Habilitation_thesis

Abstract

This habilitation treatise presents the direction of my academic activity after the year 2011, when I have defended my doctoral thesis within the BabeČ™-Bolyai university, under the coordination of professor Michael Shafir. The major research fields I have been active ever since, but also before obtaining the doctor title, are political ideologies, recent history and international relations.1 Until now, the results of my research activity have led to the publication of 6 books as single author, 3 edited books (one with two other editors), 9 book chapters, 4 articles in ISI indexed journals, 3 of them as single author, 46 article in journals indexed in international databases, 3 articles in journals recognized by the CNCS, 2 article in conference volumes, 41 book reviews, 43 international scientific conferences and 20 national scientific conferences. My books were reviewed 28 times, and my scientific works were quoted in 85 books, manuals, book chapters, scientific articles and cultural magazines, a fact which provided me with a certain national notoriety, respectively an international notoriety in the process of consolidation. Next, I will present, separated on major themes, the research I have conducted after I have defended my doctoral thesis. I will start with a concept developed in the book based on my doctoral thesis, that of romantic Leninism, after which I will present a theoretical analysis of the international orientation of communist Romania. Further, I will insist on a new concept, that of pseudo-hegemonic nationalism, respectively on the distinction between party and state within the Romanian communist regime after 1965, an ideological and political distinction that also has major philosophical implications. The next section of the treatise will bring into discussion research topics connected with those mentioned above, like Romanian post-communism, Hegelian political philosophy and European studies. Finally, the last section takes into account scientific subjects I intend to fathom in the near future.

1

The present habilitation treatise contains fragments from books and articles that I have published as a single author. Those sources are explicitly mentioned within the text. The treatise is not a scientific work and it is not intended for publication.

1

Rezumat Această teză de abilitare reprezintă parcursul activității mele academice de după 2011, an în care am susținut teza doctorală în cadrul universității Babeș-Bolyai din Cluj-Napoca, sub coordonarea profesorului emerit Michael Shafir. Domeniile de cercetare majore în care activez de atunci încoace, dar asupra cărora m-am aplecat și înainte de obținerea titlului de doctor, sunt ideologiile politice, istoria recentă și relațiile internaționale2. Până în prezent, rezultatele activității mele de cercetare s-au concretizat în publicarea a 6 cărți de unic autor, 3 cărți de editor (dintre care una împreună cu alți doi editori), 9 capitole de carte, 4 articole în reviste indexate ISI, dintre care 3 de unic autor, 46 de articole în reviste indexate BDI, 3 articole în reviste recunoscute CNCS, 2 articole în volume reunind prezentări comunicate la conferințe, 41 de recenzii de carte, 43 de conferințe științifice internaționale și 20 de conferințe științifice naționale. Cărțile mele au fost recenzate de 28 de ori, iar lucrările științifice au fost citate în 85 de cărți, manuale, capitole de cărți, articole științifice și reviste culturale, fapt care mi-a conferit o anumită notorietate națională, respectiv una internațională în curs de consolidare. În continuare voi prezenta, defalcată pe teme, cercetarea pe am efectuat-o în perioada de după susținerea tezei doctorale. Voi începe cu un concept dezvoltat în cartea care are la bază teza doctorală, acela de leninism romantic, după care voi prezenta o analiză teoretică a orientării internaționale a României comuniste. Mai departe voi insista asupra unui nou concept, acela de nationalism pseudo-hegemonic, respectiv asupra distincției dintre partid și stat în cadrul regimului comunist român de după 1965, distincție ideologică și politică având de asemenea implicații filosofice majore. Următoarea secțiune a lucrării va aduce în discuție teme de cercetare conexe cu cele mai sus menționate, cum ar fi postcomunismul românesc, filosofia politică hegeliană și studiile europene. În sfârșit, ultima secțiune are în vedere subiecte științifice pe care intenționez să le aprofundez în viitorul apropiat.

Prezenta teză de abilitare cuprinde fragmente din cărți și articole științifice pe care le-am publicat în calitate de unic autor. Sursele respective sunt menționate în text în mod explicit. Lucrarea nu are un caracter științific și nici nu este destinată publicării.

2

2

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Scientific and professional results 2.1. The concept of romantic Leninism 2.2. Communist Romania’s international relations – theoretical analysis 2.3. The concept of pseudo-hegemonic nationalism 2.4. Party and state in Ceaușescu’s Romania: an ambiguous and challenging relation

3. Other topics 3.1. Romanian postcommunism 3.2. Hegelian political philosophy 3.3. European studies

4. Career development plan 4.1. Youth in communist Romania, 1965-1989 4.2. The resurgence of undemocratic ideologies in contemporary Romania 4.3. The dialectic of possibility. Two centuries of Hegelian political philosophy 4.4. Eurasianism and neo-Eurasianism 4.5. Eurocommunism: theory and history 4.6. Final remarks

3

1. Introduction This habilitation treatise presents my scientific achievements after defending my doctoral thesis in the year 2011. The thesis was coordinated by professor Michael Shafir and is entitled Genesis of romantic Leninism. A theoretical perspective over the international orientation of Romanian communism, 1948-1989. It was defended at the Babeș-Bolyai university, Cluj-Napoca. The thesis uses an interdisciplinary approach, involving conceptual history, ideological and critical discourse analysis and some of the main theories of international relations in order to offer a new perspective regarding communist Romania’s international relations. After defending the thesis, I have received a doctorate in International Relations and European Studies. The research topics pursued following the defense of the doctoral thesis stressed the ideological and philosophical dimensions of Romanian communism, especially after 1965. I will now present these scientific findings systematically.

2. Scientific and professional results

2.1.The concept of romantic Leninism One year after receiving my doctorate, I have published a considerably expanded and revised version of the thesis under the same title, Genesis of romantic Leninism. A theoretical perspective over the international orientation of Romanian communism, 1948-1989 (Institutul European Publishing House, Jassy, 2012). In order to advance the concept of romantic Leninism, which is theoretically circumscribed to communist Romania during the Ceaușescu regime, I have theorized a number of similar concepts, derived from the ideology and political practice of the Soviet Union.

Introduction The most important mark left upon the 20th century was that of Lenin and Leninism (Gellately: 2008). The teachings of the man who stands as a symbol for the Bolshevik revolution represented the ideocratic matrix that gave birth to Fascism, a twin ideocracy and basically a “socialist heresy” (Muravchik: 2004) – and stood at the core of all metamorphoses experienced by Soviet Leninism.

The relationship between Marxism and Leninism is a very delicate and much debated one. Did Lenin put into practice the essential teachings of Marx, or did he mostly distort them? I incline toward the second explanation, although I am not trying to deny that there is 4

a certain undeniable filiation between Marx and Lenin. First of all, we have to understand that Marx was a German philosopher, very prone to action indeed, but still a philosopher, while Lenin was a half-learned political activist. Marx’s philosophy was open, autoreflexive, based on empirical findings, with a strong sense of morality and social responsibility (Popper: 2005, 270), while Lenin’s ideology was closed, dogmatic, indifferent to empirical realities and amoral, rejecting dialogue, compromise and negotiations as bourgeois categories that undermine the revolutionary conscience of the proletariat (Lenin: 1946). One must primarily take into account that, unlike Marx, Lenin belonged to what in Eastern Europe and especially in tsarist Russia was called the intelligentsia; a group of intellectuals with radical democratic ideas, persecuted by the political regime and not understood, indeed even rejected, by the very peasant people it tried to illuminate. Therefore, along the second half of the 19th century, the Russian intelligentsia went through a process of radicalization and gradually developed a messianic sense of its mission, closing itself to inter-social dialogue and empirical realities. The intelligentsia members turned ideas into weapons, amputating their critical and auto-reflexive functions; most of them became terrorists, opting for a shock-therapy to immediately and radically cure Russia from its social and political backwardness. Even Marx complained, in the last years of his life, that his Capital was wrongly interpreted by Russian social-democrats (Berdiaev: 1994; Besançon: 1993; for an analysis of Russian intelligentsia see Pomper: 1993). This was the socialintellectual milieu that gave birth to Lenin and Leninism: highly different from the warmly bourgeois and intellectual atmosphere in which young Marx grew up.

Revolutionary Leninism By revolutionary Leninism I understand the teachings and actions of Lenin himself, not the enormous mystifications that his image and his books became subject to right after his death.

From the Bolshevik-Menshevik split (1903) to the October Revolution and (partially) to Lenin’s death, Leninism was, truistic as it may sound, a powerful, revolutionary movement.

It was hugely emancipatory: for workers, who saluted it as an end to tsarist oppression and a promise of a better life, for peasants, who were promised the object of their all-time dream, land, and received it for several years, only to be confiscated by the state starting with 1928, when Stalin launched the collectivization process. But it was Lenin who argued in the first place that the land must be collectivized because peasants engaged in free trade activities are actively supporting capitalism and undermining the revolution. Other social categories who benefited from the revolution were artists and women. Cultural activities were experiencing 5

a blooming effervescence once the tsarist censorship was abolished, while women, led especially by the famous Bolshevik lady Alexandra Kollontai, were ostentatiously affirming their newly found emancipated identity consisting of civil rights and social-political equality with men (Figes: 1998).

Post-Revolutionary Leninism This concept covers what in Soviet history is usually known as Stalinism. Stalinism is often understood as an extreme bureaucratization of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and a total loss of revolutionary ferment. The most frequent argument sustaining this hypothesis is Stalin’s “socialism in one country,” an ideological innovation aimed to stabilize and consolidate the young Soviet regime. If Lenin believed and struggled for a simultaneous revolution in the most developed European countries as a condition for the survival of the Russian revolution and the victory of the global one, after his death this kind of wishful thinking made room for harsher political realities. Stalin did not renounce the aim of achieving global communist revolution, but argued that this must be done progressively, taking into account the unequal contradictions which undermine capitalism – and starting from a revolutionary center, namely the Soviet Union.

“What else is our country, that of «socialism under construction», if not the basis of world revolution? But can it be a real basis of world revolution if it is not capable of building the socialist society? Can it remain the greatest attraction center for workers of all countries, as it undoubtedly is now; if it is not capable to defeat, within its own borders, the capitalist elements from its economy, to victoriously construct socialism? I believe not! But does it not follow from here that distrust in the victory of constructing socialism, preaching this distrust leads to discrediting our country as a basis of world revolution, and that discrediting our country leads to the weakening of the world revolutionary movement?” (Stalin: 1952a, 146).

Europeanized Leninism versus Asianized Leninism: the Sino-Soviet conflict and its devastating effect over the revolutionary substance of Leninism After Stalin, the Soviet Union and the whole communist world went through major changes.

So did Leninism. De-Stalinization, “peaceful coexistence”, “state of all people”, all these new ideological conceptions advanced by Nikita Khrushchev reflected a “de-radicalization” of Leninism, to use another concept developed by Robert Tucker (Tucker: 1969, 187-188).

The new Soviet leader was truly committed to Leninism and tried to restore what he believed 6

to be its original essence, eliminating in the process the Stalinist perversion of Leninism (Crankshaw: 1971, 3-9). He was described by Andrei Grachev, a former foreign policy advisor of Gorbachev, as “the last sincere believer in the possible of the world communist cause”; after his removal in the autumn of 1964, “the ideological dimension of Soviet foreign policy was gradually reduced to rhetoric and propaganda”, while the political factors became now the most important ones.

Of course, rhetoric devoted to the continuous advance of the “world revolutionary process” still could be heard in the public statements of Soviet leaders and continued to occupy an honorable place in the political reports of the General Secretary to Party congresses. Yet it was mostly meant for internal consumption and used as one of the elements of the stabilization mechanism of the system. It was increasingly evident that the actual foreign policy of the Soviet Union, although maintaining some relation to its ideological origin, had sacrificed its revolutionary ambition for the sake of great power pragmatism (Grachev: 2008, 12-13).

Showing (sometimes) a certain degree of political responsibility, Khrushchev understood that a violent confrontation between Socialism and Capitalism (as Lenin theorized) within the new, nuclear international context, would be catastrophic, endangering the idea of communism itself. This did not mean a renunciation of the ideological confrontation between the two “camps” of the Cold War, but rather the extrapolation of the struggle from the political and military field to that of economic, social and cultural competition. Khrushchev, a convinced Leninist, really believed that odds were on his side.

Although retrospectively proved wrong, his legacy of Europeanized Leninism played a major role within the internal economy of the ideocratic concept.

Relaxing the international ideological tension, inclining toward Western political values like negotiations and compromise, taking the European Common Market as a model while nevertheless competing with it, trying to restore “legalist socialism”, freeing from Gulags or rehabilitating some 20 million people and diminishing control over East European satellite regimes (Taubman: 2005), renouncing thus the “intrasystemic” perspective for the “intersystemic” one (Shafir în McCauley: 1987, 156-158) – are reason enough for naming Khruschevite Leninism “Europeanized Leninism.”

Leninism, even in the era of Lenin, but most visibly in the era of Stalin, needed a strong centre from which to launch its assault over reality. If Leninism as an ideology is somehow flexible, adapting itself to the particularities of the society it plans to assault, Leninism as revolutionary discipline must by firmly rooted in one single centre. This is the 7

meaning of “democratic centralism”: party members are allowed to debate and criticize until a common decision is made; after that, no further debates are permitted, for they can only be counter-revolutionary because they undermine the “unity of action” and the sheer efficiency of the party itself. The Moscow centre trough which Leninism started its assault over “bourgeois” reality, trying desperately to replace it with its own, phantasmagorical, ideologized reality – found itself contested, in the beginning of the 60’s, by an alternative Beijing center. Another “autonomous” Leninist regime was competing with the classical centre in order to win supremacy over international communism. A truly unique situation that would end in the implosion of any remaining revolutionary substance in Leninism (Copilaș: 2009b, 89-111).

Asianized Leninism despised Europeanized Leninism as an ideological capitulation in the confrontation with global Capitalism (or imperialism, in a more vilified, Leninist sense). It stood for a total rejection of compromise with the enemy and it cynically claimed it was not afraid of war, even nuclear: even if half the earth’s population would have died, Mao Zedong argued, imperialism would have been defeated and the remaining half could safely advance toward communism. Moreover, the Soviet Union was harshly accused of renouncing the struggle for global revolution, of boycotting it in other Leninist regimes (like China) and of becoming revisionist because of its recent endorsement of the Eurocommunist thesis that under certain conditions, societies might become socialist by parliamentary paths rather than violent revolution. For the Chinese this was tantamount to the betrayal of Leninism. In turn, the Soviets accused the Chinese of “leftism”, a danger Lenin had warned agains in his writings and consisting of romantic revolutionary intransigence that might imperil the success of the revolution itself (Copilaș: 2009b, 97-102).

Who won? No one. Who lost? Leninism. The force and the prestige of the international communist movement was irremediably affected, and its (even formal) unity forever lost. The revolutionary substance of Leninism was gone. Still, it continued to exist in wholly unprecedented forms, just like it does today.

Systemic Leninism To begin with, systemic Leninism seems to be a conceptual contradiction. And it is a contradiction, an ideological oxymoron to be precise. How can Leninism be systemic, when its sheer essence is above all revolutionary? Can we still talk about Leninism without referring to revolutionary texture? I believe so, even if we have to understand that, from now

8

on and until the Soviet Union’s implosion, we are talking more or less about emasculated Leninism.

By systemic Leninism I mean the ideology of the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era, especially the period that started with the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe and continued into the early 80’s. It was now that, strange as it might appear, Leninism developed characteristics that brought it very close to conservative politics.

Classical, revolutionary Leninism was dead and buried; it was replaced by a surrogate of Leninism, a petrified, empty shell of ideological hyper-dogmatism, excessive bureaucratization and “bourgeois” commodity that paralyzed (almost) all party members.

The revolutionary consciousness was gone, although impulses of revolutionary Leninism were still to be found within the old Stalinist, even Leninist guard.3

Post-Bolshevik Leninism Post-Bolshevik Leninism defined its ideological identity by sharply opposing systemic Leninism and post-revolutionary Leninism. “Socialism must be freed from all that is pseudosocialist, from all distortions and deformations stemming from the personality’s cult period (i.e., Stalinism), from the period of command system domination, from stagnation, we must give back its authentically Leninist sense.” (Gorbaciov: 1988b, 17; see also Gorbaciov: 1987a, 7-25; Gorbaciov: 1988a, 13-15; O nouă viziune...: 1988, 27-29). At the same time, it tried to push Europeanized Leninism to “go all the way” to reaching and applying the ultimate consequences deriving from it. Chernenko’s successor never stopped claiming that he was a “child of the 20th Congress” (Taubman: 2005, 648; Gorbaciov: 1988c, 26).

Gorbachev’s domestic and foreign initiatives were authentically reformist and, most important, were not necessarily induced from outside by coercive actions (American republicanism - Beschloss, Talbott: 1994), but from a restless internal struggle to reimagine the Leninist identity on the eve of the 21st century. “The extraordinary political moves, the proposals for unexpected compromise, the unilateral gestures and concessions all would have been inconceivable in the framework of the traditional logic of superpower 3

Viaceslav Molotov vehemently blames, in his conversations with journalist Felix Chuev, the loss of revolutionary Leninism. At “the XXIVth party Congress”, held in 1971, Leonid Brezhnev stated: “«We can now enjoy breathing freely, working well and living calmly. » The «living calmly» part was particularly addressed to the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks could not accept that. With people enjoying a calm life, the Bolsheviks are no longer needed. They become totally unnecessary. The Bolsheviks are always in the thick of the fray, leading the people, overcoming obstacles. For what would they be needed if life proceeded calmly?

The Social Democrats would be much more appropriate. They would be perfectly suited. They would submit, so to speak, to this spontaneous movement of capitalism”. Chuev, Molotov remembers, 222. This quote is perfectly illustrative of what Robert Tucker means by “mass-movement regimes”.

9

confrontation.” (Grachev: 2008, 6). Or, in Gorbachev’s own words, “today’s world has become too small and fragile for wars and power politics” (Gorbaciov: 1986, 83).

Post-Bolshevik Leninism’s vigorous appeals for “democratizatsiya” and “new thinking” in internal affairs and “reasonable sufficiency” in international relations were doubled by deep cultural and institutional reforms: glasnost and perestroika. Why did they fail? Was Leninism too crippled to be reformed? Not necessarily. The problem was that Gorbachev tried a colossal reform of Leninism using non-Bolshevik ways. For the first time in its history, Leninism voluntarily abandoned “democratic centralism”: criticism could be spoken openly, even against the party and its decisions. This “bourgeois” freedom of criticism corroded Leninism from inside so fast and so complete that it virtually amazed all its observers. Furthermore, again for the first time in history, Leninism tried to reform itself from the inside, not adapt itself to the particularities of the bourgeois societies it was meant to assault. In fact, post-Bolshevik Leninism voluntarily renounced its assault on “bourgeois” reality: it chose to emasculate itself. As Stephen Senfield put it, “«Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ has enabled moral absolutism to establish a precarious foothold in the fortress of official ideology»” (Senfield în Brown: 1997, 222). As I intend to prove, post-Bolshevik Leninism did considerably more than that: it openly embraced what can be called “bourgeois ‘moral absolutism’”.

How? First by renouncing the aim of global revolution. At the CPSU’s 27th Congress, held in 1986, Gorbachev clearly stated that “stimulating revolutions from outside, the more so with military means, is useless and inadmissible” (Emphasis mine)” (Gorbaciov: 1986, 15; see also Gorbaciov: 1987b, 110-121). In Archie Brown’s words, “Gorbachev, with his new emphasis on global concerns and universal values, was, in effect, abandoning the idea of a final victory of Communism and legitimizing both a political and economic diversity and an international co-operation which transcended ideological divisions” (Brown: 1997, 223-224). Furthermore, post-Bolshevik Leninism renounced “the revolutionary conquests of socialism” like East Germany (Gorbaciov: 1994, 119-132; 249-252) and finally the whole of Eastern Europe. That would have been an inconceivable gesture for all other varieties of Leninism analyzed here.

Second, post-Bolshevik Leninism centered its program on humans as individualities rather than on humans as societies. The anthropological approach of revolutionary Leninism and its successive forms was thus turned upside down. This “humanistic universalism” (Brown: 1997, 221), as Archie Brown referred to it, was understood by Gorbachev as it follows: “We see socialism as a system of authentic, real humanism, in which’s conditions 10

man appears effectively as ‘the measure of all things’. The whole development of society, starting with economy and ending with the ideological-spiritual sphere is oriented toward the satisfaction of man’s needs, toward its multilateral development, all these being done through the work, creation, energy of the people themselves” (Gorbaciov: 1988c, 90). For an old Bolshevik like Viacheslav Molotov, post-Bolshevik Leninism closely resembled the “Bukharinist deviation”. He loudly and prophetically condemned this kind of humanism that was outlined by Khrushchev as “petty bourgeois philistinism” (Chuev: 1993, 362) and unambiguously declared, proving his revolutionary-Leninist formation: “There can be only one range goal if we are to move forward: only international revolution. There is nothing, no alternative, more reliable than this” (Chuev: 1993, 389-390).

To conclude, post-Bolshevik Leninism tried to preserve institutional Leninism while renouncing its fundamental revolutionary sense: world revolution. It succumbed to “bourgeois” morality, or, better said, it joyfully adopted it and, simultaneously abandoned “democratic centralism”, the Leninist principle that states that, within the framework of the (Bolshevik) party, criticism and debates are allowed, even encouraged to a certain extent, but only until a decision is made. After that, criticism is strictly forbidden because it weakens the party and its “unity of action”, disorientates it and gradually drives it away from its final aim: revolution and, subsequently, global revolution. In the backwash of Soviet collapse, Gorbachev even abolished the CPSU; institutionally, this was his most post-Bolshevik gesture (Judt: 2008, Brown: 1997). These are the main reasons that led me to conclude that, in the Gorbachev era, Leninism became post-Bolshevik. Citing Archie Brown once again, “Gorbachev retained an idealized view of Lenin while departing more and more from the essentials of Leninism” (Brown: 1997, 223).

Looking at what he calls ‘Leninist regimes’, Kenneth Jowitt reaches a series of interesting and scientifically fertile conclusions. In his acception, communist parties can be understood as ‘fortresses’ that insulate themselves to the exterior world in order to maintain their revolutionary purity and trying in the same time to extend it over the society in which they act and, after that, over the whole world. The ideological component of Leninist parties and, in case they reach power, regimes, represents the quintessence of the way in which they think and act: legitimacy is always placed in a future that only the party is entitled to know and build, manifesting itself as a depository of the ‘scientific laws’ and ‘historical forces’ that implacably govern human development. The Leninist phenomenon considers itself and pretends to be considered scientifical, but it only proves its pseudo-scientific character, as Alain Besançon shows. Unlike fascist regimes, were the leader, (führer) represents the main 11

guarantor of the party, which exists and acts only like his institutionalized will, in the Leninist regimes, the party is on the first place (Jowitt: 1993). Of course, in the case of the majority of Leninist regimes, the role of the party has progressively estompated with reference to its general secretary; furthermore, having to survive in an ideologically hostile world were the chances of the global revolution diminished in geometrical proportion, Leninist regimes have encompassed nationalist elements, pretending to have epurated it from its ‘bourgeois’ excrescencies. In this sense, the adaptation of different Leninisms to an invariable ‘bourgeois’ world translates itself to their progressive, conscious or unconscious, fascization.

By romantic Leninism I understand the ideology of the Romanian communist regime after 1965, visible especially after 1971, the year of the ‘July theses’. Unlike other types of Leninism, which renounced the revolutionary spirit and preferred to live together with ‘imperialism’, which they approached more politically than ideologically – romantic Leninism has gradually radicalized itself, and isolated itself in order to be protected from the ‘bourgeois’ ideological flux from the second half of the 20th century, which undermined its revolutionary project. Why romantic? Ceausescu had a permanent romantic vision over Romania’s past, composed in his optic by heroes which articulated great and glorious moments in order to affirm the Romanian presence in European politics and culture, possessing also an extreme nationalism. He often compared RCP with ‘Prince Charming’, fighting an epic battle against ‘the dragons of the modern world’, all subsumed to the much detested imperialism (Plenara Comitetului Central...: 1971, 66-68). But romantic Leninism is not equivalent to Ceausescu’s thinking, although it was massive boosted by its psychology.

No. The entire propagandistic apparatus of the RCP, the military thinking developed in the RSS, on its turn nationalistic, the nationalist prejudices of the population itself – all these categories are part of romantic Leninism, an ideological construct ‘from above’, based on the recovery and the ‘Leninization’ of some mental structures that incorporate to the present day a persistent nationalism, maturated over the centuries – therefore ‘from below’. Even if many of the RCP activists were, using the vocabulary of the time, opportunists, the permanent propaganda, developed over decades, has surely inoculated them romantic Leninist cognitive patterns. Furthermore, Ceausescu knew how to plan in advance its political ascension. Responsible, at the beginning of the 60’s, with the personal policies of the regime, the future general secretary of RCP benefited by the advantages of its important position, placing in key posts, both at party and state level, his protégées. After coming to power, Ceausescu transformed this practice into a basic rule of political advancement in the 12

RSR. In this way, the nomenclatura had the interest to support him in order to keep and increase its privileges. During this time, official propaganda was, beside an instrument of power, adapted to the political necessity of the moment, RCP’s Weltanschauung.

Romantic Leninism, a combination f Leninism (the sacrosanct role of the party, the material and ideological construction of socialism, permanently projective) and nationalism (usually named ‘revolutionary socialist patriotism’, but which, without possessing the power to convince the population of its differences with ratio to the ‘bourgeois’ nationalism and appealing, in the same time, paradoxically, just to the latent and funciar nationalism of the society, ended up in a paranoid and vulgar xenophoby) – tried to offer a new identity to the Romanian society in order to ermetize it with reference to the scale the ‘bourgeois’ spirit took outside the borders of the country, even in the other Leninist regimes like Yugoslavia, Hungary or the Soviet Union during Brezhnev’s and especially Gorbachev’s leadership. A ‘paramodern’ identity, in which material modernity (economic and technological development, positivist attitudes) coexists with values of German romanticism (a movement that, one century later, anticipated fascism), totally antimodern: social and axiological hierarchy, the perceivement of politics as a organic relations between rules and ruled, based on ‘love’, the lifting of individual heroism and the constitution of a world of moral and spiritual heroes etc (Râmbu: 2001). Exactly what the formation of the ‘new man’ aimed, having a ‘socialist consciousness’, capable and willing to construct socialism in the romantic-Leninist version.

On the other hand, romantic Leninism was always pragmatic, massively collaborating with capitalist states. But in this case, what mattered was not the collaboration I itself, but the possibility that its advantages would transfor RSS in an ‘average developed coutry’, internationally stronger and therefore able to resist the challenges of an essentiallt ‘bourgeois world. For Ceausescu, as for Mao, the revolutions of the third world seemed the basic political force of the future, which could eventually overcome ‘imperialism’.

Ideologically, romantic Leninism has made permanent efforts to counter the international ‘bourgeois’ threat, visible especially during the 70’s trough the human rights concept.

Between 1965 and 1989, Romanian foreign policy was based on two major coordinates. The first, calculated dissidence, was already discussed in the previous chapter.

The concepts refers to the exploitation of Bucharest’s autonomous policy within the ‘socialist camp’ in order to obtain image capital, fonds and political support from the West, along with this support to force economic concessions and political tolerance from Moscow.

But, progressively, especially in the last decade of the regime, calculated dissidence reversed 13

its landmarks: as the human rights obtain a more and more important position on the international stage, and most communist countries tacitly tolerate them, within certain limits, in their original, ‘bourgeois’ sense, the RSS will maintain its Leninist acception over the concept, romantically indulging itself in this perdant posture. The West is no longer willing to have commercial relations with a dictatorial regime, which hardly respects its payments and which, despite the abundant democratic rhetoric it offers on any occasion, stubbornly refuses to obey it practically. Trying to ensure the resources for a hypertrophied industry, Ceausescu will shyly reaproach the Soviet Union. But the ‘wondering son’ will not really return home: it will rather walk in front of the garden, pretending sulky that it will enter only when it could impose its own rules. In other words, in the 80’s, Ceausescu’s dissidence was aimed rather towards the West (considered always an enemy) than the ‘socialist camp’, where it tried on every occasion to impose its ‘independent’ point of view. But the ‘brotherly countries’ did not forget Bucharest’s chicanes in foreign policy, and were not having a special interest to welcome in the ‘camp’ a state which did not admit any behavior standards but its own. Furthermore, Gorbachev deprived Ceausescu of its reformist image. Thus, alculated dissidence will end up losing its sense and being hostile to both the ‘imperialist’, respectively ‘socialist camp’.

On the other hand, prestige diplomacy represents on its turn a relatively independent component of calculated dissidence, but without having its pragmatic substrate. An example in this sense is Romania’s decision to get involved in the Vietnam War as mediator. ‘One day, when I was working with Ion Gheorghe Maurer at his home’, Paul Niculescu-Mizil remembers, ‘N. Ceausescu called and informed on new events in Vietnam, events which wrer the object of our analysis. Without my will, I have attended to that telephonic converstion. Ion Gheorghe Maurer offered the solution on spot: «I have understood, we need to be in the area» (emphasis in original)’. For Mizil, the expression was a pun and it was utilized ‘when the situation did not allow us to stay impassible and asked for new measures, respectively our presence in Vietnam or USA’ (Niculescu-Mizil: 2008, 32). By ‘being in the area’ I understand something else. Namely, RSS’s intention to be present in the majority of hot spots on the globe without having the possibility to truly contribute with solutions to the problems. Actually, Bucharest’s intention was very different: to be as most visible as possible on the international relations stage and to derive as many advantages as possible from this aspect. Last but not least, the heroic-romantic posture which the regime displayed externally corresponded both to the image it will make of itself and to the image it wished to ‘sell’ the West.

14

Once the phase of conceptual and political consolidation was over, trough the passing from symbolic to manifest, romantic Leninism will make everything possible to make its presence felt in the world. It will try to amplify and improve its image in the West, miming democratic ideas and values in order to undermine the ‘imperialist’ discourse, turning them into weapons inserted into its own ideological logic. Also, it will try to affirm itself especially in the Third World, trying to become a non-Western developmental model and competing in this way, although at a lower level, with much more imposing Leninist regimes, as the Soviet Union or China.

Over the eight decades of the previous century, the international orientation of the RSS kept its pragmatic print: calculated dissidence ca be considered in this period as the main moving force of Bucharest’s foreign policy. But, progressively, the end of the 70’s brings forward a visible deterioration of the regime’s global image. The persecution of the few dissidents and the Western asyle of Ion Mihai Pacepa, the head of Romanian intelligence service, will contribute to the partial worsening of Ceausescu’s international prestige.

Furthermore, Jimmy Carter’s presidency revalorized human rights as an American instrument of foreign policy. This ideological boost of ‘imperialism’ will shake the scaffolding of romantic Leninism, consuming it slowly. Human rights will be legitimized, in their ‘bourgeois’ version, by the ‘socialst camp’ once the Helsinki accords were signed in 1975. International communism made therefore a major concession to Western philosophy, gaining in return the recognition of the postwar geopolitical statu-quo, namely the official acceptance of Eastern Europe’s communization. But on long term, the ideological price will turn out to be greater than the geopolitical benefits, as the Leninist regimes, although lacking by now the revolutionary impetus, were dealing harder and harder with their societies claim to confirm human rights: the ‘bourgeois’ internal tendencies obtained a new impulse.

With all these, the reputation of RSS’s foreign policy in the West will be truly damaged only in the next decade. But during the 70’s, RSS will multiply its economic relations with the United States and the European Community, with the World bank and the Monetary International Fund; politically, it will try to impose itself in the Third World.

Regarding its contacts with Moscow and the East-European Leninist regimes, there are no major difference with ratio to the orientation already assumed: calculated dissidence will maintain its positions. One major problem romantic Leninism had to face in this decade resided in the impossibility to successfully counter the tendencies, information sources and the atractivity of the West, which fully manifested within the society. The process lead to the ideological strengthening of romantic Leninism, which’s intransigence towards the 15

‘bourgeois’ spirit will consequently amplify. RSS’s position at the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) and with reference to the Helsinki accords confirm this.

Unlike systemic Leninism, which only reacted to the Western ideological offensive, therefore proving the loss of its revolutionary substance, romantic Leninism successfully took the terms of Western discourse and gave them a new sense. Romantic Leninism articulated a counter-discourse in order to de-legitimize the Western discourse, using its terms in a Leninist sense, not ‘bourgeois’ sense, as they were originally intended. In other words, romantic Leninism did not resign in front of the Western ideological advance, as systemic Leninism did, but acted against it with every means. It preserved therefore its revolutionary substance, and in time, instead of losing it, as the other east-European Leninist regimes did, amplified it: Ceausescu’s personality cult represented, as Mary Ellen Fischer has noticed (1989), only a prophylactic reaction against the stubborn society which did not accept its projects: romantic Leninism therefore narrows its action base, restraining its ideological terrain around the ‘conscience’ and ‘revolutionary vigilance’ of its main architect, Nicolae Ceausescu.

In the last decade of existence, RSR entered in obscurity from the international policy point of view, while in the internal policy, PCR was experiencing new and unsuspected stages of radicalization. A fortiori, romantic Leninism, the regime’s official ideology, became more revolutionary as the communism principles were eroding themselves fast in the Eastern Europe and, starting the second half of the 80’s, in The Soviet Union itself.

In this period, the RSS will see itself confronted with a large and varied series of dilemmas. Externally, the Polish crises, which will begin in 1980 and will end in December 1981 with the declaration of the martial law by the new leader of Warsaw, general Jaruzelski – it will concern Bucharest, he was still hopping in a typical ending for such situations in the Leninist regimes: the brutal intervention of the leadership, the arresting of the protagonists and intimidation of the population for preventing the incidence of such gestures in the future.

What has really happened, in the first phase; but after, the situation will take an insolate turn, inconceivable for the PCR leadership: Solidarity syndicate will undermine gradually and effectively the legitimacy pillars of the Polish Leninism, becoming to be invited, in few years, at the discussions for making a new government. Ceausescu was totally confused by the evolution of what it might be called the polish problem. Violating the foreign policy principles under which he gained the foreign reputation, “ different ways of building the socialism”, “non-interference in internal affairs”, “quitting at force or threat with force” etc.

-

the PCR leader suggested to Gorbachev to intervene armed in Poland to eliminate the 16

threat of removing from power the communist regime. The same way, he gave Jaruzelski to understand that he is willing to send military contingent to stabilize the situation and defend the polish socialism. Both refused him, fact which certainly strengthened the Romanian leader believes that "the socialist camp" knows a process of metamorphosis which puts into question his own existence. Consequently, the romantic Leninism will become more intransigent, concomitant with the rapid retrospective dissolution of global Leninism.

The greatest international and ideological threat for romantic Leninism will come from the part of the Gorbachev’s regime or of the post-Bolshevik Leninism. In the first case, the Soviet leader will adopt the same kind of pacifist speech in the foreign policy plan but, unlike his Romanian counterpart, he will inspire a new content, "bourgeois", social democratic rather than Leninist (see Brown: 1997, 115-116, 138). Which meant that Gorbachev was going to agree with ‘imperialism’ hic et nunc, not condemn it preemptory for political, propagandistic and ideological reasons. In the vocabulary of the young and energetic successor of Konstantin Cernenko, “democracy”, “freedom” and “human rights” were irretrievably losing their Leninist sense, embracing the “bourgeois” one. Finding the possibility of a discursive common denominator with the Occident, Gorbachev eclipsed Ceausescu, faithful until the end to the Leninist Weltanschauung. In addition, the fact that the new soviet leader renounced in silence at the global revolution principles, at the “democratic centralism” and, last but not least, at the army guaranty of the East-European regimes stability, the most important element in understanding the revolutionary journey consumed in 1989 – profoundly intensified the fears of Ceausescu.

Finally, the romantic Leninism will turn into a pariah both for the “imperialist camp”, because of its hostility declared to the democracy and the humanitarian principles, and for the communist world, where the Leninist ideology, recalibrated over seven decades in the case of Moscow and have of century for the satellite regimes, was disintegrating fast. The philosophy of "bourgeois" won, and the “fortress” parties (Jowitt: 1993) made after the Bolshevik pattern were becoming more and more some simple groups sharing commune doctrinal sympathies. But not PCR. In a world that it couldn’t understand it anymore (if it ever did), the romantic Leninism was making desperate efforts to maintain on the barricades.

It will not succeed; however, the national and international impact that its fail trained will offer the measure of an inflexibility and of a real “multilateral developed” dogmatism. The Romanian revolution doesn’t make the object of the present chapter or paper, offering only tangential the confirmation of the ideological exacerbation of the regime and the frustrations accumulated by the population over the decades.

17

The concept of romantic Leninism was also analyzed in a series of scientific articles, published as follows:

Emanuel Copilaș, „Counter-idea of the 20th century: varieties of Leninism in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia”, in Valahian Journal of Historical Studies, Târgoviște, nr. 18-19, 20122013, pp. 181-208.

Emanuel Copilaș, „«National in form, socialist in content»? «The national-international relation» in the ideologic economy of romantic Leninism”, in Valahian Journal of Historical Studies, Târgoviște, nr. 17 (1)/2012.

Furthermore, I have published other scientific articles that engage in ideological evaluations of both Romanian and international communism, and are therefore relevant for a broader understanding of the concept of romantic Leninism:

Emanuel Copilaș, „Hannibal is in the city: several reflections on contemporary barbarians.

A social-constructivist approach”, in Studia Europaea, Cluj-Napoca, nr. 1/2012, pp. 55-84.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Ideologie și politică. Helsinki 1975 și problematica drepturilor omului în România socialistă”, in Anuarul Institutului de istorie George Barițiu, Cluj-Napoca, 2011, pp. 227-247.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Roots of Bolshevism: an ideological overview of the 19th century Russian intelligentsia”, in Polis, nr. 2, 2013, pp. 131-153.

Emanuel Copilaș, „De la monarhie la republică populară: România în intervalul 1945-1947.

O retrospectivă politică”, in Anuarul Institutului de Istorie George Barițiu, Cluj-Napoca, 2013, pp. 395-421.

18

2.2.Communist Romania’s international relations – theoretical analysis Genesis of romantic Leninism. A theoretical perspective over the international orientation of communist Romania, 1948-1989, consists in a theoretical evaluation of the international policy of communist Romania, stressing on the ideological dimension of the process. Four major theories used in the study of IR – realism, pluralism, Marxism and socialconstructivism – comprised the instrumentary needed for the analysis. The theories were mentioned in the order of their importance within the IR discipline; as for their relevance to the study of the empiric material, the succession will support major changes. We shall see next the main premises and assumptions of each of these theories.

Realism Supported by a millenar intellectual tradition which starts with Tucydides, goes trough Machiavelli, Hobbes, Clausewitz and reaches the 21st century trough authors like Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, Robert Gilpin or John Mearsheimer – realism represents the main current in IR, despite the numerous and powerful critics it had to face for several decades now. To each IR theory corresponds, to a more or less extent, a political ideology (in scientific, not dogmatic or militant terms, as the notion will be applied to the concept of Romantic Leninism, developed in the thesis). Accordingly, realism represents the international facet of conservatism, an intellectual current developed along thousands of years within the military Greek and roman doctrines, then under the protective aegis of roman-catholic theology and, last but not least, as a reaction against the rational project of modernity. Here lies one of the first aspects that differentiates realism from other IR theories: its anteriority regarding the enlightenment philosophy which created modernity. Pluralism, Marxism and social-constructivism are all intellectual projects that claim themselves, with no exception, from the critical legacy of the French Revolution.

Realism operates, as the other theories of IR, with several basic concepts.4 Methodologically, studying the causes of wars, Waltz distinguishes tree ‘images’: the first one, which considers that international conflicts appear first in the mind of the leader, and only then materialized; the second one, were wars emerge due to the internal constitution –

4

In order to simplify the reading of the text, I will mention here the main souces used trough out this chapter: Dunne, Kurki, Smith: 2010; Steans, Pettiford: 2008; Dougherty, Pfaltzgraff: 1997; Halliday: 1994; Baylis, Smith, Owens: 2008; Viotti, Kauppi: 1999; Taylor (ed.): 1980; Lobell, Lipsman, Taliaferro: 2009; Morgenthau: 2007; Carr: 1947; Niebuhr: 1977; Guzzini: 2000; Waltz: 2001; Waltz: 2007; Miroiu, Ungureanu: 2006; Buzan: 2000; Wendt: 1999; Gilpin: 1981; Mearsheimer: 2003; Nye, Keohane: 2009; Nye: 2009; Ball, Dagger: 2000; Copilaș: 2009a.

19

political, economical, social or ideological – of states, an explicative factor superior to the simple psychology of the leader and, finally, the last image, regarded by Waltz as the most important: the international structure, composed of the power fluctuations of states which, globally, become independent of their intentions – ‘the distribution of capacities within the system’ in Waltz’s terms and deterministically press upon the international behavior of each ‘unit’ (state). Although all tree images (later renamed ‘levels of analysis’ and including a larger analytical area, limited not only to conflicts) are useful in deciphering the international policy of a state, according to Waltz, only the systemic one is indispensable. This study is placed within the second analysis level, an assumption which will be insisted upon in the last chapter of the paper, but it does neglect neither the third, nor the first level Waltzian realism is also known as neorealism or structural realism. The intellectual configuration of neorealism would have not existed in the absence of classical realism thea preceded it. Here, names like Hans Morgenthau, Edward Carr or Reinhold Niebuhr are central. Waltz’s first image is the most important in the case of classical realism. Human nature, corrupt, immoral, coward or vindictive lies at the basis of all reprehensible things in the world. One can see the contribution of catholic theology to this type of realism: the ‘original sin’ with which every person is born, lives and dies gives the extent of human interrelations and implicitly of international politics: violent, anarchical structured by ambitions, egoism and power will. Directly connected to the people which inhabit them, sharing the same human nature, relist states will behave as their subjects. Only the plan of action is changed: the patterns realists identify in interpersonal relations can be easily extrapolated on the global politics stage.

Pluralism This theory of IR is the equivalent of the liberal tradition of political thinking. Consequently, its main assumptions problematize the international environment from a considerably different perspective than the realist one. During the interwar period, the dispute between classical realism and idealism – the label which realists attributed to the contemporary liberal current – is tendentiously denominated in an effort to bring about a depreciative impression over the international orientation of liberals. The term idealism is used even tody; I will use it myself, in the absence of a better one and in order to avoid confusions. The dispute between realism and idealism is known in the literature of the discipline as the ‘first great debate’.

The liberal arguments for ‘collective security’ which could have been put into practice trough a progress of the idea of peace, the interpretation of human nature as ameliorable, not 20

inevitably decayed and conceiving the historical process in terms of progress, both material and moral and therefore social – were ridiculized by realists of the time, especially by Carr.

He reproached idealists excessive credulity in human nature and in the possibilities of its amelioration and consequently of international politics and the flagrant irresponsibility they encountered fascism for example, not reacting vigorously in order to prevent its ascension.

If realism appeared to be absolutely victoriuous against idealism, after 1945, the situation begun to change. As the war faded into past, replaced by wellbeing and economic progress, liberalism stared to be a more and more appreciated theory of IR. Starting with the classic assumption of commerce as creator of richness and added value, liberalism could successfully affirm itself in an relatively relaxed and prosperous international environment, although still dominated by realist principles.

The opposition between neoliberalism and neoliberalism became known as the ‘second great debate’ in IR. Distinct from classical liberalism, based on individuality, political rights, free market and human rights, neoliberalism stresses upon the role of international institutions as creators of stability and security. By educating states in order to overcome an immature, anarchical environment, to paraphrase Barry Buzan, neoliberal institutions also project an international environment structured on economic rather than political coordinates, were governments are treated as mere annexes of global economic processes upon which they have no direct control and by which are almost determined.

Economy and politics became, trough institutions and international relations, interdependent (Nye, Keohane: 2009). Neorealism and neoliberalism share many common features, the most important being the recognition of the international structure; it depends less that the first insists upon its political dimension and the last on its economical dimension: the two currents are complementary. The Bush administration has proven this empirically; theoretically, many social-constructivists share the same conviction.

Marxism Although by Marxism is generally understood as a corpus of sociological analyses with no special emphasis on international relations, but by global economical processes and tendencies which have created and still create stages of the historical development of humanity – this intellectual current and especially its ramifications have taken into account more and more the interactions between states, while preserving the sociological methodology of Marxism and circumscribing them to the social global context to which they belong.

21

Marxism, made possible by the Enlightment’s intellectually revolution which has opposed the critical rationality of individuals to the dogmatic catholic theology, considersthe flow of history as being subjected to well defined stages, each of them configured by the ratio between forces of productions (inventions, progress) and relations of production (the stabilizing of a social-economic system which gradually becomes oppressive trough its own structure, acting like an impediment to development). Each ‘mode of production’ (‘primitive commune’, ‘slaverist’, ‘feudal’, ‘Asian’ and ‘capitalis’), meaning society, composed by an economic ‘structure’ and a cultural, political and religious ‘superstructure’ determined by the structure – an ideology in the sense Marx and Engels used the term in their German Ideology – dialectically transforms itself, in the sense that the forces of production defeat at some point the stagnant relations of production trough the form of a revolution; next, the victorious production forces will gradually become, on their turn, relations of production, waiting to be defeated by new forces of production and so on. The Marxist dialectic is materialist: it argues that there are objective forces which guide human development and manifest themselves independently of human will. On the other hand, an often ignored component of Marx’s thought is that these forces mean absolutely nothing in the absence of human management: the ratio between the two parts is therefore complementary, not asymmetrical.5 Moreover, as Margot Light insists, Marx contested at the end of his life that he tried to offer objective laws to guide the entire development of human evolution: the ‘Asian mode of production’, by example, firmly contradicts its historical scheme, due to geographical, social and economical circumstances highly different from the European ones.

Far from being discouraged by this, Marx simply recognized that he has theorized an ‘«historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe… [not] an historicphilosophic theory of the general path of development prescribed by fate to all nations, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves»’ (Marx in Light: 1988, 78).

Marx was firmly convinced that the revolutionary process must follow, in order to be complet and not to degenerate in one of the many ‘ideologies’, the development stages described above. The Revolution, in Marx’s acception, is an emancipator project based on the conscietization of the economic and social oppression to which is subjected the majority living within the capitalist mode of production and the overcoming of national limits, constructed ‘from above’ and which divide and weaken the proletariat in favor of capitalism.

5

The main titles used in this section are: Marx, Engels: 1949; Marx, Engels: 1956, Marx: 1957; Marx: 1954; Marx: 1987; Engels: 1967.

22

The whole capitalist mode of production must be overcome, especially the ‘fetishism of goods’ (consumerism, in contemporary terms), in order for the people to regain their humanity. The process will be a violent one, Marx argued, because capitalism speculates all the interstices between the forces opposing him and, sooner or later, it ends up appropriating them. It is not sufficient to have an equitable goods distribution, the whole capitalist process of production must be changed, because it inevitably generates inequalities that polarize societies. Morality is therefore insufficient to resolve the economic problem of modernity, being nothing more than one of the many ‘idealist’ illusions. If a capitalist decides to treat his workers better than the others, his costs of production will increase and its profits diminish. Once again, the necessity of a violent overcome of capitalism emerges: less radical solutions will only end up being incorporated or effectively swept away by capital. In this point, Marx once again revised its opinion in time. He claimed that the revolution could be implemented also by parliamentary means in some developed states, were the relations of production and revolutionary consciousness are mature enough to allow it.

Social-constructivism Social-constructivism, a new theory of IR developed in the last years of the Cold War, is today much appreciated. As a post-positivist theory, it aims to create a new onthology, neither as radical as the postmodern one, nor relativist. In Emmanuel Adler’s terms, constructivism seizes the ‘middle ground’ between, on one hand, the restructuring of the scientifical principles of knowledge and, on the other hand, the empirical validation of the affirmed results (Adler: 1997, 2005). Between the emphases upon interpretation existent in the post-positivist philosophical currents, respectively the classical rationalist perspective of modernity, centered on the individual. For Adler, „constructivism aspires and to some extent has managed to find a middle ground between a rationalist perspective that focuses on individuality and universality and an interpretive perspective that takes contextual knowledge, contingency, and human interpretation to be the hallmarks of social reality. This middle ground can be found in constructivists’ attempts to highlight: (a) the role of agency (individuals and states) in the construction of social reality; (b) the global or cosmopolitan context within which transnational communities develop; (c) the importance of general normative principles that can be learned by communities through the logic of communicative argument and persuasion;(d) the notion that even though, as Ashley has argued, the practical community in IR may be the transnational community of realists, it is also true that in the last several decades a competing community of liberals has arisen (mainly in Europe) that 23

opposes the realists and endeavors to make liberal international practice a self-understood reality; and (e) the argument that social practice helps bridge between the ideational and discursive world and the material world” (Adler: 2005, 5-6).

Before analyzing the main concepts trough which it operates, one must mention the fact that constructivism aims to be not just another theory of IR, but a whole new onthology, a new way of conceiving social existence and the articulations putting it into act: it has therefore higher ambitions than the anterior theories. We have reached now the third great debate of IR. That of positivism (constructivists include here, undifferentiated, realism, pluralism, Marxism and their derivates, having as methodological base, as mentioned, the distinction between facts and values, respectively between researcher and the object of research) and post-positivism, thought currents that contest these arbitrary divisions, considering that positivists ignore the social complexity which makes possible all these ‘hard’ interactions and concepts used by positivists, never bothering to problematize them Social-constructivism has deep roots in the innovative sociological approaches from the second half of the 20th century, a period when ‘hard’ social structures enounced and analyzed by Emile Durkheim, or even Max Weber, are being more and more contested. The static scientific approach of the 19th century is contested in the name of the intersubjective dynamics of social groups, permanently constituted and reconstituted trough the interaction between agents (individuals, non-governmental organizations) and structures (networks of political, administrative, institutional, common law power), having a constitutive role in social functionality. Structures create ‘norms’ and ‘resources’, Anthonny Giddens argues.

Normes represent legal ways trough which agents produce resources. Along tis process, trough a set of well defined practices, the agents effectively reproduce the structures, an environment out of which they cannot be imagines after all. Agents are not, however, passive instruments used by structures, but conscious which can and must reconstruct the structures created, in the end, by their own interactions. On their turn, structures permanently interact, these dynamics constituting after all the moving force of society. Constructivists make use of the agent/structure sociological distinction, extrapolating it at the international relations level. Anticipating the methodological confusion which can emerge from here, Harry Gould proposes taking the problem into account on different levels of analysis. ‘The agent is the part, the structure the whole. At the next level of analysis, the original structure/whole is now the agent/part, while at the inferior level of analysis, the original agent/part is now the relevant structure/whole’ (Gould in Kubálková, Onuf, Kovert: 1998, 96).

24

By interacting, agents and structures create the social environments in which we live.

Therefore, social reality, with all the objects and subjects that define it, is socially constructed. Material factors do not exist indepdendent of our perceptions and capacity to socially construct them, attributing them new semnifications in the day to day life. Here, constructivism splits in several branches. Without very much details, we can identify two major types of constructivism: one were material factors exist outside the social environment, and a more radical form of constructivism, were the whole world, including ‘hard’ material factors, are socially constructed. In the first category, Alexander Wendt, a central name of social-constructivism, stresses that as much as we socially construct the sea, we can still drown in it in certain circumstances. Accordingly, as much as we try to construct the reality of flying pigs, this will not be possible because, simply, pigs do not fly (Wendt: 1999). Therefore, Wendt continues, there are natural forces independent of the will and human possibilities of influencing them. Radical constructivists, Nicholas Onuf especially, affirm that all reality experienced by a person or community during their lives is socially constructed. This does not mean that the influence of natural forces is not recognized, but that their influence, impact and knowledge can only be a sum of social construction. The sea drowns us in certain circumstances, yes, but the act of drowning is a social construction, and so is the sea; none can exist outside human interpretations and actions which give them meaning and manage them in socially knowledgeable ways. Pigs do not fly, but only humans imagine that they would; therefore, this is another social construction.

Language, experience, culture, habits, traditions, fears, aspirations, hopes, all these social constructions produced by peremptory, dynamic and flexible interactions between agents and structures, gradually sediment identities. These are individual or social, and they represent the central concept of social-constructivism. Wendt: „In the philosophical sense an identity is whatever makes a thing what it is. This is too broad to be of use here, since then even beagles and bicycles would have identities, and so I will treat it as a property of intentional actors that generates motivational and behavioral dis-positions. This means that identity is at base a subjective or unit-level quality, rooted in an actor's self-understandings. However, the meaning of those understandings will often depend on whether other actors represent an actor in the same way, and to that extent identity will also have an intersubjective or systemic quality. John may think he is a professor, but if that belief is not shared by his students then his identity will not work in their interaction.

Two kinds of ideas can enter into identity, in other words, those held by the Self and those

25

held by the Other. Identities are constituted by both internal and external structures„ (Wendt: 1999, 224).

Identities are not fixed and permanent, as realist, pluralists or Marxists tend to perceive it – but dynamic and flexible, reflecting the ratio between agents and structures at different levels of analyses, from local to global.

Constructivism is, beside a theory, an emancipator program which, unlike postmodernism, is trapped neither by relativism, nor by ignoring empirical methodologies.

Wendt sustains in this sense that practice is still the best criteria for testing theories.

Furthermore, he theorizes at international level tree ‘cultures of anarchy’, a hobbesian, Kantian and lockean one, these representing essentially the social and normative progress human history has made until now. Wendt warns that, although we have left behind the hobbesian anarchy functioning according to the principle ‘homo homini lupus’ and were actors did not recognize their onthological legitimacy, we have not managed to overcome lockean anarchy were, although the actors reciprocally recognize themselves the right to exist, they act in a competitive environment, preferable of course to the conflictual, hobbesian one, but less desirable then the cooperation determined by common values of the international Kantian environment which makes its presence more and more felt. But international Kantianism remains an aspiration, and, in order to realize it, we all have to socially construct it to the point where it could transform itself into norms, practices and international institutions. (Wendt: 1999, 246-312).

Despite its generous intentions, Wendt’s constructivism does not benefit from a methodology suitable to social sciences. The problem of empirical analysis is very important in social-constructivism, questioning even its disciplinary status (see Kukla: 2002). This empty space is best covered, I argue, by Nicholas Onuf’s works (1989; Onuf in Kubálková, Onuf, Kovert: 1998, 58-78). Onuf proposes, in order to overcome the methodological dualism agent-structure, the concept of rules, operationalized along with that of norms. Rules (generally laws) and norms (moral behavior dispositions in a given society) find themselves at the junction between agents and structures, essentially constituting both sides. Agenst use rules to follow their interests, mostly material, while for structures rules stabilize and homogenize the social framework in which agents act, reproducing in this way its existence.

Each agent acts rationally, following the maximization of its own interest with a minimal cost on the ground of an anterior legislation and ethical code.From the point of view of the outside observer, agents do not seem to always act rationally, but this is due to the complexity of social existence and the impossibility to comprise it and exhaust it in scientific terms.

26

From their point of view, agents act rationally, and therefore we can conclude that rationality itself is a social construct dependent on the culture values, interests and customs of societies, even if these different rationalities can intersect and superpose themselves on certain levels.

Rules and the ways agents use them can and usually have unintended consequences.

‘When rules have the effect of distributing the advantage inequally’, Onuf writes, ‘the result is rule which is the second general propriety of political society’ (Onuf: 1989, 22). Leaving aside the tautology existent in the term ‘political society’ – a society is inconceivable in the absence of a regulatory political factor – Onuf suggests that major social inequalities produce political despotisms. The absolutist tentation is permanently lurking in the shadow of plural societies, and it is up to us to keep it there, trough rules as equitable and efficient as possible.

Onuf’s rules and norms can also be understood with the help of other onstructivists.

John Ruggie, for example, distinguishes between ‘regulative rules’ and ‘constitutive rules’.

As Wendt, Ruggie argues that ‘materialis’ theories of IR (positivist as we have named them) take statest and the international system as something fixed, without questioning their content or formation process. But states do not pre-exist the international system, as ‘materialists’ consider, neither is the system conceivable with reference to them. Actors and international structure constitute themselves through permanent interactions. Therefore, the ‘regulative rules’ of ‘materialists’ are isufficient in offering a profound perspective over the international system and the global social world; only the ‘constitutive rules’ of constructivists can do this (Ruggie: 2002, 22-24). Ted Hopf, on the other hand, considers that more important than social norms are social practices which they entail. Only the practices of social agents can offer a true understanding of the complex juxtaposed, uperposed and often conflicting social processes which structure modern political communities. I agree partially with Hopf’s position, despite the fact that is hard to understand were norms end and practices begin. The present study is not sociologic but, in very large terms, politologic. I do not analyze the social constitution of communist Romania’s foreign and international policy, but its political imposition ‘from above’, in other words, internally, but also externally, trough the prism of Leninist ideology and the political practices associated with it. If the angle of analysis would have been ‘from below’, I do not see why Hopf’s model would have not explained satisfactorily the Romanian identity during the communist period as it was relationed with the international practices of the regime and the thick propagandistic textures associated with these; on the other hand, Hopf analyses convincingly the Russian identities in the Khrushchev period, respectively the transition between the Eltsin period and the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s leadership (Hopf: 2002).

27

But I propose a research how an ‘above’ imposed identity, ‘paramodern’ (Matei: 2007) – I will explain the term at the right moment – reflected in the thinking and international activity of Romanian communism, at first, and, complementary, in the regime’s relations with the society. Consequently, Onuf’s rules and norms are much more useful here than Hopf’s social practices.

Finally, Onuf considers international anarchy as an unintended consequence of the activity of statal agents, suverans, independent and interdependent. As any unintentioned consequence of social agents, it can be gradually removed, trough conjugated efforts (Onuf in Kubálková, Onuf, Kovert: 1998, 58-78). Here, the difference between Wendt’s moderate constructivism and Onuf’s radical constructivism is best seen: international anarchy is given and static in the end; it can only be cosmetized, humanized, Kantianized, but not overcome.

But Onuf argues in these terms: international anarchy, as structurant as it is, represents, along with other products of human activity, totalitarianism, war, hunger, oppression, injustice etc.

– unintended consequences of actors which have resulted from powerful structures and partisan norms, more powerful than agents, which could not have done anything else, trough current social practices, then reproduce them. Trough new norms agents can identify new paths of socialization, less inclined towards undemocratic leadership (rule) and more commited to flexibilizing the structures, indispensable on their turn to any social project. Of course, it is infinitely easier to reach this conclusion with theoretical then practical means.

On the other hand, radical constructivism imagines at least convincing alternatives that could one day be socialized; realism, pluralism, Marxism – although it offered the conceptual instruments necessary for letting behind the positivist paradigm – even Wendt’s moderate constructivism, all these theories are captive to the positivist scientifical specter and belong eventually to the past. „Theorizing is not an activity separated by the analyze of the empirical data. The analysis can be made only with theoretical propositions and schemes. On the other hand, analysis of some events and processes have to include, as a starting point, an entire series of specified values of some variables on which base it can be explained how (sic!) it had reached at the final results. To offer the historical explanation in a clear way, often you have to cross over the presentation of the formal interrelations between the variables.

Consequently, it is often justified to review of the material in the closure, at a brief and abstract level. No doubt it has to be useful to the reader. But it is even more important for the author, because it impose a certain rigor in analyze, whose absence could pass unnoticed in the multitude of details” (Wallerstein: 1992, vol. II, 279).

28

I subscribe with no hesitation at the analytical model proposed by Wallerstein. The international policy of the Romanian communism, in the sense of the events’ succession, it is preferable to be analyzed separately from the theoretical point of view. Sure, this is how it point out the above-mentioned sociologist, the empirical material cannot be submissive to the research in the prior absence of some rigorous theoretical criteria; but they are not always explicit. On the contrary, it is indicated that theorizing is to be considered an autonomous, final part of the research, where are made the central conclusions of the entire approach, presented by then, most often in the terms of simple clues.

On the other hand, it was impossible to follow the configuration of the romantic Leninism and its international dimension, the main points of this study, without the instrumentation, ad hoc, of some theories belonging to the historical and politological register. Already mentioned in the methodological section of the study, the comparative historical analyze and the ideological analyze make together, besides the occasional sociologic interventions, very important theoretical instruments in the sense of printing some directions and objectives of specific research with which the concept of romantic Leninism could be individualized ideologically in relation to the main varieties of Soviet-style Leninist phenomenon. On the other hand, and with this occasion I hope to demonstrate, at the outline of the main stake of the researched historical itinerary contributes in the first place the international theorizes briefly analyzed at the beginning of the study. Sure, the RI theorizes and the political ideologies (in the scientific sense, not the partisan one) are practically interdependent, being largely different facets of the political theory applied, in the first case, in the foreign orientation of the countries, respectively, in the second case, in the internal one. Finally, it cannot be drawn a firm distinction between the two parts; they are interdependent. That doesn’t mean that they are not autonomous in the terms of methodology and objective ones, nor being perfectly superimposable, fact which stands out especially in the socio-constructivism case, theory of the RI which can be claimed also by the sociodemocrats, but also by the egalitarian liberals which claim from the rawlsian tradition.

To engage the methodological model dominant in RI, the one of images and analytical levels, the present study places itself between the simplistic explanations of psychological type, respectively the determination of the foreign policy of a state by the international structure.

Between the levels one and three of analyze (the leader’s

psychologies, respectively the structural pressures of the international medium), in other words. The romantic Leninism, both in what concerns the internal policy foreign policy, represented an ideologist social construction that imposed a certain political-administrative 29

structure through some rules and standards by which it hoped to establish, in time, upon the society that was assaulting in the end, a type of hermetic socialization, militant and heroic, shaped to use an expression from the Bible, “after its image and likeness”. It can be reduced to a single individual – Ceausescu, though it was, somehow, his stone "hard" - or, nighters mechanically, to the pressures of the international system. The romantic Leninism desired permanently the transformation of RSR in a “medium” power and in the first place an independent one. Even though it didn’t have success in the limits he proposed – for the political and geopolitical situation of RSR, largely discussed in the previous chapters, the effective deployment of Moscow represented an ideal hardly reachable – the romantic Leninism yet resisted obstinately to the international pressures, especially in the last decade of its existence, in the 80’s. We remember that Bucharest fully paid its foreign debt in 1988, renounced at the most favored nation clause (although without any doubt would have lost it), condemned aggressively the international reactions against the discrimination of national minorities and systematization of rural projects, particularly those inhabited by ethnic Hungarians. It acted the same in the precedent decades, once Ceausescu took power, only that, unlike in the 80’s, when the Romanian leadership rejected both the Humanitarian critics of the West, and the ideological and administrative critics of the Soviet Union led now by Michael Gorbachev – in the 60’s and 70’s Moscow was considered the main danger for the internal stability of the Bucharest regime. Romantic Leninism, revolutionary in the postrevolutionary Leninist acception of the term – did not want to accept the constrains in favor of the statu-quo imposed by systemic Leninism, which’s revolutionary impetus had disappeared in favor of the material benefits that could be extracted from the ‘bourgeois’ world.

The pluralist evaluation of the international dimension of romantic Leninism Internationally, pluralism, the ideological equivalent of liberalism, affirms the constitutive values of this ideology. Let us mention the most important: individuality, respect and guarantee of human rights, political participation, tolerance, interculturality, free market, the limitation of state power. Beside these, pluralism stresses upon commerce as a pacifying force and also a creator of positive sum games, an idée enounced even from the beginning of 19th century by Benjamin Constant (2001) – but also on the educational and factual role of international conflicts in preventing and managing global conflicts.

How many of these principles would have appealed to romantic Leninism? The ideology that articulates it is totally incompatible to ‘bourgeois’ liberalism. First of all, the 30

importance of the individual is secondary for romantic Leninism. If it did not obey party principles, the individual was, as we have seen, ‘class enemy’, ‘counter-revolutionary’, lacking ‘patriotism’ and manipulated by exterior ‘enemy forces’ like ‘imperialism or international ‘bourgeoisie’. The revolutionary project of romantic Leninism did not distinguish, externally, but also internally, between its ideological and its national enemies.

A ‘xenophobic’ attitude, as Michael Shafir observes (Shafir: 1989, 1-12). Even when the individual was convinced by the justness of romantic-Leninist principles, developing therefore a ‘revolutionary conscience’ it was in the same inferior ration with RCP. Within Leninist regimes, Robert Tucker argues, social dynamics articulated on ideological principles is dominant: the community, the party in this case, or, better said, its intransigent nucleus, is more important than the party member. Consequently, the whole is more important than the part, a premise to which no liberal theorist would subscribe. Regarding the romantic-Leninist vision over human rights, the present thesis discussed it over a whole subchapter, from which clearly emerges its animosity towards the ‘bourgeois’ notion of human rights. Liberalism, the political philosophy from which human rights emerged, insists on the individual and civic character of them. Within romantic Leninism individuality is disconsidered, with the exception of the single possible hero, Nicolae Ceausescu. Human rights functioned here as social disciplinary instrument, not as a guarantee of individual freedom and dignity. And the obtaining by citizens of the ‘revolutionary consciousness’ would have revealed something else: the ‘bourgeois’ variety of human rights was nothing but a masquerade, a surrogate of the authentic and plenary rights of humans, which’s individuality was circumscribed to a collective framework; the trues affirmation of human personality would have been possible only in the post-capitalist world, were the social and material reality would have been restructures on very different onthological coordinates.

The Marxist evaluation of the international dimension of romantic Leninism As we have seen in the theoretical chapter, the filiation between Marxism and Leninism is unquestionable. Certain topics from Marx’s theories were reinterpreted in an ideological sense, an evolution that the German thinker would have surely not approved. We have seen, on short, the main social, economic and philosophical premises of Marxism: emancipation, the overcoming of the capitalist mode of production, respectively the abolition of the objectification of human creation and the annulment of the ratio between subject and object specific to the capitalist historic stage, were the last becomes autonomous and even superior

31

to the first. Marx’s revolution signifies the abolition of this dualism and mankind’s regaining control over itself as a whole, especially its productive activity Lenin, on the other hand, was less interested on Marx’s social and conceptual revolution in favor of the political one. Bolshevism imposed itself in an agrarian country, when Marx expected the developed countries to nurture the revolutionary process, because they have already entered the capitalist stage that offers the material conditions for revolution; the last ingredient was the development of the ‘revolutionary’ conscience of workers, which would have united them into a single, transnational class. Marx’s predictions did not come true, but they have contributed enormously to the ‘humanization’ of western capitalism. In Russia, on the other hand, Marxist ideas were turned from empirical instruments with a declared emancipator role into weapons for which the social practice did not count as the absolute landmark, but the enemy which had to be moulded in the name of pseudo-religious and pseudo-scientific principles, as Alain Besançon had wonderfully proved (1993). Marx’s material socialism, originated from the social-activity in itself, and which could have confirmed or infirmed the theoretical evaluations of its author, and consequently transforming them – is abandoned by Lenininsm, especially post-revolutionary Leninism, in the name of dialectical materialism. This is no longer a product of practice and experience, but is independent with reference to empirical reality, which it aims to reconstruct according to its ideological principles. (see Kubálková, Cruickshank: 1980). Or, as I have argued in the last chapters of the thesis, ‘socialist conscience’ is no longer, as Marx saw it, an emanation of ‘social existence’, but a corrective of it. Marx and Engels however warned it The German Ideology ‘For us, communism is not a state which has to be created, an ideal which has to guide reality. We name communism the real movement that suppresses the actual statu-quo. The condition of this movement result from the existent premises’ within the structure, not superstructure, we could add (Marx, Engels: 1956, 32; Emphasis in orig.).

If Soviet Leninism distorted Marxism so much, politicizing and ideologicizing it, romantic Lenininsm went even further in this direction because, beside the Leninist reinterpretations of Marxism, we have to deal in this case with romanticism, nationalism and fascism. Marx knew and went against the first two ideological currents, considering them ideologies that keep mankind captive to the ‘idealistic’ specter and diminishing its chances of progress. The havocs of fascism remained unknown to him, but he would have surely denounced him in its own way, both vehement and scientific.

32

The heroic posture in which romantic Leninism imagined itself internally and externally, appealing to militant historic mythologies, wrapped in an extremely complex and sophisticated propagandistic package, would have never obtained Marx’s approval. On the contrary, it would have been denounced and ridiculized with the characteristical precision of the author of Capital. The rigid internal hierarchy and the exacerbated external ambitions, combined with the ideologization of society in a manner similar to the ‘organicism’ and ‘love’ which the romantic Germans valued and postulated as basis of the relation between monarchs, models of virtue, and citizens, which would hopefully find the necessary amount of inspiration in them – beside the fact that imprint romantic Leninism with a distinct ideological shape, would have again been condemned by Marx, which wrote and acted all his life against such recrudescences of the Dark Ages, wherever they appeared. If the German philosopher presented himself often as not being ‘Marxist’, we can only imagine how it would have reacted to the romantic-Leninist distortion of its theories.

Regarding the analysis of romantic Leninism trough contemporary Marxist currents, the result is not at all improved. For Immanuel Wallerstein, classical Marxism would be put into practice, as its original authors argued, at the level of the nucleus. But Leninism could have not been born somewhere outside the periphery. The motives are clear: in the developed states, the proletariat had a better way of life and more diverse and attractive options to spend its free time, a fact which negatively influences the development of militantism and class conscience; then, excepting Germany and Italy, the first two fascist states, nationalism, which partially contributed, camouflaged under the form of ‘anti-imperialism’, to the success of Leninism in Russia, making, along with appeals for class struggle, the promise of economic development and social prosperity – was not as developed within nucleus states as to successfully mobilize societies in revolutionary directions, the appeal of class struggle being insufficient in this regard, as the behavior of European socialist parties during the first world war proves it; last but not least, as an anti-systemic movement, Leninism would have been harder to put in practice within the nucleus states, where the ‘reaction’ was all powerful.

And the same regarding the Third World, insufficiently developed at the level of infrastructure and industry to manage all by itself the revolutionary scale for a process like this. The unique solution thus came from semiperiphery, a category in which tsarist Russia fully integrated (Wallerstein: 1991, 88).

33

The realist evaluation of the international dimension of romantic Leninism Both in the Gheorghiu-Dej period and the ‘Ceausescu epoch’, Romania’s foreign policy has characteristics than can easily include it in the realist approach of international relations: systematic and less risky strategies to create contacts and possible partnerships with states and international institutions that could prove useful for the regime’s objectives, the careful analysis of the balance of forces in the regions it planned to act, the permanent struggle for its national interest, of the independence and suveranity of the Romanian state, the clear delimitation between internal and external affairs – although, as we have seen, internal and foreign affairs were united by ideology – the greater importance ascribed to the state and nation compared with social classes, and the list can go on. Why is then realism insufficient to profoundly analyze romantic Leninism’s internationalism?

First of all, because it does not take into account the ideological subsidiary of the foreign policy of Leninist regimes. Even if, in a ‘bourgeois’ world, they have borrower more and more realist characteristics, they have kept however a distinct ideological identity (Lynch: 1989, 31). In other words, realism homogenizes international actors, taking into account only their external behavior in some circumstances and classifying it according to rigid and inflexible formulas.

If the other Leninist regimes became more an more ‘bourgeois’, leaving their guard down in front of their old ‘class enemy’, romantic Leninism also suffered ‘bourgeois’ influence, but from different reasons. More exactly, due to its constitutive nationalism or ‘revolutionary socialist patriotism’ that structured it. Although conceptually different from ‘bourgeois’ nationalism, ‘chauvinistic’ and ‘aggressive’, the romantic-Leninist nationalism entailed just this type of attitudes and practices, both within RCP and at the larger level of society. Due to romanticism that was ideologically and politically expressed trough a heroic, mystical and virulent nationalism, but also due to the ideological advance of the ‘bourgeois’ ontology in the second half of the 70’s, romantic Leninism became extremely nationalist in its attempt to isolate itself from this threatening tendency. This led to the exacerbation of the nationalist component of romantic Leninism, insufficiently matured in Leninist terms: ‘bourgeois’ nationalism made a forceful comeback to take the place of ‘socialist revolutionary patriotism’; beside their ideological difference, in social practice both parts had the same type of effects. And if one takes into account that realist, conservative regimes, even liberal ones, are on their turn nationalist, it can disover a powerful common denominator between romantic Leninism and realist conservatism, insufficient however to proclaim the two parts as being equivalent.

34

Second, realism is, generally, a philosophy of the international statu-quo, appreciated and practiced especially by the great powers which dominate the international environment at one moment. Its temporal orientation takes into account the present, legitimizing itself, in a conservative tradition, from the past. Romantic Leninism is far from those characteristics.

RSS did not legitimize the international statu-quo, but permanently and vehemently contested it, if we take into account the messages that proposed the ‘simultaneous liquidation of military blocks’, identifiable in almost every discourse of the regime’s officials. Of course, in this point could be brought into discussion Ceausecu’s incalculable ambition to become the leader of an appreciable European power and its regret for not ruling one of the superpowers of the day. Is this not the equivalent of masked realism? However, we have here the example of the Soviet Union. None of the Soviet Leninism can be considered realist, not even systemic Leninism, because, to put it simply, to act in accordance to the international environment’s pressures does not equate with its acceptance. Realism and Leninism express to highly incompatible ideologies which, although they have influenced themselves reciprocally along the 20th century, they have never confounded one another.

The social-constructivist evaluation of the international dimension of romantic Leninism If realism, pluralism and Marxism are all positivist theories, based on the distinction between researcher the the object of research, respectively between facts and values, socialconstructivism proposes a radically different analysis which transforms it into a new social theory, a new onthology, being thus more than a simple theory of international relations.

In any Soviet type, Leninism represented a social political construction, meaning a ‘from above’ socialization. Romantic Leninism is no exception. Benefiting from the anteriority of several forms of Soviet Leninism, which’s experience and direct intervention (post-revolutionary Leninism) brought a constitutive contribution to its intellectual and political gestation, romantic Leninism is influenced, at least as much, by a different ideology, nationalism. Aiming to convert society to its own revolutionary project, romantic Leninism’s direction of action was always ‘from above’. This is a first motive, common to all Leninist regimes, for which romantic Leninism represents a special social construction: due to its intellectual isolation and the radical and intransigent atmosphere in which it was born, both contributing to its ideological ossification and to the sketching of the only way of action it knew and utilized: the political, ‘from above’ one.

In order to apply the onufian constructivist model to romantic Leninism, we must start from the norms and rules valuable in RSS. We know from Onuf that norms and rules 35

lye between actors and structures, representing means actors use in order to follow their interests in the sense of using as much available resources as possible; acting, actors reproduce, trough their behavioral dispositions, the social structures they belong to (Onuf: 1989). When social inequalities are major, Onuf warns, rules became dictatorial (rules make rule). This problem does not affect romantic Leninism, which’s beginning itself lies under the totalitarian aegis. In this case, we can reverse the elements in Onuf’s equation and affirm that dictatorship (rule) creates its own rules and norms (rules) which do not reflect the conditions of social existence, but its own ideological objectives. Therefore the dictatorship created its own normative-legislative system and imposed it to the population, both for enrolling it and to reproduce itself. Of course that the RCP’s ideologues were aware of the apathy and passivity of the population with ratio to the official ideology – here lied the necessity for the ‘July these’ and Ceausescu’s attention for this chapter – but they hoped that, in time, the population will be attracted by the nationalist principles the regime professed (a relatively successful prediction) and ‘the wooden language’ would be further integrated into the popular language, contributing to the creation of the ‘socialist consciousness’.

The unconditional obeyance of the party’s decisions and the existing system of laws and ‘the growth of the leading role of RCP’, along with all the ideological norms and their ideological, economic and social facets – all contributing to the ‘construction of socialism’, romantic-Leninist style – constitutes or so it should, the link between the regime and society.

The social actors would have used the juridical framework to achieve their purposes, becoming, in the same time, part of the romantic Leninist structure, which’s their actions confirmed and reproduced. The problem that lies here, constituting in the same time the major drama of romantic Leninism is that it did not become eventually a structure and continued to behave as an agent. To become a structure, the regime lacked social legitimacy, something it never had, being imposed externally and from above’; furthermore, as we recall, Leninist regimes consider societies ideological enemies which must be educated in order to develop ‘socialist conscience’, indispensable for ‘building socialism’. The paradox is that romantic Leninism was both structure and agent in ratio with the social structure which stubbornly refused to be enrolled and develop the so much needed ‘revolutionary conscience’. An insufficiently structurant political-ideological structure with reference to the social structure it ‘assaulted’, to paraphrase Anthony Giddens.

Closely related to the romantic-Leninist norms and rules are some ‘speech acts’ theorized by Onuf. We remember that ‘speech acts’ were of tree types: ‘assertive (based on 36

instructions, neutral with ratio to the transmitted information), directive (or imperative, entailing mandatory submission) and, last but not least, engaging, thus implying different promises and their fulfillment (Onuf: 1989; Onuf în Kubálková, Onuf, Kovert: 1998, 58-78).

Within romantic Leninism exist only the last two types of ‘speech acts’, the directive and the engaging ones. The unconditional obeyance of the party and state decisions and the conviction that they are just, the avoidance as much as possible, of contacts with strangers, the denunciation of deviations from the ‘socialist morale’, the ‘sabotage of socialist property’, the remedy of the insufficient ideological training and the instilment of revolutionary impetus, to name just a few – are directive ‘speech acts’ the officials and propagandists of the regime used on every party meeting or public manifestation. The costs of not obeying these norms were known to the population. On the other hand, they were engaging ‘speech acts’, identifiable in the first place within the messages that promised, always in the future, general social welfare based on adequate industrialization and an equitable way of production, which would eliminate the division of work, responsible, as Marx had predicted, for the appearance of capitalism. But getting there required lots of work, abnegation and heroic dedication from all citizens to the revolutionary project of the party; ‘revolutionary combativeness’, firmness, intransigence and vigilance in order to ‘unmask’ internal or external ‘class enemies’, more and more as romantic Leninism was getting inadequate to an expanding ‘bourgeois’ world. One could say that the RCP used the ‘stick and carrot’ leading technique. But, as the carrot got smaller, the stick increased. Repression was amplified in the last decade of the regime’s existence, while the resources diminished and the population became more and more dissatisfied and distant regarding RCP’s ideological postulates. Confronted with increased hostility, within and outside the country as well, romantic Leninism comprised and adopted a very aggressive posture that could be named, as I have argued in the previous chapter, insular-repressive.

It is interesting to observe that, internationally, the regime adopted the same ‘speech acts’, even in the same order – directive, respectively engaging – stressing upon the need to practice a ‘new international order’ trough the restructuring of international institutions and commerce and, trough disarmament and the renunciation of nuclear weapons, objectives which, if on the international agenda, would have gathered the unconditional support of RSS. One must mention that, if in internal affairs romantic Leninism was something between a structure and an agent, inclining however towards a structure, in external affairs, as we know from Harry Gould ( 1998, 79-100), social-constructivism approaches states as agents with ratio to the international structure (institutions, organizations, balance of forces etc.), treating 37

them internally as structures that reproduce themselves trough the actions of social actors, to which they make available a system of rules trough which they maximize their interests with minimal costs. So, in order to adapt to the international system and extract a maximum of benefits from it, romantic Leninism used a type of discourse somehow similar to the ‘bourgeois’ ones, but Leninist in essence and nationalist in strategies. Using the same ‘speech acts’, apparently cosmeticized and impregnated by ‘bourgeois’ terms in order to be used as a counter-discourse in the competition with the dominant, ‘bourgeois’ ideology, romantic Leninism fully proved the continuity between its internal and international policy, both articulated by a unitary ideology, negatively fascinating trough its simplicity and coherence and the stubbornness in affirming its own, distinct identity.

Because identity

is the main topic here, and the way romantic Leninism imagined and constructed itself, inviting others to perceive it in the same way. Constituted by the combining of two ideologies, Leninism, and romantic nationalism, romantic Leninism was animated and tried to impose the Romanian society a paramodern identity (paramodernity is borrowed from Matei: 2007). Paramodern because it has one foot in the past and the other in the future. The antimodern dimension of romantic Leninism resides in its elitist, archaic, romantic character, trough which present was rejected in the name of heroic mythologies in which Prince Charmings destroyed the modern dragons of ‘imperialism’, making Romania a respectable power and a global opinion leader. The modern dimension of romantic Leninism has two components: a material an ideological one, both Leninist. Massive industrialization, building infrastructures and the enlargement of the urban locative space represent the material component of the modern dimension of romantic Leninism. The ideological component is given by the classical principles of Leninism, discussed in the whole thesis. Of course, its characterization as modern implies several risks because, as we have noticed, Leninism can be considered rather a parricidal offspring of modernity in the sense that it destroys it by pretending that it only puts it into practice according to its authentic purpose of ensuring equality in the same extent it ensures freedom. Unable and unwilling to perfectly guaranteeing both of them, the reproaches Leninism makes modernity are much beyond its powers and objectives.

Romantic Leninism ended in the same way it existed: in a world it did not understood, or it understood only in the extent it needed in order to assault it. But in December 1989, the society went against the regime, in a revolutionary flare that Marx would have probably saluted, especially because it seemed the application of a principle it enunciated in the 18th

38

brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: ‘Better a horrific end, than an endless horror!’ (Marx: 1949, 317; emphasis mine).

The topic of communist’ Romania’s international relations, along with other contributions dealing with aspects regarding the theory of international relations – was further researched in the following scientific article: Emanuel Copilaș, „Imposibila independență: aspecte ale politicii externe românești în perioada comunistă”, în Suplimentul Anuarul Institutului de Istorie George Barițiu, ClujNapoca, 2013, pp. 257-281.

2.3.The concept of pseudo-hegemonic nationalism Closely related to romantic Leninism, pseudo-hegemonic nationalism is another concept that I have used in a book where the nationalist dimension of communist Romania during the so called ‘Golden Age’ was researched (Națiunea socialistă. Politica identității în Epoca de Aur, Polirom Publishing House, Jassy, 2015). If romantic Leninism refers to both the Leninist and the romantic-nationalist component of Romania’s official ideology between 1965 and 1989, pseudo-hegemonic nationalism is a concept that focuses only on the last component, bringing forward some of the ideological dilemmas Romanian communist had to face when its nationalistic ideology began to directly contradict the Marxist and Leninist approaches of nationalism as a modern social theory.

Introduction During Dej’s leadership, especially after 1960 and after the shy, yet undeniable separation from Moscow, the nationalist elements gradually appearing within the ideology of the Romanian communist regime indicated perenialist preferences, an intriguing evolution for a discourse pretending to be Marxist in its essence. Perenialism is a theory of nation which insists upon the symbolic and, to a certain point, social continuity between antique ethnies, feudal peoples and modern nations. The modern, liberal and Marxist, theories of nation, embrace a totally different position: although they recognize, without much enthusiasm, a somehow pure symbolic continuity between ethnie/ethnies and nation, they quickly add that the last one is selective and partisan constructed and instrumented, with the aim of obtaining certain political benefits, and that the new economic and political elites brought forward by 39

the industrial revolution have the interest to create, trough administrative and educational means, a working force able to sustain the necessities of an internal market in the making.

While liberals tackle the national problem trough mainly political means, appraising the civic and participative benefits of modernity and arguing that, in the whole, the evolution from feudalism and absolutist monarchies to the industrial societies of consumerism and mediatic spectacle was a positive one, Marxists consider that the new political economy of capitalism already proved its limits, despite a progresist stage consisting in the dismantling of feudalism and absolutism, and argue in favor of abandoning it for a new mode of production in which the division of labor and thus social polarization would be absent (see Gellner 1993).

Coming back to the Romanian communist regime, if at the end of Gheorghiu Dej’s leadership perenialism was present, in a moderate manner, in the party propaganda, the ‘Golden Age’ will witness the primordialist nature of Romanian national-communism.

Unlike perenialism, primordialism is not satisfied with a fluctuant and insufficiently articulated at a discursive level historical continuity, although a ‘bimillenial’ one; starting with the last millennia before our age, when Dacians were considered absolute masters of a territory twice the size of modern Romania and located in the north of the Danube river, going through the ‘Dacian state’ created by king Burebista in the first century of our age, through the Roman conquest and the ‘ethnogenesis’ process, through the voivodates of medieval vlachs the period of Otoman suzerainty over the Romanian provinces and arriving to the 1859 union, the 1877 independence and the 1918 union – the whole historic discourse was rewritten to assess not only the historical continuity and the permanent ideal of ‘unification’, but also the supremacy of the Dacians and later of the Romanians with reference to all other ethnies, peoples or nations which inhabited or continued to inhabite the territory of the Romanian Socialist Republic (RSR).

Romanticism, the central ideological component of Romanian national-communism Just like in the case of German culture, by which it was massively inspired, Romanian modern culture embraced romanticism as its core set of values. From the second half of the XIXth century and to the interwar period, various types of nationalisms, inflamed by a dominant right-wing political culture, made use of the romantic myths and stereotypes that were perpetuated from generation to generation. With the partial exception of Dej’s communist leadership, Ceaușescu’s national-communism recuperated previous elements of romanticism and mixed them into a new ideological formula. The cult of heroes, of a mythical and heroic past, the cult of medieval hierarchies, the cult of an organic unity 40

between the leader and the people, the need to affirm, both internally and externally, an assertive and ostentatious political identity (see Râmbu: 2001) – all these elements combined with the Leninist ideology to form an unique ideological mixture: Romanian nationalcommunism.

Primordialist perennialism and the invention of Romanian antique history ‘«Within the character of the Romanian people, in his inextinguishable yearning for freedom and independence one can find embodied the high virtues of ancestors: the resoluteness, pride and wisdom of Dacians and Romans, the heroism and fearlessness of Decebal and Traian»’, Ceaușescu believed (Mușat în Pascu, Ștefănescu: 1986, 8; italics in orig.). The combination between Dacians, named by the ancient historian Herodotus ‘the most fearless and rightful among the Thracians’ - and the ‘proud’ Romans resulted in a superior synthesis, ‘«a new people based on the most esteemed virtues»” both of the winners and also of the losers of the Dacian-Roman wars, the Romanians, characterized from immemorial times by their ‘«love of truth and justice»’. The Romans supposedly left us their language, while from the Dacians we inherited ‘ the ownership of this land’ and our ‘thinking’ (Anghel in Sentimentul patriei: 1983, 26). The tasks of the party propaganda were therefore clear: ‘«The Dacian-Roman origin and the continued existence on this land’, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) argued, ‘«constitute fundamental characteristics of the Romanian people. The establishment in history of the place, the origins and the continuity within the Carpathian-Danubian basin of the Romanian people constitutes the fundament of every ideological, theoretical, and politically educative action. One cannot talk about socialist patriotic education without knowing and honoring the past, the work and struggle of our»’ (Preda, Pătroiu în Pascu, Ștefănescu: 1986, 324; subl. în orig.).

If during Gheorghiu Dej’s period the Dacian-Roman filiation and the ‘bimillenial’ continuity of their descendants on the territories of Moldavia, Wallachia and Transilvania was rarely mentioned, the ‘Golden Age’ will transform it into one of its cornerstones, amplifying it in a ‘Dacian’ sense. Latinism and Dacism represented two major interpretations of the origins and of the identity of Romanians, both coming into shape during the XIXth century – within a promising political context. The Latinism of the Transilvanian School was centered on the idea of total identification of the Romanians with the West, these being the descendants of the Roman colonizers which populated Dacia after the presumptive decimation and enslavement of the autochtonous population, following the wars against Rome, which they have lost; therefore, Romanian identity would have not contained 41

anything ‘eastern’, oriental, being, despite historical vicissitudes, of the migrations that gradually placed Romanians at te periphery of Europe – purely western. The Latinist discourse corresponded with the aim of obtaining political independence. Once this realized in 1859, the Dacist discourse will progressively affirm itself, through the writings of philologists and historians like Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu or Vasile Pârvan. Dacism meant the consolidation of the new found independence, sustained resistance against centuries of external colonization or at least absence of an adequate political organization and the assertive affirmation of the new political status to which the contribution of European powers, widely recognized until 1859, was entering into oblivion (Verdery: 1991).

From obvious reasons, the national-communist discourse opted for the ‘dacist’ version regarding the origins of the Romanians. It was much more fitted for the independence aspirations of RSR with reference to the imperial capitalist powers or with Soviet ‘hegemonism’ and for the arrogance and ostentatious pride with which Romanian national-communism discursively recuperated two millennia of history in order to present itself as a natural and unique continuity of them. This whole Dacian mythology reminded sociologist Henry Stahl of the legionary mentality: mystique, chauvinistic, excessive (Rostás: 2000, 67). Presented as ‘ancient inhabitants of this land’ with reference to the Greeks with whom they developed intense commercial and cultural relations, the Dacians or the Gets were considered two of the most powerful tribes from the north of the river Danube, ‘who have imposed their names to the other ones’ (Daicoviciu: 1968, 15). But Zoe Petre convincingly argues that even the Dacians or the Gets denomination forcibly overlaps a much more fragmented and dynamic identity, much more opened to the Greek space than the communist historiography presents (Petre: 2004).

In the second half of the first century A. D., the Dacian civilization would have reached its peak. In support of the hypothesis of the ‘high degree of civilization our ancestors have reached’ are brought the constructions, the diverse skills and the progress of art.

‘Nowhere are to be found bigger settlements, more powerful cities, better tools, more beautiful works of art’. One could not find a better political legitimation for this miraculous civilization than the creation, between 60 and 48 B. C., by king Burebista, of a ‘centralized Dacian state’ which ‘expanded to the West and North-West until the middle Danube and Moravia, to the North until the wooded Carpathians, which bordered in the East the Tyragets from the Dnestr river, encompassed Dobruja in its entirety and reached, towards South, until Haemus (the Balkans) (Daicoviciu: 1968, 143, 107). The best proof supporting the (in)existence of this immense Dacian state resides in the fact that, after Burebista’s 42

assassination in the same year with that of his potential rival Caesar, 44 B. C., the first falling victim to the Dacian aristocracy unhappy with the threat of a centralization that woud have substantially reduce its traditional powers and the last one loosing its life among one of the most important civil wars from ancient Rome – Burebista’s political construction, ‘The great state which he had built with the sword but which lacked a true economic unity’, dismembered almost instantaneously. Despite this aspect which invalidates its hypothesis, any state, in the case one can talk about states in the politological sense of the term before our age – which earsn its name functioning on institutional, not personal bases, and therefore surviving the passing of one leader or another – Daicoviciu insists that he does not talk about a simple and temporary, although huge Dacian ‘tribal union’; moreover, ‘the development of the production forces in the Orăștiei mountains (the military centre of the Dacian’s political organization during the short and intermittent unification periods of the majority of their tribes by a leader more ambitious and more determined than his rivals, m.n.) and the complex of the cities built here by Burebista presupposes the existence, in the Dacian society fromSouth-West Transylvania, of a precursory phase towards the construction of a state before Burebista (Daicoviciu: 1968, 102, 110; italics in orig.). Because Burebista was king, Daicoviciu further argues, his state could not be anything but an incipient form of monarchy, named, in order to maintain the Marxist cannon distorted through Leninist lens, an ‘apprentice slave-state’. Apprentice because slavery, although did not obtained a central role in the production process of Dacian political economy, represented nevertheless an element of innovation, progressist with reference to the anterior period of the ‘primitive commune’ which, ‘according to the objective laws of history’, was destined to replace (Daicoviciu: 1968, 118-119; italics in orig.).

Although in a flagrant discontinuity with the research methods used in the fields of history and political science, the syntagm ‘centralized Dacian state’, sometimes completed with ‘independent’, made, with the blessing of the ‘genious of Carpathians’, an astonishing scientific career before 1989 (Ceaușescu 1989, 18; Potra în Potra, Stati, Crișan: 1982, 10).

On his turn, Burebista becomes, as his illustrious descendant over millenias, ‘the artisan of a wise policy’ rather than a warrior; the ones he led were equally brave and wise: ‘they cultivated as supreme moral values the pride of liberty, the bravery of defending it, moderation’ and, flagrantly contradicting Daicoviciu’s concept of ‘apprentice slave state’, formulated in 1965 and already outdated with reference to the ideological intensification of national-communism, for which Dacians became the most democratic ancient people, beside the fact that it already was, as Herodotus mentioned, the ‘bravest’ and the most ‘righteous’ 43

- ‘in an epoch of slavery, they rejected slavery’. Externally, ‘Peaceful neighbors found in them reliable partners for economic and cultural exchanges, benefiting all; but the conquerors received from the Dacians the rebuff of a general took to arms and often had to lear the bitter, but deserved price of defeat (Gheorghiu în Potra, Stati, Crișan: 1982, 292293). Kind of what the Soviet Union would have experienced in the case of taking into account the possibility of repeating the Prague experience from 1968: it would have been confronted, as the Dacians did with the Romans, by a ‘general’ resistance, trough what has been called ‘the war of the entire people’. But the Soviet Union never had this intention. It did not matter anyway. What mattered is that the regime had the ambition to discursively overlap Burebista’s ‘unitary and independent centralized state’, representing a major danger for ‘Roman imperialism’ (read American and/or Soviet) trough Dacia’s capacity (RSR) to mobilize, ‘through its example the fight for freedom of the peoples from the South of the Danube enslaved by Rome’. Thus to obtain, by indirectly competing with Maois and postmaoist China, the support of the nonaligned movement against a possible ‘imperialist’ or Soviet aggression. The danger of a Soviet invasion, because an ‘imperialist’ invasion can be excluded from the start, was out of the question; however, it was used as a rethorical weapon in the western press, where Moscow did not enjoy, in general, a favorable attitude.

Coming back to ‘Burebista the founder’, as Corneliu Vadim Tudor names him, we find out that his unique aim was that of foreshadowing the continuation and the improvement of the political ideal of the Dacians by no one other than the general secretary of the RCP, ‘The supreme synthesis of the millenial wisdom of the Romanian people and of its youth without old age’, legitimized by ‘the voivodal noblesse inherited from the hundreds of generations of ancestors’ (Vadim Tudor: 1983, 81, 140). Therefore „the firm wall against migrations, the making of the first statal formations and afterwards, starting from 1290, of the Romanian countries – everything, absolutely everything springs from the common conscience of the borders and of the same ethnic being, conscience that was developed by that gigantic tarabostes that was Burebista. He really existed and offered the first viable measure of our being and permanence, no one can contest these evidences without making himself a fool in front of history. Romanian language, religion and the natural borders from Burebista’s time constituted the sacred trinity of the national consciousness, the coagulating factors that held the Romanians together, two millennia, around their parental place, no matter how many winds would scatter the earth and the snow, the crops from the field and the ashes, against all sacrileges and barbarian plunders. Eternal praise to the father Burebista, and may his memory be adorned with bay laurels and green bay! He was the first keeper of 44

the golden tools of our ideals, under his wise leadership begun to shine on the heaven of our homeland the first stars of pride, to him the imperial eagles of the Carpathian and the whole nature swore obedience, to him gave praise the moiras of a great destiny for this people. He is the first great pillar of the Triumphal Arch of the country, while the second is, no doubt, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Between them, as a frontispiece, grows over ages and unites with the iron link of the ‘lust that lusted’ Michael the Brave. Trough them, trough these great men, and trough the other brave makers of country and traditions, the Romanain people has come today to see with his own eyes his dreams of freedom, unity and prosperity!” (Vadim Tudor: 1983, 64; italics in orig.).

The attention is retained, in this painting of cosmic proportions, the ‘natural borders’ of the presupposed proto-Romania from Burebista’s period, almost twice the size of the present day Romania. Nevertheless, the author does not hesitate in applying the accusation of irredentism, then and now, to the Transylvanian Magyars and to the Magyars leaving abroad Romania, trough direct references to the ‘loftily tribes’ which ‘did not yet appear on the map of the world and still traveled blindly on the back of their horses, arousing the dust of the steps from sol-oriens’ when ‘they, the Dacians, built in the crown of the Carpathians and on their valleys a classic culture, original and full of beauty’ (Vadim Tudor: 1983, 61).

Despite being the most ‘brave’, ‘righteous’ and, one could add, the most democratic among the Tracians, the Dacians nevertheless lost the war ‘with changing odds’ (Gheorghiu în Potra, Stati, Crișan: 1982, 293) waged against Rome. It is certain that Dacians never stood a chance in defeating the greatest power of Antiquity. But when politics doubled by implacable ideological reasons penetrates not only the scientific field, but everything public and official, we should not be at all surprised when we read that, on the contrary, the power of the Dacians united by Burebista ‘became so great that at least two times existed the danger that they could occupy the Romans (and not otherwise, as it happened in 106 A. D.)’ (Vadim Tudor: 1983, 61). Remembering the two opportunities Burebista had to conquer Rome is purely superfluous. However, is not superfluous to mention that Traian waged agains the dacians an ‘aggressive, unjust’ war, while the latter only defended their country, despite occasionally plunder campaigns in the Roman provinces from the South of the Danube. ‘The danger that the Dacian state represented for the Roman empire was real, but it did not threaten the existence of Rome and the Roman people, but only the Roman possessions at the South of the Danube’. Moreover, these campaigns would have not represented plunder opportunities, but tentative encouragements for the dacian tribes in the area to rebel against Roman occupation. Even if Decebal, the last Dacian king, would have conquered these 45

regions during a war with Rome (something he never intended), ‘his action would not have been a war of aggression, but a war of freedom’ of the related and less fortunate tribes, without posing a threat to the existence of the Roman empire.

‘The expedition Traian

prepared a mortal danger for the existence of the Dacian state, for the independence of the Dacian people. The Romans would fight in order to conquer, the Dacians for their freedom and their homes. In this sentiment of defending their motherland the Dacians have found the strength to heroically resist almost three years to the most formidable army Antiquity has ever known (Daicoviciu: 1968, 250-251). It intrigues, if something can intrigue further, the reciprocity the Dacians would have demanded from the Romans: we do not aim to annihilate you, so you should not aim to annihilate us. Ceaușescu’s frustrations for not being the leader of a global superpower (Popescu: 1993, 307), but of a small state lacking nuclear weapons are transposed in time, becoming the frustrations of a prosperous and independent Dacia against an immoral aggression from an empire its borders has continuously trespassed, even if pursuing some ideals to noble for the Roman comprehension capacity Just as ‘Burebista the founder’, transformed by Vadim Tudor into the cornerstone of an absolutely ridiculous nationalist mythology (1983, 81), Decebal becomes on his turn one of the antique predecessors of Ceaușescu. The Dacian king, named the ‘hero of the ancestors’ and the ‘ancestor of heroes’, the ‘Carpathian vulture’ which presumably threatened Rome just as much as Hannibal did some centuries earlier – is considered a ‘new man’ for ‘new times’, a hero which’s sacrifice staked, just the remembrance of Burebista’s ‘Dacian centralized state’, the consciousness of Dacian-Roman continuity and of unity on the territory of modern Romania. ‘Centuries have passed, but they only increased the urge, the example of Decebal’s deeds, strengthening consciousnesses in the struggle to maintain the ethnic being, to defend the liberty of the Land Decebal himself defended with ardor, with the sacrifice of his life’. And today, ‘the sacrifice of the great king’ is understood and valued more than ever, even the general secretary of the RCP himself proving his ‘deep understanding and cherishment of the lessons of the past’ by inscribing the memory of the Dacian king ‘at a righteous place in the great book of the past’ (Achim: 1981, 77-89; Tudor: 1977, 18, 64).

Otherwise, it is obvious that the migratory populations which passed for almost a thousand years over the Roman Dacia’s territory have radically altered the already plural identity of this former imperial province. One cannot talk, therefore, about a biological continuity between the Vlachs, the Moldavians and the Transylvanians from the medieval, modern and contemporary times – and Dacia’s population after the Roman conquest, but 46

only about a partial and selective symbolic continuity operated by certain political and cultural elites interested by the attention of a West which’s development, prosperity and military capacities begun to affirm more and more and within the memory of Rome’s former glory was far from being extinguished. In Eric Hobsbawm’s terms, a very important historian of nationalism, we are dealing with an ‘invented’ tradition, from purely pragmatic reasons: as an indispensable element within any type of discourse, history never exists beyond certain contemporary stakes, therefore beyond a form of politics. Medieval voivods needed the support of the Papacy and of the ascending Western powers in the attempt to stop or at least contain the Turkish expansion, Ceaușescu needed funds and western technology in order to finish the revolution in its national-communist acception and to transform the RSR into a global middle power.

By transforming the Dacians into the direct ancestors of Romanians and into the symbolic embodiment of the most patriotic force that ever expressed the unity and the desire for independence of the inhabitants living between the Carpathians, the Danube river and the Black Sea – the RCP, the national-communist discourse proved that it had absolutely nothing in common with the modern theories of nation formation. Quite the contrary, Romanian national-communist was not only perennialist, but largely primordialist, thus sharing numerous ideological characteristics with extreme-right ideologies such as the organic nationalist discourses from the end of the XIXth century and the beginning of the XXth century and legionarism, Romania’s sui-generis type of fascism. And this was and still remains, for a regime pretending to have a Marxist ascendancy, quite an ideological dilemma.

In conclusion, nationalism was a constitutive element within the official ideology of the ‘Golden Epoch’, unlike the previous period, that of Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej’s leadership (1948-1965). This type of nationalism I refer to as pseudo-hegemonic nationalism. Before explaining it, I should mention that trough the expression project of an alternative modernity I refer to Romanian communism in general and the way it tried to materially emulate modernity in a short period of time while distorting its values (pluralism, democracy) and pretending it only extracts their logical consequences. The concept of ‘hegemonic nationalism’ is borrowed from the work of Didier Chaudet, Florent Parmentier and Benoît Pélopidas (2009), which use it to describe the Eurasian identitary project of postSoviet Russia, consumed by the ambition to rebuild its global geopolitical magnitude trough the help of a political nationalism to which all of the ethnic groups sharing the Russian territory can identify with. In reverse, neo-conservatism plays the same role in the United 47

States. The nationalism of the present project was labeled as pseudo-hegemonic; its most intimate ambitions were hegemonic in the sense of the desirability of geopolitical, economic and cultural range of great powers, even if the real possibilities of achieving this goal were, except the propagandistic register, never close to be materialized. Ceaușescu generously imagined itself as the leader of a superpower in the making and he even acted in this sense starting with the second half of the 1970s within the Third World, inducing the idea of Romania as a China in miniature, contesting both Western capitalism but also the Soviet Union’s ‘great power chauvinism’, although of course he did not disagree (how could he?) with the Soviet political system.

The concept of pseudo-hegemonic nationalism was applied not only at the international level, but also in the domestic policy of the Ceaușescu regime. Here, the ideological and political hegemony that the party tried to institute did not substantially reverberate among the population. On the contrary, the need of ‘building socialism’ by and trough ‘new men’ was passively, sometimes latently hostile, accepted. This does not mean at all that the social influences of this unsuccessful hegemony were negligible; in most of the cases, they were simply not the anticipated ones (duplicity, conformism, general apathy).

Although Leninist regimes, as Kenneth Jowitt names them, possessed an indisputable internationalist ideological basis, as any political projects which stayed in power for a considerable amount of time, they have developed conservative tendencies, even if they tried to enfold them on the Leninist ideological scaffolding. Although it experienced the same evolution, Romanian communism between 1965 and 1989 never renounced the rudimentary form of Leninism which it absorbed via Stalinism. It did, however, placed it on an approximately equal position with that of pseudo-hegemonic nationalism, more vehement and less credible as the regime came to its end.

Beside Națiunea socialistă. Politica identității în Epoca de Aur, Romanian nationalcommunism was analyzed in several articles and book chapters: Emanuel Copilaș, „Third World themes in the international politics of the Ceaușescu regime or the international affirmation of the socialist nation”, forthcoming in Symposion.

Theoretical and applied inquires in philosophy and social sciences, no. 1., 2018.

48

Emanuel Copilaș, „Perennialism and modernism in Romanian national-communism. An ideological dilemma ?”, in Symposion. Theoretical and applied inquires in philosophy and social sciences, no. 3, 2015, pp. 363-371.

Emanuel Copilaș, „National-comunismul ca proiect politic pseudo-hegemonic. Funcții si obiective”, in Sfera Politicii, nr. 178, 2014, p. 3-8.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Național-comunismul ca excepționalism? O punere în perspectivă”, in Mihăilescu, Vintilă (coord.), De ce este România astfel? Avatarurile excepționalismului românesc, Polirom Publishing House, Jassy, 2017, pp. 208-249.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Despre birocrație în Epoca de Aur. O analiză ideologică”, in Rogojanu, Dumitru-Cătălin; Boda, Ghergina (coord.), Istorie, Cultură și Cercetare, vol. I, Cetatea de Scaun Publishing House, Târgoviște, 2016, pp. 171-181.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Noi direcții în cercetarea național-comunismului românesc. O perspectivă istorică”, in Rogojanu, Dumitru Cătălin; Boda, Gherghina (coord.), Cercetarea în era globalizării. Mize, provocări și perspective, Cetatea de Scaun Publishing House, Târgoviște, 2015, pp. 203-224.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Naționalismul de dreapta în România postcomunistă: implicații ideologice și impact politic”, in Mișcoiu, Sergiu; Naumescu, Valentin (ed.), What Is Left From the Left-Right Cleavage? A Comparative Perspective, Bucuresti: Editura Institutului de Științe Politice și Relații Internaționale, 2015, pp. 187-206.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Comuniști «nativi» versus comunisti «moscoviti». Strategii de reconstruire identitară a național-comunismului în România postcomunistă”, in Gherghina, Sergiu, Mișcoiu, Sergiu (ed.), Miturile politice în România contemporană, Institutul European Publishing House, Jassy, 2012, pp. 151-180.

Although is not centered on national-communism in particular, the following article analyzes a cultural and social phenomenon in 1980s Romania – the rise and fall of videotheques, a phenomenon that was closely monitored by local and national authorities:

49

Constantin Pârvulescu, Emanuel Copilaș, „Hollywood Peeks: The Rise and Fall of Videotheques in 1980s Romania”, in East European Politics and Societies, no. 2, vol. 27, 2013, pp. 240-258.

2.4.Party and state in Ceaușescu’s Romania: an ambiguous and challenging relation This section of the thesis is centered on a political philosophy thesis that I developed in a book published in the year 2017 (Cetățenii și revoluția. Contradicții între partid și stat în Epoca de Aur, Cetatea de Scaun Publishing House, Târgoviște). Here, I have advanced the hypothesis that far from overlapping each other to the point of confusion, the communist party and the communist state are, at least in the Romanian case, very different and even ideologically and politically incompatible.

In the aggressive-isolationist tradition typical for Leninist parties, the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) adopted a distrusting position towards the population, named, accordin

the

the

ideological

oscilations

of

the

moment

and

the

party’s

expectations/dissapointments, either ‘working people’, the ‘popular masses’, the ‘broad masses’, ‘people’ or ‘partiless masses’. But the Romanian Socialist Republic (RSR), the statal dimension of the regime, was juridically obliged to treat all residents of the country as citizens. The category of citizenship placed the state in a sensible posture, as dependent towards ideological fluctuations as the party to which it was subordinated – but simultaneously compelled it to maintain a certain stability, a compromise with the present, event if strategic and incomplete. Ceaușescu issued an interesting theory in this regard, apparently in contradiction with the militantism that was permanently expected from the population: ‘the wrong opinion that manifested itself in the old days, that the dictatorship of the proletariat is unconfined by law, must be renounced’. Ideology transformed into an annex of the juridical and the party into an attachement of the state? At least this is the conclusion that comes out from continuating this idea. ‘It is unconfined by the laws of the old, bourgeois society, but the power of the working class, of the working people, can enforce and develop itself only on lawful bases, ensuring the strictest compliance with the laws of our socialist society!’ (Rolul și locul omului... 1978, 107; vezi și Statutul partidului... 1974, 17). The dual nature of the regime, transformative, dynamic party, respectively bureaucratic state, is once again highlighted. But we can consider that Ceaușescu was simply condemning, through the ‘wrong opinion, manifested in the old days’, the interwar period, in which the tiny 50

communist party of Romania was directly subordinated to the Komintern, the third communist international founded by lenin in 1919 and strategically dismantled by Stalin in 1943 as an act of good will towards his Western allies, a perioa in which the party was coerced to adopt an explicit position regarding the territorial integrity of Greater Romania (Constantiniu 2001, 31-32). It is possible that this affirmation may have represented a strategy to pacify citizens potentially hostile to the official policy, followed by an eventual ideological indoctrination.

Being forced to behave more and more as a state, while the massive industrialization and the ‘agricultural revolution’ entailed a corelative growth of the bureaucratic segment, RCP becomes a more ‘individualistic’ party. Ceaușescu identifies the solution within the ‘organization of the free time of our party and state active’, the latter being centered on an ever-growing relation to the ‘masses of working people’, a process that would have eventually consolidated the ‘spirit of collective life’ and eliminate the ‘individual spirit that unfortunately makes its presence felt’. This would have happened because communists, true revolutionaries, ‘must be fierce enemies of petite-bourgeois individualism’ (Rolul și locul omului... 1978, 97, 117). Communist was not the one who mechanically followed the party decisions; communism meant more, true devotion and all of the efforts needed in order to ‘put into practice the party line’ on all levels, especially within the fields they act. ‘This is a problem, to say so, of the A.B.C. of communism’, indispensable for the national-communist revolution. ‘And this must be understood by all comrades’ (Dezvoltarea și perfecționarea...

1972, 317; see also Olaru: 1972, 46-53). A paradox of the ‘Golden Age’ thus becomes clearer: it was impossible for a Leninist regime to have both a dynamic, militant, revolutionary party and a full statal centralization of economy and society, a centralization that generated static bureaucratic mechanisms, more and more confortable and petitebourgeois’ through their sheer nature.

Without counting on too many devoted communists, and neither on enough patriots, the RCP saw itself limited and undermined in its revolutionary project by the same recalcitrant and toneless citizens. Therefore it used several camouflage organizations to permanently keep them under surveillance (Ceterchi: 1974, 57-72). Even if the party, representing the ‘people’ ‘through its best of sons’, had in 1981 aproximately three million members (Ceaușescu 1989a, 228-309), the vast majority of the population still consisted in ‘partyless masses’. To tackle this problem, the Front of Socialist Unity was founded in 1976 and renamed, in 1980, the Democratic Front of Socialist Unity (DFSU) as an ‘expression of the whole people’ (Buzatu 1975, 19; Cuciuc 1986, 85). As the revolutionary project of the 51

RCP become more and more weak, failing in influencing voluntary mobility and in the creation of a new, revolutionary conscience, the regime started to insist on the importance of the political and ultimately repressive factor in the ‘construction of socialism’. Integrally reversing the Marxist relation between structure and superstructure, the RCP argued that ‘the perfection of socialist democracy’ as a ‘complex ( and continuous, m.n.) superstructural phenomenon’ ‘does not automatically result from the economic base of socialism, but depends to a great extent on the actions of the subjective factor, first of all of the political factor, represented by the communist party from each socialist country’ (Buzatu 1975, 20; see also Florea, Moraru 1973, 30-31). Replacing social transformation, a long and natural one, with an alert and artificial political transformation, the RCP aimed, using the DFSU, to form ‘the citizens of the motherland within the spirit of the high ideals of socialism, of the endless devotion towards the motherland and the party’, together with the ‘respect and love for the wonderful fighting traditions of our people for social and national liberation’, respectively ‘for the triumph of the cause of liberty, independence and national sovereignty’ and ‘the relentless respectation of the laws of the country’ (Buzatu 1975, 42, 47; Olteanu, Ceaușescu în Statul socialist... 1976, 248-252; Florea, Moraru 1973, 38, 41; Congresul al Xlea... 1969, 71; Perfecționarea organizării... 1972, 187-189).

Only ‘socialism’ could have ensured the ‘rights and liberties of the citizens’, respectively the ‘free and conscious participation’ of all citizens to the political activity in general. It follows that only if it is ‘conscious’, developed on the ideological coordinated of national-communism, can the involvement of citizens in public affairs be truly free. Inverse, even if the regime had granted in the 1969 Constitution many generous possibilities of public association, none of these could have been used ‘with goals that are contrary to the socialist settlement and to the interests of those who work’ (1969, 10).

I have argued so far that Leninist regimes in general and the RSR in particular aimed to diminish and finally eliminate altogether the distance between politics and society, of the ‘opposition between those who govern and those who are governed’, although temporary ‘differences in this filed’ still persist. But this outcome can be fulfilled only if ‘ever growing masses and eventually every citizen will become an active participant to the life of the state’.

Consequently, ‘public-spirited organizations’, any form of syndical, artistic, agricultural, youth and women association (Ceterchi în Statul socialist... 1976, 111, 119; Ceterchi: 1974, 60-72; Dimitriu 1978, 111; Șerbănescu 1973, 67) – all these are approached as indirect but efficient means to mobilize the society, to make it pround to directly participate, through the development of heavy industry, light industry and of the infrastructure, to the general 52

progress of the country, with the hope that mobilization in favor of practical goals will eventually entail a corelative ideological mobilization (see Florea, Moraru 1973, 49-50). The regime was thus hoping to produce a ‘profesional conscience’, to inoculate an endless devotion of citizens towards their work, because the ‘revolutionary conscience is obtained only in battle, in work’; only after the workers would have understood that in ‘socialism’ they act both as producers and as consumers, being part of a superior democracy, in which class conflicts are absent – only then the national-communist revolution would have entered on its natural course (Iacob în Iordănescu 1976, 83-98; Perfecționarea relațiilor de producție... 1972, 44; Rolul și locul omului... 1978, 155; Popescu 1975, 40-41, 45-53; Lucuța 1979, 34-77; Miroș 1980, 37-38). Citizens were encouraged to exercit power on their turn and on each other, through different forms of ‘public-spirited control’. ‘The general entailment of all categories of citizens to the actions of management and optimal use of means offered by society are realized also through public-spirited control over several important sections of social-economic activity (…). The activity of public-spirited control is organized and led by the Front of Socialist Unity, with the direct support of the organizations that are a part of it. State and public-spirited organs are compelled to help the Front of Socialist Unity in this action. In order to effectuate the public-spirited control teams of 3-5 people are constituted and these are formed by syndicate members, elected in the general assemblies of those unions, members of the Union of Communist Youth, of cooperatives, of other public-spirited organizations, as well as by housewifes and pensioneers, which are designated in citizenship assemblies of city districts and villages. The constitution of the commissions, their composition and repartition to units are established by the organs of the Front of Socialist Unity together with the comittees or the executive bureaus of popular councils. The findings of the teams of public-spirited control are brought to the knowledge of of the leader of that particular unit, who is compelled to undertake the necessary measures in order to remove the deficiencies’ (Ceterchi în Statul socialist... 1976, 121; subl. în orig; vezi și Rolul și atribuțiile... 1972, 48-52).

Everyone is monitoring everyone: Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, developed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and punish (2005) is in full process of development.

Especially because it has as a driving force not necessarily the much praised nationalcommunist ideological convictions – these are considered the results of the long process of social technology and not its premises – but especially envy, resentments and personal animosities: the teams of ‘public-spirited control’ represent an excellent opening in this regard. Consequently, the rights and obligations of citizens are molded within an implacable 53

asymmetric dialectic aimed to exacerbate the latter and to constitute the former exclusively through their agency. In this way, ‘socialist democracy’ is antithetical with reference to the ‘anarchic conceptions of absolute liberty, as a manifestation of the arbitrariness of each individual’ (Ceterchi în Statul socialist... 1976, 123). The fundamental rights of the citizens of the RSR were based on equality with reference to the law and on social and economic tenets. In this way, the regime afforded to oppose to the Western critiques regarding the infringement of human rights the argument that these ‘bourgeois’ rights were just political, and not even completely political, since they could not really contest the capitalist system.

The bourgeois rights amounted to nothing more than ‘barricade-rights’ (see Prisca 1978, 112, 132-133), limited by the class-structure of capitalist societies. The assured right to work, to have a job, to vacancies partially subsided by the state was much more important for the general secretary of the RCP than the right to vote freely and behave ‘anarchically’, without any concern for the public interest; in Marxist terms, this amounted to the right of choosing your own exploiters for a limited period of time. In other words, the structural rights were much more important in Leninist regimes than te suprastructural, political and cultural rights, incapable of ensuring food and a home, the necessary resources of every day life. What this type of regimes have forgotten is that there is an ongoing reciprocity between social and individual human rights, one type without the othe amounting to nothing, in the end.

The ideological and political gap between party and state in Ceaușescu’s Romania, an issue with profound philosophical implications, was further analyzed in several articles and book chapters: Emanuel Copilaș, „Urbanizare și omogenizare socială: funcțiile sistematizării teritoriale în Epoca de Aur (II)”, in Polis, nr.1, 2017.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Urbanizare și omogenizare socială: funcțiile sistematizării teritoriale în Epoca de Aur (I)”, in Polis, nr. 3, 2016, pp. 151-165.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Între partid și stat: rolul sindicatelor, a «organelor cu dublă natură» și a Frontului Democrației și Unității Socialiste în economia politică a național-comnismului românesc (1965-1989)”, in Polis, nr. 2, 2016, pp. 169-183.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Cetățenii și revoluția. Tehnici de producere a cetățeniei în România socialistă, 1965-1989”, in Ivan, Ruxandra; Pleșca, Vasile, (coord.), A guverna/a fi guvernat.

54

Ipostaze ale raportului dintre stat și cetățean, University of Bucharest Publishing House, 2015, pp. 59-76.

3. Other topics

3.1.Romanian Postcommunism If communist ideology and political practice is rather well defined and thoroughly researched, the ideological character of postcommunism, its particular social character camouflaged by a universalist discourse, an aspect identifiable in every political ideology nevertheless – is harder to observe. There are plenty of reasons for this outcome: the mirage of the 1990’s Western liberalism and that of the consumerist society that supposedly buried all political ideologies and especially communism to the dustbin of history – becoming in this process the only relevant path of political, economic and social development; the interests of the former communist elite to elude its past and to reemerge as a force capable of modernizing the country through fast and onerous privatizations while bluntly condemning all social tensions that inevitably occurred as a result of this process with the help of a disproportionate anticommunist discourse; the geopolitical tensions that emerged after the end of the Cold War, a framework in which the West’s pressures for expanding its sphere of influence in areas recently dominated by the former Soviet Union blended with the general historical and political distrust of the Romanian society towards the Russian federation.

After three decades since the 1989 revolution, is postcommunism still a relevant concept for understanding Romania's profound transformations after the fall of Ceauşescu's national-communist regime? For a number of reasons, I aimed to offer in several publications a positive answer to this question: postcommunism is still a valid theoretical tool in apprehending this new stage of Romania's development, although its relevance is not so powerful as it was back in the 1990s. These studies – books and articles - try to differentiate several major directions of analysis regarding Romanian postcommunism. The typology I propose, for exemple, in an article entitled Romanian postcommunism. A possible typology - is by far not a complete one, not even a very complex one; it just tries to identify, grosso modo, what I consider to be the main dimensions of this complex social phenomenon.

Of course, the debate can go on, and it is highly recommendable to go on, both by expanding 55

and/or contesting the present typology. After I analyze the ideological, political, economical, social and cultural components of Romanian postcommunism, the idea I try to bring forward is that of the irreducible particularity of this ideology, the more prolific as its discursive efforts to present itself as the 'end of history', common sense, reality or non-ideological universalism – were more intense.

As previously mentioned, a number of books, book chapters and scientific articles offer a further exploration of the subject: Emanuel Copilaș (coord.), Sfârșitul istoriei se amână. O radiografie a postcomunismului românesc, Cetatea de Scaun Publishing House, Târgoviște, 2017.

Emanuel Copilaș (coord.), Marele jaf postcomunist. Spectacolul mărfii și revanșa capitalismului, Adenium Publishing House, Jassy, 2017.

Sorin Adam Matei, Caius Dobrescu, Emanuel Copilaș (coord.), Liberalismul, pro și contra.

O idee care refuză să moară deși nu știe ce o ține în viață, Adenium Publishing House, Jassy, 2017.

Emanuel Copilaş, De la ideologie la hegemonie. Explorări critice în postcomunismul românesc, forthcoming at Tritonic Publishing House, Bucharest, 2018.

Emanuel Copilaș, (O)poziții. Lecturi politice în vremuri depolitizate, Alexandria Publishing House, Suceava, 2017.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Postcomunismul românesc. O posibilă tipologie”, in Sociologie Românească, nr. 2, 2017.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Simbolistica politică a populismului românesc: (dis)continuități cinice.

Cazul guvernului Ponta I”, in Polis, no. 4, 2017, pp. 87-105.

Emanuel

Copilaș,

„Dilemele

regionalizarii.

Intre

federalismul

constitutional

si

personalizarea puterii in numele interesului public”, in Polis, no. 1, 2014, pp. 106-117.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Simbolistica politică românească: între populism și cinism?”, in Sfera Politicii, nr. 174, 2013, pp. 107-120.

56

Emanuel Copilaș, „Flexibilizarea structurilor prin resurgența agenților sociali? O analiză socio-constructivistă a protestelor din Timișoara”, in Mihăilescu, Vintilă; Stoica, Cătălin Augustin (coord.), Iarna vrajbei noastre. Manifestațiile din ianuarie 2012 din România, Paideia Publishing House, Bucharest, 2012, pp. 112-160.

3.2.Hegelian political philosophy This topic is consistent with my general involvement in the research of national-communism which, in the Romanian case, is, as I have argued above, full of ideological dilemmas and political turning points. Briefly put, in order to understand the philosophical underpinnings of communist regimes I was compelled to study the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, along with other major socialist theorists of the 19th and 20th centuries: Georgi Plekhanov, Dmitry Pisarev, Alexander Herzen, Antonio Gramsci, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg. Needless to say, in order to place all these studies within a broader perspective, G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy of history was mandatory. Covering over the years all of Hegel’s works, I was able to better grasp the huge differences and also the partial similarities existent between his political philosophy, the classical Marxist literature and the ideology of communist regimes, especially the Romanian one.

Hegel’s political philosophy received a lot of attention from scholars. However, some of those scholars were too eager to isolate Hegel’s political thinking from his overall philosophy, thus labeling him as a proto-fascist or at least as an authoritarian theorist (Popper 2013, 242-290; Russell 1972, 730-746; Cohen 2001, 167). This was partly a result of Hegel’s critique of liberalism. The philosopher was not very fond of abstract notions like human rights, cosmopolitanism or the social contract, but he did not disregard them per se, only to the extent that they were isolated intellectual creations not validated by practical action, and often accompanied by confusion and fanaticism (Hegel 1967, 327; Hegel 2004, 262-270).

After all, Hegel declared himself to be an advocate of philosophical progress (Hegel 1963, 43); due to the fact that his understanding of philosophy is immanent, incorporated within the becoming of the social whole, it follows that Hegel’s philosophy is profoundly historical and its task is to actively improve all spheres of life, not simply observe them . But progress must always be filtered by and adapted to the ethical life of a community. Otherwise, it amounts to nothing.

57

Furthermore, subjective freedom can only manifest itself within the objective freedom provided by the state. In this process, individual liberty is negated by the objective liberty, which in turn is also negated by the first. The advancement of this whole speculative situation can only take place as an improvement of both forms of liberty: citizens gradually and contextually expand the norms and rules of states in order to gain more freedom, while states accommodate the demands for more liberties by integrating them into their systems of right. Therefore, freedom is attained only within the juridical and political configuration provided by the state, not outside it – even if sometimes against it. What Hegel is trying to say is that political communities always precede the existence of their individual members and, because of that, between them a contract instituted by two equal parts is impossible.

But this does not mean that, due to their institutional and ethical superiority, states should behave arbitrary towards their citizens. On the contrary, one of the main tenets of modernity lies in the recognition of particularities as the fundamental and insurmountable elements of political communities. But the sovereignty of the people must not be confounded with populism; only through gradual civic education and material improvement can the people become truly worthy of their sovereignty and understand liberty through present day necessity and necessity through prospective liberty.

I have explored Hegel’s political philosophy in some scientific articles and book chapters, as follows: Emanuel Copilaș, „Negative determinations of intellect. A Hegelian critique of Slayer’s phenomenology”, forthcoming in Metal Music Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 2019.

Emanuel Copilaș, „History of masks, masks of history. Nietzsche, Hegel and the eternal return as becoming of spirit”, forthcoming in Meta. Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy, no. 2, 2018.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Being and metaphysics. A Hegelian critique of Heidegger’s phenomenological voluntarism”, forthcoming in Meta. Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy, no. 1, 2018.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Hegel, Eurocentrism, Colonialism”, forthcoming in Romanian Journal of Political Science, no. 1, 2018.

58

Emanuel Copilaş, „Hegel and the political philosophy of Brexit”, in Romanian Journal of Political Science, no. 2, 2017, pp. 35-62.

Emanuel Copilaş, „Hegel and the social contract”, in Hermeneia. Journal of Hermeneutics, Art Theory and Criticism, no. 19, 2017, pp. 74-89.

Emanuel Copilaş, „The challenge of bad infinity: a restatement of Hegel’s critique of mathematics”, în Meta. Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology and Practical Philosophy, no. 2, 2017, pp. 681-699.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Voință și esență. Schopenhauer, Hegel și problema ontologiei moderne”, in Rogojanu, Dumitru-Cătălin; Boda, Gherghina (coord.), Istorie, cultură și cercetare, vol.

II, Cetatea de Scaun Publishing House, Târgoviște, 2017, pp. 397-421.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Istoria păcatului și păcatul istoriei. Hegel și Kierkegaard despre implicațiile teologice ale filosofiei istoriei”, în Rogojanu, Dumitru-Cătălin; Dogaru, Cosmin-Ștefan; (coord.), Cercetarea istoriei. Noi abordări, analize și interpretări, Editura Cetatea de Scaun, Târgoviște, 2017, pp. 32-55.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Libertate și necesitate la Kant, Hegel și Marx”, in Polis, no. 1, 2016, pp.

209-227.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Hegel despre intelect, rațiune și devenire”, in Polis, no. 4., 2015, pp. 279295.

Although Hegel was quoted quite often in this following article, its overall subject was Ernesto Laclau’s political philosophy: Emanuel Copilaș, „Subiectul non-universal și redemocratizarea stângii: in memoriam Ernesto Laclau”, in Polis, no. 4, 2014, pp. 106-117.

3.3.European studies In close connection with my research on communism, postcommunism and political philosophy, European studies have interested me to the extent they could bring a complementary contribution to these themes. However, my involvement with European 59

studies is not systematic. Furthermore, under the conceptual umbrella of European studies and with clear implications in this direction, I have also studied ideologies like Eurasianism or conservatism. Although the topic of Eurasianism was researched mainly before obtaining my doctoral degree, while European studies on the whole interested me both before and after I became a doctor in International Relations and European Studies - I intend to continue it nevertheless, as I will argue in the Career development plan section, in the form of several scientific articles, maybe even a book.

The European construction is a process far from being over. Despite present major shortcomings, like the social and/or the democratic deficit, to mention just a few, the EU contains both the principles and the means of overcoming its major deficiencies and return once again to the ‘welfare state’ model and to its social and democratic mission it went astray from. Only then will the EU be able to regain the confidence of its citizens, aside that of its markets. In the articles published on this topic I have analyzed the beginnings of the European project, along with its successes and failures, up to the political stagnation of the 1970s and the integration of Greece, Spain and Portugal, one decade later.

Next, I took into account the developments experienced by the European project at the end of the Cold War: a new political and economic impetus, along with the opportunities and impediments created by the perspective of the new East European democracies becoming member states. It ends with a discussion of the ‘dialectics of sovereignty’ (taking place between governments and communitary institutions), insisting on its undiserable present asymmetry and the perspectives of overcoming it. However, this ‘dialectics of soverignity’ is doubled by a more profound dialectics, taking place between citizens and governments or citizens and the EU institutions. This latter dialectic is less and less reciprocal. In other words, the political and social inequalities threaten to undermine the European construction by alienating it with regard to member states and also to its citizens.

Therefore, to paraphrase Andre Malraux, the Europe of the 21st century will be more social than market oriented or will not be at all.

The European Union is, no doubt, at a major political crossroad. Inequalities among its regions and member states are still alarmingly high, despite the considerable efforts made through cohesion policy to reduce them. The immigration crisis amplifies these inequalities, also generating major political outcomes, like Great Britain’s decision to renounce its EU membership. Some of my contributions on the topic offered a general perspective over the European project starting from the premise that the EU’s growing economic coherence is not doubled by the same level of political coherence. The future of the EU itself depends on 60

elaborating, as quickly as possible, a much needed political form and thus making it able to tackle more successfully the whole set of challenges that lies ahead.

As in the case of the previous research topics, my interest in European studies led to the publication of the following scientific articles: Emanuel Copilaș, „Economic and social inequalities in the European Union: a general view”, in Ideo. Romanian Journal of Philosophical and Social Studies, no. 1, 2016, pp. 107122.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Extinderea proiectului comunitar ca dialectică a suveranităților: dimensiuni, limite, perspective (II)”, in Polis, no. 3, 2014, pp. 178-193.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Extinderea proiectului comunitar ca dialectică a suveranităților: dimensiuni, limite, perspective (I)”, in Polis, no. 2, 2014, pp. 85-97.

Emanuel Copilaș, „Hannibal is in the city: several reflections on contemporary barbarians.

A social-constructivist approach”, in Studia Europaea, Cluj-Napoca, no. 1/2012, pp. 55-84 I have also published a book that can be situated, to a certain degree, within the framework of European studies. It consists in expanded and revised versions of some previously published articles, book chapters and book reviews: Emanuel Copilaș, Incursiuni în istoria politică și intelectuală a secolului XX, Adenium Publishinh House, Jassy, 2014.

4. Career development plan

4.1.Youth in communist Romania, 1965-1989 In Cetățenii și revoluția. Contradicții între partid și stat în Epoca de Aur, a whole chapter was dedicated to the approach of youth problems by Romanian national-communism. While the regime invested high hopes in this social category, aiming to transform it in a generation with a proper political conscience and, more important, a generation that has never experienced a different type of political regime – the young people grew more and more dissatisfied with the political, economic and social conditions Romanian national61

communism had to offer. Disquieted by such an outcome, the authorities abandoned, although never officially, the goal of turning young people into devoted communists.

Instead, simple and obedient citizens would suffice.

Benefiting from considerable materiales from different archives (over 130 volumes, many of them semi-classified research reports), along with a considerable literature of the subject, I intened to publish in the near future several scientific articles and a book on this topic. The book will be published by Polirom Publishing House.

4.2. The resurgence of undemocratic ideologies in contemporary Romania This topic was previously explored in some scientific articles and book chapters. However, I intend to expand its research. I have already issued a call for papers for a future collective volume that will be published in 2019 by Tritonic Publishing House and will have the exact title of this subsection. Among the already confirmed collaborators are personalities like Daniel Barbu, Vladimir Pasti, William Totok, Daniel Șandru, Livi Antonesei, Adrian Dohotaru, Gabriela Crețu, Claude Karnoouh, Liviu Rotman and Andrei Miroiu. The volume will also constitute a homage to professor Michale Shafir with the occasion of his seventyfive birthday.

After communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, it left behind an ideological void. At least this is what Zbigniew Brzezinski argues in one of his books from the 1990s (Brzezinski 1993). Understandable to a certain extent, this void was soon filled by ideologies firmly suppressed by the former regimes, namely nationalism and all kind of right-wing doctrines.

However, Brzezinski is referring only to one side of this ideological process. Nationalism was nurtured by communism as well, although with some minor changes with reference to ‘bourgeois nationalism’. After the 1989 political shift, it was not only anti-communist varieties of nationalism that emerged; in Romania, at least, many nationalist movements, some resulting into political parties, were from national-communist descent.

Nowadays, right-wing nationalism is mostly identifiable, in my opinion, within two intellectual movements. The first is the so called Prison Saints movement (sometimes it goes by the name foundation). It aims to recuperate the memory of the inmates persecuted by the communist regime for mainly religious reasons. An understandable and noble endeavor, but many of these inmates were members or sympathizers of the interwar Legionary Movement.

Condemning communism trough orthodox-nationalist and fascist affiliation is not exactly the most appropriate form of redemption. Second, the Memorial of the Victims of 62

Communism and of the Resistance. Although at a reasonable distance from the Prison Saints, some of the documentary films and publications of the memorial possess many traces of the above mentioned kind of nationalism.

Furthermore, the intense anti-communism that often coagulates Romanian rightwing nationalism can be understood as one of the main factors contributing to its ideological identity. However, anti-communism is a sufficient, but not a necessary cause for the existence of right-wing nationalism. In this particular case, the general and legitimate anticommunist objective tends to be overcome by the aim of replacing one pathology of modernity, communism, with another one at least as pernicious, nationalism.

Since the XIXth century, when it acquired its modern shape, Romanian nationalism was inextricable tied to a type of political romanticism which originated in the postNapoleonic German culture (Hitchins 2013a; Hitchins 2013b; Neumann 2013). This type of nationalism and the nuances it produced was also visible during the interwar, communist and post-communist periods. Nowadays, in the form of both right-wing and left-wing nationalism, this harmful ideology is, in the context of economical, political, geopolitical and demographical crisis, resurgent. Fortunately, however, it did not acquire a strong social impact and a firm political expression, at least not to the extent it did in the 1990s. But its ideological implications remain nevertheless powerful, especially if we take into account the latent nationalism that still appeals to a majority of the population. In a 2006 contest for choosing the most important Romanian of all times, the first place went to Stephen the Great, a ruthless XV century voivod of Moldavia, but nevertheless a skilled political and military leader. After him came Carol I, a king from German descent (1881-1914), who contributed enormously to the modernization of the country. On the third position we find Mihai Eminescu, considered the most talented Romanian poet ever, but also an ultranationalist and anti-Semite xenophobe. One can read in his poetry: ‘Who ever will grow in love with strangers/ May dogs eat his heart out’. On the forth position there is another voivod from the XVIth century, Michael the Brave, who managed for the first time to unite, for a brief period of time, Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania (1600). National-communist historiography presented him as a conscious pursuer of the ‘millenary’ dream of Romanians to live together in a single political unit, although he was nothing more than a pragmatic conqueror that looked for ways of resisting the assaults of the Otoman Empire (Boia 2011). Next is Richard Wurmbrand, a pastor of Jewish descent who was imprisoned during communism and stood out, in comparison to those mentioned above, as a real moral beacon. On the six place, outrageously enough, the voters placed the military dictator Ion Antonescu, a close 63

collaborator of Hitler who engaged Romania in a criminal war against the Soviet Union, far above its military and economic capacities. On the seventh place we have Mircea Eliade, considered to be the most important historian of religion ever, but also a devoted sympathizer of the Iron Guard before fleeing into exile in 1940. Alexandru Ioan Cuza comes next, the constitutional ruler of both Wallachia and Moldavia, which united themselves in 1859 and were officially recognized as a single kingdom by the European powers two decades later.

On the ninth and tenth places there is a very famous sculptor, Constantin Brâncuși, and a world renowned athlete, Nadia Comăneci.

So, we have two ruthless military leaders (Stephen the Great and Michael the Brave), one extreme nationalist and anti-Semitic poet (Mihai Eminescu), one military dictator (Ion Antonescu) and one right-wing historian of religions (Mircea Eliade), one authoritarian but legitimate king (Carol I) and one very authoritarian leader who ruled almost exclusively against the Legislative Assembly (Alexandru Ioan Cuza). The rest are a preacher, a sculptor and an athlete. This is why nationalism, ‘banal nationalism’, to use Michael Billig’s expression (Billig 2010), has a considerable ideological impact in Romania, both in its rightwing and left-wing forms, an impact not doubled, like in the case of many other European countries, at least not by now, by a similar political expression. Another reason for this powerful, although (still) latent ideological implications of both right-wing and left-wing, but mostly right-wing nationalism – is the fact that almost all relevant political parties recuperated nationalism as one of the main elements of their official discourses. Even the Social-Democratic Party, which appealed to orthodoxy and nationalist pride as the key elements of the 2014 presidential elections campaign. Overall, nationalism’s fragmented discourse, both in general and in its right-wing form - and its incapacity to articulate itself in a relevant political form allows us to treat it as a potential, future threat to Romania’s political stability rather than a manifest and immediate one.

4.3. The dialectic of possibility. Two centuries of Hegelian political philosophy 2021 will mark two centuries since the publication of Hegel’s main work on political hilosophy, The principles of the philosophy of right. I intend to launch a call for papers at the end of this year or the beginning of the next one in order to mark this anniversary moment with a collective volume that will probably be published at the Tritonic Publishing House.

64

4.4. Eurasianism and neo-Eurasianism As previously mentioned, I will continue to study the ideology of Eurasianism and neoEurasianism and its geopolitical implications for the European Union and the international stage on the whole. Both in its classical variant, based on primarily cultural coordinates, and in the neo-one, predominantly geopolitical, Eurasianism proves its ideocratic character, and therefore ideological, despite its advocates’ rejection of any form of ideology in favor of geopolitical concepts. Advancing concepts as pro-Soviet neo-Eurasianism, respectively post-Soviet neo-Eurasianism, that were theoretized in a scientific article published in 2009, my future research will center around a review of the Eurasianist phenomenon in 20th century Russia, and the way it was resorbed, after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, in the Russian Federation’s foreign policy. I have gathered numerous materials in this sense and I will use them in order to write scientific articles, possibly even a book.

Post-Soviet, or “Slavophile”, neo-Eurasianismis considered (and to a certain point it is) anintellectual construct based on geopolitical grounds. Unlike ideologies, these are supposed to be invested with “a constant character and can not beamended over time by historical developments.”

But just here lies the ideological character of neo-Eurasianism, in postulating ideas it has about itself and about the world around as being permanent and unchanging in time and space. Stressing the primacy of the Eurasian idea, neo-Eurasianism reveals, as its precursor, its ideocratic character. Or any ideocracy, any enslavement and anydistortion of reality in order to make it compatible with a certain idea or set of ideas is ultimately an ideology.

Moreover, the messianism specific to neo-Eurasianism, its radicalism, its irrational belief in an imminent confrontation between the“Great Atlantic Area and Eurasia (a reminiscenceof the Leninist dogma regarding the inevitability of a fight between the “imperialist camp” and the “socialist” one), all these lead to the identification of an ideological substrate within the neo-Eurasianist project, despite the declared aversion of its adherents to any form of ideology. We should not loose out of sight the rather fascistic character of neo-Eurasianism, despite its pro-Islamic propensity and the so-called tolerance of all Eurasian peoples. The main pole of the neo-Eurasian project remains the Russian Federation, which reminds all nations and ethnic groups inthe post-Soviet area Moscow’s imperial ambitions and the essentially imperialist nature of neo-Eurasianism. Lacking feasibility, resentful and intolerant, neo-Eurasianism plies on the cultural coordinates of the ‘20s’ Eurasianism, borrowing from it the ideocratic character, but injecting it witha massive dose of geopolitics.

Claiming resistance to Western culture, until it will be able to destroy it, neo-Eurasianism 65

forgets that each culture is a product of the interaction of other cultures, andthe opening to otherness permanently enriches its own identity, reducing prejudices, suspicions and fear towards the other. Closed in an autarchic cultural and geographical conception, even hermetic, Eurasianism’s success is based precisely on the ignorance, prejudice and fear of those who claim that are trying to protect them against the bad influence of the “materialistic and decadent West.

Finally, Eurasianism and neo-Eurasianism represent only a manifestation of what the famous Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev named ‘the religious energy of the Russian soul’, which is often orientated towards ‘goals which have nothing religious in them’. Just like

their

Slavophile,

Narodnic,

Nihilist,

Anarchistor

Communist

predecesors,

intelligentsia’s representants in the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th, Eurasianists and especially neo-Eurasianists extract their philosophy from Western ideas (in this case, residual-comunist and ultraconservative towards fascistic) insufficient and dogmatic assimilated (not that Fascism or Communism would not be themselves dogmatic), which they credit as being universal and eternally valid. The Russian civil society it’s just beginning to emerge, therefore an authentic social dialogue upon the ideas from the public sphere is still to be expected. As a consequence, the ideas which underlie Eurasianism did not benefit from debates to polish them, confirm or infirm their validity or universality and to attenuate their radical tendencies developed, to a great extent as in the case of the predecessor ideatic currents, due to the isolation and rejection from and by the society. They are still surrounded by an aura of ‘holiness’ and any attempt to critically approach them, not necessarily hostile, are disregarded from the start. As long as in Russia liberal ideas will remain ‘anemic’, the civil society and the social dialogue insufficiently developed and ‘the religious energyof the Russian soul’ oriented towards dogmatic and intolerant directions, not towards the possibility of creating a mobilizing ideal indispensable to anytype of political organization, especially to the democratic ones – these kind of movements will sadly maintain a certain strong position and hopefor a better future.

4.5.Eurocommunism: theory and history This is another topic that I want to fathom during the next years. As previously mentioned, I have briefly researched the relations between communist Romania and the main Eurocommunist parties within a scientific article pubslihed in 2011. In the foreseeable future, I plan to analyze in depth the theoretical foundations of Eurocommunism as a peculiar 66

form of Western Marxism, and also to take into account the history and organizational development of the main communist parties that have promoted this ideology in the second half of the 1970s: The Italian Communist Party, The Spanish Communist Party and the French Communist Party. The outcome of this research will materialize, as in the previous cases, in the writing of some scientific articles and/or a book, which Cetatea de Scaun Publishing House has already offered to print in advance.

4.6.Final remarks Besides, but in close connection to my scientific activity, I am also active in the Romanian cultural press, and I have contributed so far to magazines like Observator Cultural, Cultura, or Timpul. Sometime later this year, Tritonic Publishing House has accepted to publish all thse short pieces in a volume which will be entitled Critical exercises. Polemics, comments and notes, 2011-2017. Recently I was invited by Daniel Șandru to coordinate the social and political section of a new cultural journal – yet untitled – that will make its appearance in late April 2018.

This habilitation treatise enabled me to review the dimensions of my scientific research so far, to put it in perspective and to corelate it with the research directions sketched in the Career development plan section. As far as I can observe, there is an undeniable continuity and coherence between my past, present and future topics of analysis. If the present thesis will be successful in gaining me the habilitation, I intend to become a member of the doctoral school of the Faculty of Political Science, Philosophy and Communication Sciences from the West University of Timișoara and to work closely with other researchers with similar scientific interests in order to consolidate both this doctoral school and the institutional partnerships of the West University of Timișoara.

67

References Achim, Silviu (1981), „Decebal, eroul străbunilor, străbunul eroilor”, in Almanah Scânteia, pp. 77-89.

Adler, Emmanuel, (2005), Communitarian international relations, Routledge, New York.

Anghel, Paul (1983), „Legătura neîntreruptă”, in Sentimentul Patriei, București, Editura Militară, pp. 24-26.

Anton, Mioara, (2001), „Trădarea partidului frate”, în Rusan, Romulus, (ed.), Anii 19611972: Țările Europei de Est între speranțele reformei și realitatea stagnării, București, Fundația Academia Civică, pp. 146-153.

Ball, Terrence, Dagger, Richard, (2000), Ideologii politice și idealul democratic, Iași, Polirom.

Baylis, John, Smith, Steve, Owens, Patrici, (2008), The globalization of world politics. An introduction to international relations, New York, Oxford University Press.

Berdiaev, Nikolai, (1994), Originile și sensul comunismului rus, Cluj-Napoca, Dacia.

Besançon, Alain, (1993), Originile intelectuale ale leninismului, București, Humanitas.

Besançon, Alain, (1993), Originile intelectuale ale leninismului, București, Humanitas.

Betea, Lavinia, (2001a), Convorbiri neterminate. Corneliu Mănescu în dialog cu Lavinia Betea, Iași, Polirom.

Billig, Michael (2010), Banal Nationalism, London, Sage Publications.

Boia, Lucian (2011), Istorie și mit în conștiința românească, București, Humanitas.

Braham, Randolph (1964), „Rumania: onto the separate path”, in Problems of communism, nr. 13, pp. 14-24.

Brucan, Silviu, (1985), Dialectica politicii internaționale, Cluj-Napoca, Dacia.

Brucan, Silviu, (1992), Generația irosită. Memorii, București, Universul & Calistrat Hogaș.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew (1993), Marele eșec. Nașterea și moartea comunismului în secolul XX, Cluj-Napoca, Dacia.

Burks, R.V., (1966), „The Rumanian national deviation: an accounting”, in London, Kurt, (ed.), Eastern Europe in transition, Baltimore, The John Hopkins Press, pp. 93-113.

Buzan, Barry, (2000), Popoarele, statele și teama. O agendă pentru studii de securitate internațională în epoca de după Războiul Rece, Chișinău, Cartier.

Buzatu, Stana (1975), Frontul unităţii socialiste, expresie a unităţii întregului popor, Bucureşti, Editura Politică.

Carr, Edward, (1947), International relations between the two World Wars: (1919-1939), London: MacMillan.

68

Ceaușescu, Nicolae (1989), Creșterea Rolului Conducător al Partidului – Necesitate Obiectivă a Făuririi Societății Socialiste. Texte Alese, București, Editura Politică.

Ceaușescu, Nicolae (1989a), Creșterea Rolului Conducător al Partidului – Necesitate Obiectivă a Făuririi Societății Socialiste. Texte Alese, București, Editura Politică.

Ceterchi, Ioan (1974), Democrația socialistă. Principii și acțiune politică, București, Editura Politică.

Ceterchi, Ioan, (1976), „Participarea maselor la Conducerea Societății – Esență a Democrației Socialiste”, în Statul Socialist Român în Etapa Actuală, București, Editura Politică, pp. 102-124.

Chaudet, Didier; Parmentier, Florent; Pélopidas, Benoît (2009), When empire meets nationalism. Power politics in the US and Russia, Ashgate, Farnham, Burlington.

Chuev, Felix, (1993), Molotov remembers. Inside Kremlin politics, Chicago, Ivan D. Ree. Cohen, Martin (2001) Political Philosophy. From Plato to Mao, London, Pluto Press.

Congresul al III-lea al Partidului Muncitoresc Romîn (1960), București, Editura Politică.

Congresul al X-lea al Partidului Comunist Român (1969), Bucureşti, Editura Politică.

Constant, Benjamin, (2001), Scrieri politice, București, Nemira.

Constantiniu, Florin (2001), P.C.R., Pătrășcanu și Transilvania (1945-1946), București, Editura Enciclopedică.

Constantiniu, Florin, (2002), O isorie sinceră a poporului român, București, Univers Enciclopedic.

Constituția Republicii Socialiste România (1969), București, Editura Politică.

Copilaș, Emanuel, (2009a), „Revising realism: from scientism to a more empirical approach”, in Romanian Review of International Politics, nr. 1, pp. 25-48.

Copilaș, Emanuel, (2009b), “Implozia leninismului. O reevaluare a conflictului sino-sovietic din perspectivă ideologică”, in Sfera Politicii, nr. 141, pp. 89-111.

Copilaș, Emanuel, (2010), „Politica externă a României comuniste: anatomia unei insolite autonomii”, in Sfera Politicii, nr. 152, 2010, pp. 267-284.

Crampton, R.J. (2002), Europa Răsăriteană în secolul al XX-lea... şi după, Bucureşti, Curtea Veche.

Crankshaw, Edward, (1971), Khrushchev remembers, London, André Deutsch Limited.

Cuciuc, Constantin (1986), Sistemul democraţiei socialiste, Bucureşti, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică.

Daicoviciu, Hadrian (1968), Dacii, București, Editura pentru Literatură.

69

Deletant, Dennis, (2001), Teroarea comunistă în România. Gheorghiu-Dej și statul polițienesc, 1948-1965, Iași, Polirom.

Dezvoltarea și Perfecționarea Învățământului (1972), București, Editura Politică.

Dimitriu, E. (1978), Educația permanentă – educație a întregului popor, București, Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică.

Djilas, Milovan, (1991), Întâlniri cu Stalin, Craiova, Europa.

Dougherty, James, Pfaltzgraff, Robert, (1997), Contending theories of international relations. A comprehensive survey, New York, Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers.

Dunne, Tim, Kurki, Milja, Smith, Steve, (2010), International relations theories. Discipline and diversity, New York, Oxford University Press.

Ernu, Vasile, (2006), Născut în URSS, Iași, Polirom.

Farlow, Robert, (1971), „Romanian foreign policy: a case of partial alignment”, in Problems of Communism, nr. 20, pp. 54-63.

Fejtö, François, (1979), Histoire des démocraties populaires. Après Staline (1953-1979), vol. II, Paris, Éditions de Seuil.

Figes, Orlando, (1998), A peoples’ tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, New York, Penguin Books.

Fischer, Mary Ellen, (1989), Nicolae Ceaușescu. A study in political leadership, Boulder & London, Lynne Riener Publishers.

Fischer-Galați, Stephen, (1966), „Rumania and the Sino-Soviet conflict”, in London, Kurt, (ed.), Eastern Europe in transition, Baltimore, The John Hopkins Press, pp. 261-276.

Fischer-Galați, Stephen, (1998), România în secolul al XX-lea, Iași, Institutul European.

Florea, Ion; Moraru, Ion (1973), Dezvoltarea Multilaterală a Conștiinței Socialiste, București, Editura Politică.

Floyd, David, (1965), Rumania: Russia’s dissent ally, Londra, Pall Mall Press.

Foucault, Michel (2005), A supraveghea și a pedepsi. Nașterea închisorii, Pitești, Paralela 45.

Gellately, Robert, (2008), Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: the age of social catastrophe, New York, Vintage Books.

Gellner, Ernest (1993), Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers.

Gheorghiu, Mihnea (1982), „Personalitatea României contemporane”, in Potra, George; Stati, Șerban; Crișan, Constantin (coord.), Trepte de civilizație românească, București, Editura Politică, pp. 289-301.

70

Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe, (1960), „Raportul de activitate al Comitetului Central al Partidului Muncitoresc Romîn la Congresul al II-lea al Partidului”, in Articole şi cuvântări (1955-1959), Bucureşti, Editura Politică, pp. 5- 150.

Gilpin, Robert, (1981), War and change in world politics, New York, Cambridge University Press.

Gorbaciov, Mihail, (1986), Raportul politic al Comitetului Central al P.C.U.S. la Congresul XXVII al partidului, Moscova, Editura agenției de presă Novosti.

Gorbaciov, Mihail, (1987a), Cu privire la restructurare și politica de cadre a partidului, Moscova, Editura agenției de presă Novosti.

Gorbaciov, Mihail, (1987b), Scrieri alese, București, Editura Politică.

Gorbaciov, Mihail, (1988a), Restructurării revoluționare – o ideologie a înnoirilor, Moscova: Editura agenției de presă Novosti.

Gorbaciov, Mihail, (1988c), Cu privire la realizarea hotărîrilor celui de-al XXVII-lea Congres al P.C.U.S. și sarcinile de adîncire a restructurării, Moscova, Editura agenției de presă Novosti.

Gorbaciov, Mihail, (1994), Memorii, București, Nemira.

Gould, Harry, (1998), „What is at stake in the agent-structure debate?”, in Kubálková, Vendulka; Onuf, Nicholas; Kovert, Paul, International relations in a constructed world, Armonk, M. E. Sharpe, pp. 79-100.

Gould, Harry, (1998), „What is at stake in the agent-structure debate?”, in Kubálková, Vendulka, Onuf, Nicholas, Kovert, Paul, International relations in a constructed world, Armonk, M. E. Sharpe, pp. 79-100.

Gross, George, (1966), „Rumania: the fruits of autonomy”, in Problems of communism, nr.

15, pp.16-26.

Guzzini, Stefano, (2000), Realism şi relaţii internaţionale: povestea fără sfârşit a unei morţi anunţate: realismul în relaţiile internaţionale şi în economia politica internaţională, Iași, Institutul European.

Halliday, Fred, (1994), Rethinking international relations, London, MacMillan.

Hegel, G.W.F (1967), Studii filozofice (Philosophical studies), translated by D.D. Roșca, Bucharest, Publishing House of the Academy of Socialist Republic of Romania.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1963), Prelegeri de istorie a filozofiei, (Lectures on the history of philosophy), Vol. I, translated by D.D. Roșca, Bucharest, Publishing House of the Academy of Popular Republic of Romania.

71

Hegel, G.W.F. (2004), Political Writings, edited by Laurence Dickey and H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Hitchins, Keith (2013a), Românii, 1774-1866, București, Humanitas.

Hitchins, Keith (2013b), România, 1866-1947, București, Humanitas.

Hopf, Ted, (2002), Social construction of international politics. Identities & foreign policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999, New York, Cornell University Press.

Iacob, Caius (1976), „Conștiința profesiunii – conștiința demnității cetățenești”, in Iordănescu Mihai (ed.), A trăi și a munci în chip comunist, București, Editura Politică, pp.

83-98.

Ignat, Petru, (1987), „Permanența spiritului revoluționar. Normă de viață, de gândire, de acțiune”, in Almanah Pentru Patrie, pp. 15-17.

Johnson, Chalmers, (1970), „Comparing Communist Nations”, in Johnson, Chalmers (ed.), Change in Communist Systems, Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, pp. 1-32.

Jowitt, Kenneth, (1971), Revolutionary Breaktroughs and National Development. The case of Romania, 1944-1965, Berkeley și Los Angeles, University of California Press.

Jowitt, Kenneth, (1971), Revolutionary breaktroughs and national development. The case of Romania, 1944-1965, Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of California Press.

Jowitt, Kenneth, (1993), New world disorder. The Leninist extinction, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press.

Judt, Tony, (2008), Europa postbelică. O istorie a Europei de după 1945, Iași, Polirom.

King, Robert, (1980), A history of the Romanian Communist Party, Stanford, Hoover Institution Press.

Kubálková, V.; Cruickshank, A., (1980), Marxism-Leninism and theory of international relations, London, Boston și Henley, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Lăcustă, Ioan, (2005), 1948-1952. Republica Populară și România, București, Curtea Veche.

Lenin, V. I, (1945), Imperialismul, stadiul cel mai înalt al capitalismului, Bucureşti: Editura Partidului Comunist din România.

Lenin, V. I, (1946), Ce-i de făcut?, București: Editura Partidului Comunist Român.

Lobell, Steven, Ripsman, Norrin, Taliaferro, Jeffrey, (2009), (ed.), Neoclassical realism, the state, and foreign policy, New York, Cambridge University Press.

Lucuța, Gheorghe (1979), Democrația Socialistă și Responsabilitatea Socială, București, Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică.

72

Lynch, Allen, (1989), The Soviet study of intrnational relations, New York, Cambridge University Press.

Marx, Karl, (1949), „Optsprezece Brumar al lui Ludovic Bonaparte”, in Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich, Opere alese, vol. I, București, Editura Partidului Muncitoresc Român, pp. 231339.

Matei, Sorin Adam, (2007), Boierii minții. Intelectualii români între „grupurile de prestigiu” și piața liberă a ideilor, București, Compania.

Matei, Sorin Adam, (2007), Boierii minții. Intelectualii români între „grupurile de prestigiu” și piața liberă a ideilor, București, Compania.

Mearsheimer, John, (2003), Tragedia politicii de forță. Realismul ofensiv și lupta pentru putere, București, Antet.

Mendel, Arthur, (ed.), (1961), Essential works of Marxism, New York, Bantam Books.

Michael Shafir, (1985), Romania. Politics, economics and society. Political stagnation and simulated change, London, Frances Pinter.

Miroiu, Andrei, Ungureanu, Radu-Sebastian, (2006), (ed.), Manual de relații internaționale, Iași, Polirom.

Miroș, Liubomira (1980), Raportul dintre Individ și Societate, Realizarea Libertății în Condițiile Socialismului, București, Editura Politică.

Montias, Michael, (1967), Economic development in communist Rumania, Cambridge, The M.I.T. Press.

Moraru, Constantin, (2008), Politica externă a României, 1958-1964, București, Editura Enciclopedică.

Morar-Vulcu, Călin, (2007), Republica își făurește oamenii. Construcția identităților politice în discursul oficial în România, 1948-1965, Cluj-Napoca, Eikon.

Morgenthau, Hans, (2007), Politica între națiuni. Lupta pentru putere și lupta pentru pace, Iași, Polirom.

Mușat, Mircea (1986), „Coordonatele dezvoltării unitare a poporului român în vatra străbună a Daciei”, in Pascu, Ștefan; Ștefănescu, Ștefan (coord.), Jocul periculos al falsificării istoriei. Culegere de studii și articole, București, Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică, pp. 548.

Neumann, Victor (2013), Essays in Romanian Intellectual History, Jassy,, Institutul European.

Niculescu-Mizil, Paul, (2008), România și războiul americano-vietnamez, București, Roza Vânturilor.

73

Niebuhr, Reinhold, (1977), Christian Realism and Political Problems, Fairfield: Augustul M. Kelley Publishers.

Nye, Joseph, (2009), Puterea blândă. Cale către succes în politica mondială, Iași, Institutul European.

Nye, Joseph, Keohane, Robert, (2009), Putere și interdependență, Iași, Polirom.

O nouă viziune, viziuni cu caracter novator. Ce a dezbătut și deis forumul comuniștilor sovietici, (1988), Moscova, Editura agenției de presă Novosti.

Olaru, Stejărel; Herbstritt, Georg, (2005), STASI și Securitatea, București, Humanitas.

Olaru, Tudor (1972), Comunistul. Însemnări despre responsabilitatea socială a membrului de partid, București, Editura Politică.

Olteanu, Constantin; Ceaușescu, Ilie (1976), „Apărarea Patriei – Funcție a Statului Socialist, Operă a Întregului Popor”, in Statul Socialist Român în Etapa Actuală, București, Editura Politică, pp. 239-266.

Onuf, Nicholas, (1989), World of our making. Rules and rule in social theory and international relations, Columbia, University of South Carolina Press.

Onuf, Nicholas, (1998), „Constructivism, A user’s manual”, în Kubálková, Vendulka, Onuf, Nicholas, Kovert, Paul, International relations in a constructed world, Armonk, M. E. Sharpe, pp. 58-78.

Perfecţionarea Organizării şi Conducerii Vieţii Sociale. Rolul Statului Socialist (1972), Bucureşti, Editura Politică.

Perfecţionarea Relaţiilor de Producţie, a Organizării şi Conducerii Economiei (1972), Bucureşti, Editura Politică.

Petre, Zoe (2004), Practica nemuririi. O istorie critică a izvoarelor grecești referitoare le geți, Iași, Polirom.

Plenara Comitetului Central al Partidului Comunist Român, 3-5 noiembrie 1971, (1971), București, Editura Politică.

Pomper, Philip, (1993), The Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, Arlington Heights, Harlan Davidson, 1993.

Popescu, Dumitru (1993), Un fost lider comunist se destăinuie: „Am fost și Cioplitor de Himere”. Convorbire realizată de Ioan Tecșa, ziarist, București, Express.

Popescu, Vasile (1975), Disciplina, Inițiativa, Activitatea Creatoare în Socialism, București, Editura Politică.

Popper, Karl (2013), The Open Society and its Enemies, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

74

Popper, Karl, (2005), Societatea deschisă și dușmanii săi, vol. II, Epoca marilor profeți: Hegel și Marx, București, Humanitas.

Potra, George (1982), „Noi”, in Potra, George; Stati, Șerban; Crișan, Constantin (coord.), Trepte de civilizație românească, București, Editura Politică, pp. 9-45.

Preda, Constantin; Pătroiu, Ion (1986), „Poziție fermă împotriva falsificatorilor și denigratorilor istoriei noastre naționale”, in Pascu, Ștefan; Ștefănescu, Ștefan (coord.), Jocul periculos al falsificării istoriei. Culegere de studii și articole, București, Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică, pp. 316-326.

Prisca, Nistor (1978), Drepturile şi îndatoririle fundamentale ale cetăţenilor în Republica Socialistă România, Bucureşti, Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică.

Rambu, Nicolae (2001), Romantismul fiosofic german, Iaşi, Editura Polirom.

Rolul şi atribuţiile sindicatelor (1972), Bucureşti, Editura Politică.

Rolul și locul omului în construcția societății socialiste multilateral dezvoltate (1978), București, Editura Politică.

Rostás, Zoltán (2000), Monografia ca utopie. Interviuri cu Henri H. Stahl, București, Editura Paideia.

Ruggie, John Gerard, (2002), Constructing the world polity. Essays on international institutionalization, New York, Routledge.

Russell, Bertrand (1972), The History of Western Philosophy, New York, Simon & Schuster, Inc. Searle, John, (2000), Realitatea ca proiect social, Iași, Polirom Şerbănescu, Ion (1973), General şi particular, naţional şi internaţional în politica P.C.R., Bucureşti, Editura Politică.

Sfetcu, Paul, (2008), 13 ani în anticamera lui Dej, București, Curtea Veche.

Shafir, Michael, (1985), Romania. Politics, economics and society. Political stagnation and simulated change, London, Francess Pinter.

Shafir, Michael, (1986), „Romanian foreign policy under Dej and Ceaușescu”, in Schöpflin, George, (ed.), The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, London, Muller, Blond & White, pp.

364-377.

Shafir, Michael, (1987), „Eastern Europe”, în McCauley, Martin, (ed.), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism, Essex, MacMillan & School of Slavonic and East European Studies, pp.

156-179.

Shafir, Michael, (1987), „Eastern Europe”, in McCauley, Martin, Khrushchev and khrushchevism, London, MacMillan, pp. 156-179.

75

Shafir, Michael, (1989), „Xenophobic communism: the case of Bulgaria and Romania”, Situation Report (Romania), 27 June, no. 112, Arhiva 1989.

Shafir, Michael, (2010), Radiografii și alte fobii. Studii contemporane, publicistică și pubelistică Iași, Institutul European.

Soulet, Jean François, (1998), Istoria comparată a statelor comuniste (din 1945 până în zilele noastre), Iaşi, Polirom.

Statutul Partidului Comunist Român (1974), București, Editura Politică.

Steans, Jean, Pettiford, Lloyd, (2008), Introducere în relații internaționale. Perspective și teme, București, Antet.

Taubman, William, (2005), Khrushchev. The man, his era, London, Free Press.

Taylor, Trevor, (1980), Approaches and theory in International Relations, London and New York, Longman.

Tucker, Robert, (1969), The Marxian revolutionary idea, London, George Allen & Unwin.

Tucker, Robert, (1971), The Soviet political mind. Stalinism and post-Stalin change, Londra, George Allen & Unwin LTD. Tucker, Robert, (1987), Political culture and leadership in Soviet Russia New York, London, Norton & Company.

Tudor, Dumitru (1977), Decebal și Traian, București, Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică.

Vadim Tudor, Corneliu (1983), Idealuri, București, Editura Eminescu.

Verdery, Katherine (1991), National Ideology Under Socialism. Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceaușescu’s Romania, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, University of California Press.

Viotti, Paul, Kauppi, Mark, (1999), International relations theory. Realism, pluralism, globalism and beyond, London, Allyn and Bacon.

Vlad, Corneliu, (1987), Pentru ca soarele să nu răsară dinspre asfințit, București, Editura Politică.

Wallerstein, Immanuel, (1989), The modern world system, vol III, („The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840”), New York, Academic Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel, (1992), Sistemul mondial modern, vol. I, („Agricultura capitalistă și originile economiei mondiale europene în secolul al XVI-lea”), București, Meridiane.

Wallerstein, Immanuel, (1992), Sistemul mondial modern, vol. II, („Agricultura capitalistă și originile economiei mondiale europene în secolul al XVI-lea”), București, Meridiane.

76

Wallerstein, Immanuel, (1992), Sistemul mondial modern, vol. III, („Mercantilism și consolidarea economiei mondiale europene, 1600-1750”), București, Meridiane.

Waltz, Kenneth, (2001), Omul, statul și războiul. O analiză teoretică, Iași, Institutul European.

Waltz, Kenneth, (2007), Teoria politicii internaționale, Iași, Polirom.

Wendt, Alexander, (1999), Social theory of international politics, New York, Cambridge University Press.

77