Occidentalism in Romania

Written by: Golan

"We like bananas! We like jeans! We wanna go on luxurious vacations!" -A liberal Romanian citizen, amidst the 2024-2025 election crisis

It seems that much of Romanian political discourse has a certain fascination with the West. We have seen it in the anti-corruption movements of the 2010s, amongst the neoliberals, and it is even heard from the "sovereigntists" who see a role model in the USA's MAGA or who, before 2024, saw in the USA the source of every depravity. Either way, Romanian society has constructed an image of the West that does not really correspond to reality and that is more of a mask for the fantasies, hopes, anxieties and other projections of Romanians. Before the 2020s, it was even more evident that Romanians saw in the West a kind of Promised Land inhabited by vaguely spectral concepts like wealth, meritocracy, normalcy, education and so on.

By far, this is not a new phenomenon. Ever since the beginnings of modern Romanian national conscience, as early as the 19th century, Romanian elites who were working to establish the self-determination of Romania were looking towards Western Europe (France especially) for inspiration. The historically Latin origins of the Romanian people became a symbolic argument for their inclusion within the rest of the Western European family. Once Romania became a free nation-state, the elites began importing various institutions (including but not limited to universities, laws, constitutions, political principles and so on) from France. The problem was that Romania barely had the material basis for these imported (and imposed) institutions to work properly, as it was a mostly agrarian country, just coming out of feudalism. Titu Maiorescu described this phenomenon as forms without substance (forme fara fond). Of course, this was going to lead to severe social tensions between the elites and the majority of society, but I'm not here to talk about Romania's westabooism before WW1, and not even the one from the interwar period. What I wanted to point out is that the creation of a fantastic image of the West in the collective mind of Romanians is a phenomenon as old as Romanian modernity. These images, however, differ from period to period because of the differences in Romanians' collective desires.

Occidentalism (here, the images and symbols projected by Romanians onto the Western world) in Romania as we know it today starts some time after WW2, when Romanians were hoping the West was going to save them from Soviet imperialism. Of course, this never happened and the communist regime got into power swiftly because of the geopolitical context. Because of this, throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s, the West has been pretty much foreclosed from Romanian experience. After this, beginning with the mid to late 1960s, Nicolae Ceausescu got into power and started mimicking a sort of liberalization, even going as far as allowing some Western products and Western media into the country. This is significant because it allowed people in Socialist Romania to experience Western culture in a limited manner. This went even further when Ceausescu started "standing up" to the Soviet Union and associating himself with Western leaders (from the USA, France and the UK) beginning with 1968 and even throughout the 1970s. But as social and material conditions started to deteriorate in the 1970s, and even moreso in the 1980s, the West was once again being foreclosed from Romanian collective experience, save for official (captured, state-serving) and unofficial channels.

As such, only a handful of privileged apparatchiks could now see the West and at times bring in goods from there. The sight of even the packaging of Western commodities could arouse wonder in otherwise ignorant children. For the larger population, a certain TV series that was allowed in Socialist Romania at that time provided a dose of escapism from their cold and dull reality, making them covet what they saw as Western, American plenty, but also fostering a sense of inadecuacy. For others who might have been braver, accessing Western culture by way of illicitly via Radio Free Europe, the West became the image of freedom.

After 1989, Romanians started emigrating en masse to Western Europe in search of making better living conditions for themselves (especially in the 2000s and the 2010s). Following the creation of a more business-friendly environment within Romania, Romania joining the EU and the arrival of multiple Western multinational corporations, Romanians could now afford to live in better conditions while consumer goods became much more widely available. This created a significant middle class in Romania*, whose consciousness and culture was tied to a greater degree to the West. For the typical middle class (from the lower to the higher) kid, the West was imagined as a sort of promised land where everything was possible. For the urban middle class as a whole, the West became the image of normalcy, an idealized role model in which everything goes smoothly. A heavenly place where trains arrive on time, where no bribing takes place, where the air is cleaner, where people don't blast manele on full volume bluetooth speakers and don't litter, where rivers of milk and honey flow on the streets and so on.

These middle class Romanians tend to support neoliberal agendas and to have a submissive view in regards to the West (this was moreso the case in the past). Romanian Occidentalism has two imaginary poles: the West as a fetishized image of normalcy and a place of full of civillized, smart, morally upright people, and Romania (especially rural, suburban and small urban Romania) as a primitive inadequate entity, full of uneducated and immoral people that completely lack a civic spirit. This complex causes a certain degree of resentment in a certain segment of the urban middle class towards the lower classes of rural, suburban and small urban areas driven by the belief that they are incapable of making "good" political choices. Not only that, the corruption and clientelist relations that developed in these regions of Romania are seen by this urban middle class more as a moral failing. The anti-corruption movement of the 2010s was spearheaded by this liberal middle class, and while throughout 2017-2019 they managed to punish a handful of corrupt figureheads, the #REZIST project was ultimately proven impotent because it did not cause long-lasting structural change.

During the late 2010s and throughout the 2020s up until 2024 (the aftermath of the #REZIST movement and of the COVID pandemic), Russian and populistic propaganda in Romania started to intensify even amongst the middle class, contributing to the Romanian sovereigntist current as we know it today. An important role in this wave was also played by neo-protestant churches, supported by their bigger sisters in the US, importing culture war narratives into Romania. The original Occidentalist complex we discussed was inverted in the discourse of this local far right represented by parties like AUR and SOS, where the West was seen as the ultimate bastion of depravity, degeneration and oppression against Romanians. This image shifted in 2024 after the re-election of Donald "Orange Man" Trump in the USA and the whole Georgescu fiasco that took place, and now the USA was again being seen as a model for the desired "traditionalist" society of the sovereigntists. The image of the West in Romania is now split between America and Europe. For the liberals, Western Europe remains an important idol while the USA is repudiated. Vice-versa for the conservatives. What we see throughout all of these shifts is that Romanians still demand a sort of recognition of this higher entity. Another thing that remains constant is the middle class anxiety that fuels everything.

While there are many images of the West, they still walk in pretty much the same subservient manner. They import culture war slop from the West with all of its fictitious problems. On an end note, refering to a specific kind of Westernized political discourse in Romania, the parties who pride themselves on being anti-globalist are themselves the products of globalism.