Where West meets East, people prepare to make the most of their assets

Date: 12/06/1997

By Oana Lungescu

EVERY night, Romanian state television shows the weather forecast on a borderless map of Europe before focusing in on Romania itself.

This order of priorities might seem paradoxical, but it is indicative of the aspirations of eastern Europe's second-largest country. What a Romanian writer has called “the return to Europe” ranks as the number one priority for the reformist government which ousted the former Communists in last November's elections.

The new borderless weather map is also symbolic for a nation which has puzzled for centuries over how geography has affected its history and identity.

Two centuries as part of the Roman Empire left an indelible mark. Romanian is the only Latin language in the 'Slav sea' of eastern Europe and many of those who speak it have a passable understanding of Italian. As Romanian elites started studying abroad in the 19th century, French, German and, more recently, English words were added to already substantial Slavonic borrowings.

But what Romanians have most in common with their Slav neighbours is their religion. More than 80&percent; are orthodox and, after the overthrow of Communism in 1989, many young people and even besuited businessmen now go to church.

The orthodox hierarchy has been accused in the past of a subservient attitude towards the Communist regime and relations with other religious denominations still show occasional strains.

But with two ethnic Hungarian ministers in the new government and the conclusion last autumn of a long-delayed treaty with neighbouring Hungary, a clean break has been made with the nationalist rhetoric of the last 20 years.

The 1.7 million Hungarians are a well organised and vocal community, unlike the Germans - now dwindling to tens of thousands because of emigration - and more than 2 million gypsies, many of whom live on the margins of Romanian society.

Hungarians and then Germans settled centuries ago in Transylvania, a fertile region whose fortified mediaeval churches and baroque towns most resemble those of central Europe - with good reason, since Transylvania, although inhabited by a Romanian majority, was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1918, when it joined the other two main regions of modern Romania. The latter had alternatively fought against and been dominated by the Ottoman sultans and the Russian tsars, leading historians to say that Romania always lay at the crossroads of empires.

There is still a lingering sense of historic injustice in Romania over the loss in 1940 of great swathes of territory to the Soviet Union under the secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet pact. As a result, a sizeable Romanian minority now lives in Ukraine, and Bucharest hopes that a recently concluded bilateral treaty will guarantee respect for their rights. The Republic of Moldova, where two-thirds of the population are ethnic Romanians, also emerged from the ruins of the Soviet empire, but few believe reunification of the two countries is on the cards in the foreseeable future.

In December 1989, eastern Europe's only bloody revolution ended 40 years of Communist rule in Romania. Images from a land lost in brutal isolation and abject poverty shocked the world. But that initial sympathy was lost by years of half-hearted reforms and nationalist outbursts until the recent elections, dubbed by Romanians their second revolution.

Although Bucharest did not revert to the 'little Paris' it had been until the 1930s, its notoriously surly shop assistants have learnt how to smile in new western-style outlets, mobile phones are supplementing the still unreliable telephone system and the latest models of car race along the still bumpy roads.

Romania probably has the highest number of commercial radio and television stations in eastern Europe. Most are obsessed these days with the countdown to next month's NATO summit in Madrid, when Romanians hope to be invited to join and thus catch up with the 'train for Europe', for which they know some of their more advanced neighbours already hold tickets.

Romanians associate membership of both the EU and NATO with higher living standards and with greater freedom to travel. They are currently frustrated to find themselves, alongside Bulgarians, as the only eastern Europeans still queuing up for days for Union visas. But there is also an awareness that EU accession is not around the corner.

Belonging to eastern Christianity through their religion, but to western culture through their language, with an oriental sense of time but a quick western intelligence, Romanians are now consciously attempting to turn the paradox of their destiny into an asset.

Politicians tend to speak less of their Balkan ties and then only in order to emphasise Romania's role as an oasis of calm in the region. They point to the country's strategic position between the Danube and the Black Sea, and to its contribution to western culture through artists such as Brancusi and Brauner and writers like Ionesco and Cioran. After so many centuries spent on the dangerous margins of empires, Romanians are keen to shed their favourite pastime - 'making light of misfortune' - and to be recognised as mature members of the European family.

What Europe means for insecure Romanians, in the words of one sociologist, is “the certainty that things will get better and that we are no longer alone”.

Oana Lungescu is European reporter for the BBC World Service.