead of toiling for "harmonization," had simply pursued ordinary growth policies (on the model of the states of Southeast Asia, for example), freed from costly EU social and environmental policies? To answer this question, we need only to compare the relatively good situation in Baltics with the terrible conditions in Ukraine, itself committed to capitalism, but not operating under the EU thumb. More than a project, enlargement is also a means of "enforcing progress" via a long, detailed, and impersonal monitoring process.

The extent of EU monitoring of applicant states is hard for outsiders to grasp. Of course, the EU does not have the means to run the applicant countries directly. But the EU does whatever it can do short of a political takeover. A visitor to policy circles in Budapest or Bucharest will soon discover that the head of the EU delegation is the most important person in the country next to the prime minister. He is the latter’s best friend, feared ally, and domineering adviser. The EU’s ambassador to Budapest, whose grasp of regional geography could perhaps be improved, was overheard explaining imperiously that Hungary must enforce EU regional policy in its regions, mainly in Transylvania. The EU’s ambassador to Turkey, a woman with very progressive views, triggered a scandal after encouraging a group of fundamentalists to take advantage of European freedom.

Standardization is relentless. All government bids are extended according to European regulations. A team of researchers recently tried to study differences in organization among the new Romanian regions. But they found no differences, for the simple reason that regional agencies were exact replicas of each other, having been planned identically by the EU. They could not really differ from each other, in fact, as their main task was to distribute EU grants, using EU standard procedures. As things now stand, EU delegations find themselves accountable to the commission for the success or failure of the accession process of the country they are in. This leads them inevitably to identify with the process and, thus, to adopt patronizing and pushy attitudes toward locals who are the objects of the process. The EU itself traveled a long way before trying to integrate these undeveloped Eastern regions. Ten years ago, joining did not mean importing such a comprehensive regulatory package.

The EC works with governments to design accession strategies, that is, to map the path that each country must follow to go from wherever it stands to the EU level and to adopt the full acquis. Once accepted, such a strategy becomes the program of the elected government, regardless of its political coloration. Elections were held in Romania in the fall of 2000. But since all political parties took a solemn oath to respect the strategy of European integration and its implementation, the stake in these elections was merely a change in political clienteles, as parties move in and out of power. The bright side here is that this EU-imposed package of policies commits successor communist parties (whether genuine or just-pretend social democrats) to serious reform programs that they would never otherwise have endorsed. A darker side is that Eastern Europe’s political parties—which remain both unprofessional and unpopular—have now entirely abandoned the idea that their principal service to their countries should be the formulation of policies. They confine themselves happily to representation and implementation. As far as the policies in question are concerned, this may be all to the good. But it leaves the parties themselves crippled, unpopular, and underdeveloped. The public loathes political institutions and longs for majoritarian systems and popular consultations on every important topic (as indicated by a 2000 Freedom House survey run by the Romanian Academic Society in Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia). Indeed, while Western Europe is steadily transferring sovereignty from the national states to Brussels, Eastern Europe is increasingly succumbing to the spell of direct democracy.

The more essential question regarding EU monitoring, however, is this: Is the acquis meant to serve the countries of Eastern Europe or have the countries been put here to serve the acquis? Do varying results discovered along the path to accession lead to different, tailor-made policy interventions in the various countries? We face, here, a heterogeneous array of countries, differing enormously in the initial constraints under which they started the accession process. So, is the acquis the means or rather the end? This question arises from the impressive uniformity of the policy of enlargement. The EU uses monitoring categories such as institutional reform, economic situation, and adoption of the acquis. As an alternative, I would like to propose (below) a more historically grounded set of categories. Adoption of the acquis, by itself, explains little about a successful transition. Indeed, it would perhaps make more sense to say that you need some elements of a successful transition before engaging in the adoption of the acquis.

Internal diversity makes it misleading to describe postcommunist Europe as a single region subjected to a common transformation process. Although one can name a few factors that may help explain success or failure, identifying successful policies is difficult. Vaclav Klaus’s approach to privatization and restructuring was a success for years before turning into a failure. Donors such as the IMF consider it a success if loan money is spent for the intended purpose, and clear objectives (for example, a precise yearly inflation rate) are met. But afterwards, what the IMF considered a "successful" government may fall from power precisely because of its well-designed and effective austerity policy, and a new government may sweep into power, reversing everything. It is difficult to make success "sustainable" under the turbulent conditions of transition. With such caveats in mind, the following patterns, providing the basis for an alternative to the EU’s current set of monitoring categories, may nevertheless be discerned.

Pattern 1: Some applicant states are relatively well-endowed, possessing a fairly good infrastructure, human and social capital, substantial foreign investment, decent legal culture, and a tradition of nonviolent protest movements; this first pattern is also associated with clear goals (integration into the EU and NATO), combined with sound management in the pursuit of goals—for example, rapid downsizing of the state sector, rapid restitution of property, creation of an operating market, and decommunization in the civil sector. Note: The larger issues of the transition itself, such as the creation of democracy and a market economy, are too general to be classified as "goals." In some instances "democracy" and "markets" are simply political slogans. I take "goals" to mean much clearer commitments that presuppose some already well-defined policies, such as EU integration. The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and, to some extent, Slovenia and Estonia fall into this first category or pattern. Not surprisingly, these countries recorded the greatest performance in institutional transformation, as reflected in the most successful economic transition, and were invited to join the EU in the first wave.

Pattern 2: Some other, less fortunate, applicant states are burdened by moderate constraints. In comparison with the first-wave states, these countries had begun reform later, their infrastructure is poorer (despite a good level of urbanization), and they have received less foreign investment. This second pattern, nevertheless, is still associated with clear goals (EU and NATO integration), and with fairly clear management targets (decommunization of the state sector, an operating market, attraction of foreign investment). This second group consists of the other two Baltic states. Bulgaria may be quickly approaching this category.

Pattern 3: Still another, even less favorably situated group of candidate countries suffer from severe constraints: a tradition of social unrest, ethnic minorities, poor infrastructure, high foreign debt, large rural sector, low human and social capital, and weak statebuilding. Their goals remain clear (membership in the EU and NATO), but their management targets are poorly defined or incorrect. Policymaking in these countries is characterized by delay or absence of property restitution, ambivalence toward foreign capital, and the inability to put into place the institutional framework of property ownership. The "laggards," Romania, Bulgaria (so far), and Slovakia, are included in this group.

Pattern 4: The last group of states labor under such severe constraints that incorporation into the EU is not even on the distant horizon. They have unclear goals and poor records of managing reform policy: Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.

The lesson to be drawn from this four-part categorization is simple: wherever the constraints on a country permitted the allocation of resources sufficient for the goals being pursued, and the targets were the right ones, the transition was successful. Where constraints were stronger (and, to those already enumerated, one may add the lack of political will or social consensus and the inability to bridge foreign expertise with local experience and culture) but the goals were clear—such as European integration—the success was slow to come, though it very well may come in the end—as with the second wave of EU applicants, for example. Finally, where goals and targets were unclear and constraints overwhelming, as in many CIS countries, it is difficult to speak of any positive development at all.

The obvious problem with current enlargement policy is that the EU is not trying to match constraints with resources in a manner that differentiates between essentially disparate groups. The one-joins-when-one-is-ready approach, combined with the strict enforcement of the acquis from the earliest phases of the integration process, makes the race for entry into a very unequal one and brings no stability to unstable countries. In March 2000, we measured the popularity of the center-right governments in the so-called laggard countries—governments that were otherwise celebrated as democratic when contrasted with successor communist parties or nationalists (Freedom House survey run by the Romanian Academic Society). In the three countries surveyed, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, the EU-oriented governments scored extremely low. If they were to lose elections, it was clear that they would be replaced by governments that might reconfirm the country’s formal commitment to EU integration while being more nationalist at heart and less austere in their spending practices. This is exactly what happened in Romania in November’s presidential and parliamentary elections. Wherever it happens, the fall of pro-EU governments promises to delay the process and intensify the inherited constraints even more.

Unless EU policy toward the "laggards" changes, the prospect of integration itself will become even less popular there. We see already that committed Euro-optimists are better educated, better off, and living in urban areas. Integration needs to become everyone’s game, not just that of the rich and educated. The public longs for integration without understanding what it is, and the attempt to impose more austerity on this already impoverished population by a highly unpopular and relatively affluent political elite, committed to Europe, will only backfire.

Western European elites did a remarkable job pushing through EU integration without much popular consultation. The recent setback for the euro by Danish voters raises once again old fears that this process is too technical to be understood and endorsed by ordinary voters. Demonstrating "the limits of democracy" in democracies still barely consolidated may not be an especially brilliant idea, however. Governments seeking EU integration need more help; and assistance in the integration process means adjusting resources to local constraints that differ so greatly from country to country.

EC spokesmen could reply that the poorest applicant countries do not have the capacity to absorb funds, and that they are always returning monies to the EU after being unable to spend them. This argument is rotten. What is lacking are not small grants mediated by a complicated grant-giving mechanism, but a commitment by Western governments to stimulate Western direct investment and other types of more-innovative aid, especially in the field of infrastructure. If local governments are unable to apply for EU grants it may well be because they still do not have computers, not to speak of the skills needed to respond to the bureaucratic requirements of a Phare application. The more the EU’s undifferentiated policy toward applicant countries persists the more the differences among these countries will increase, further diminishing the capacity of those severely constrained to ever satisfy the required criteria.

Sometimes, great things look messy if examined under a magnifying glass, and enlargement is no exception. In time, it may be the wisest thing Europe has ever done, or its greatest folly. So far it must be one of the grandest political projects ever pursued so half-heartedly. God forbid that the American critics are right, and that this is just the usual European way of doing things. The real question is whether Europe can get things done in the end, steering history its way, or if it is only writing its good intentions down, bureaucratically, in a too-precise orthography. Different histories for the different regions of Eastern Europe may still await us. Thus, bringing them to heel according to a common denominator may require more from all sides than what is already being done.

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is professor of political science at the Romanian National School of Government and Administration and director of the Romanian Academic Society, a policy institute in Bucharest.

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