On Europe Day, Traian Ba?sescu, the Romanian president, made a small blunder in his speech, delivered in American style in the garden of the Cotroceni Palace. Ba?sescu first pleaded that the Romanian parliament, government and judiciary should play by the rules of Europe. Then he encouraged the political class to be “an obstacle to the institutional reform”.
The former merchant navy captain then smiled and rephrased his sentence. He said the political class should of course be no obstacle. Others also smiled a particular kind of smile, like accomplices.
There is a pact in Romania. It is about pretending to be critical, without upsetting the oligarchs, the political families and the protection networks that are the victors of Romanian transition. And it avoids any reference to corruption.
The local elections campaign just getting under way in Romania is revealing in that the candidate lists for all major parties include VIPs under criminal inquiry. The standard defence is that the accusations are ill-founded, and all these candidates are determined to clear their names.
They almost certainly will. As long as Romania was still a candidate for EU accession, a chance existed for successful judiciary reform. The process was aborted once Romania joined the club. Now the political class in Romania is convinced that Brussels will no longer make serious efforts to remedy the deficiencies.
There are plenty of stories about corruption in the Romanian press these days, but they are reports on Myanmar, Zimbabwe or – especially – Bulgaria, which is under the same kind of scrutiny from Brussels, since both countries joined the EU in 2007 without being prepared for it.
The very few corruption cases in Romania arise almost entirely from accusations made outside the country, where plaintiffs address foreign courts with the proper documentation. The case against former Romanian prime minister Adrian Nastase is a typical example, involving a duty-free shop deal with a UK company. Another relates to the sale of second-hand frigates by BAE Systems, a British weapons manufacturer.
Successful trials for corruption do not represent even the tip of the iceberg of corruption in Romania. The country is poor, not because it lacks resources, but because its resources are systematically plundered through corruption. EU funds, one of the country's most important current resources, are highly vulnerable to this depletion. Weak civil society in Romania – as in neighbouring Bulgaria – allowed a more criminal form of transition than in the countries of central Europe.
If its upcoming monitoring reports on the two countries provide evidence of this aberrant behaviour, the EU will have to impose some sort of punishment in order to retain its credibility. But how? Brussels should know perfectly well by now about the misuse of EU funds by the elites in Bulgaria and Romania. As an example, it is no secret that a political party in Bulgaria holds all the keys to EU agricultural funds. European diplomats also know which oligarchs in Romania are the best clients of the structural funds. So EU funding should be cut in a highly targeted way.
The decision to take on board Bulgaria and Romania was not a mistake. The two countries have great potential, but they needed more guidance than they were given prior to accession. The EU was too diplomatic when its influence over Sofia and Bucharest was at its peak, and it failed to do enough to strengthen civil society. But has the EU learnt this lesson adequately as it moves closer to the remaining enfants terribles: Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo?
