People and Places

People and Places: "Photo Gallery: Romantic Rome Part of the Places of a Lifetime series from Traveler magazine Click here to find out more! 1 of 10NEXT Photo: Sant Angelo Bridge Photo: Sant Angelo BridgePhoto: The PantheonPhoto: Romans on lunch breakPhoto: Tiber river boatPhoto: Nuns in St. Peter’s SquarePhoto: Man in Piazza del CampidoglioPhoto: Italian businessmenPhoto: Diners near PantheonPhoto: Pigeons in St. Peters SquarePhoto: Ruins of the Roman Forum ENLARGEWALLPAPER Statues of angels designed by 17th-century sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini decorate the Sant’Angelo Bridge."


Mr. Cioroianu's Romania

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The Romanian foreign minister's public statements are representative of Romania's official view. Mr. Cioroianu's words have been taken seriously abroad and analyzed as such, although they have been criticized and mocked at home, causing indignation and absolutely motivated protests. Or how can there be dialogue with a state, unless you start from the idea that Romania's most important institutional actor in foreign affairs expresses the Romanian message?

As a foreign minister in a European country, Mr. Adrian Cioroianu expressed a perfectly anti-European message, opposing not only the EU's fundamental principles, but also all the game rules in the European system. In November 2007, Cioroianu expressed a hallucinating message sending not only ourselves back in history, in the era of the Totalitarian system and the Nazi intolerance. There is one more thing, even more serious and harder to forgive, since he is a minister in a European government and he is supposed to know (or at least to realize) that the European solidarity rule always works when such messages are at stake. They work either positively, which can't possibly be the case now, or negatively, by delimitation and quarantine. Given the context, he has done great harm to Romania's interests. Even if Romanian politicians can be forgiven for their lack of experience and knowledge, even if the dirty political disputes in Bucharest can also be forgiven, there is one limit no one can cross.

This is about Europe's historical memory, the one that registered the dreadful deeds of the Nazi legislation, which later on was used as model for the Soviet assassinations. That legislation allowed for the separation, within the same nation, between groups of superior category and groups who had to be isolated and then turned into ghettos and concentration camps. Against this memory they tried to build a different kind of Europe, based on other principles and rules. Romania is the first EU state that has expressed something else by Adrian Cioroianu's message. And it will undoubtedly be sanctioned as such.

How can Romania possibly be the first to say tremendously foolish things again? How can Romanian diplomacy be headed by a historian unaware of how dramatical it is to refer to the Egyptian exile's symbol, for it is impossible not to make a connection between our minister's foolish words and the episode the Jews went through, ending up with the exodus Moses led?

Cioroianu's message is innovative in one more sense. The massage of Romania's top diplomat sounds like this: The Europeans' difficulties have so far been caused by the communities of non-EU citizens on national territories. But at home we have got a problem with some of our own citizens and out of the blue we want to collect them all and exile them to Egypt!

But is this Romania's message too? Of course it isn't. One needs to think only about Romania's traditional tolerance and interethnic cohabitation. The message expresses one more thing: our politicians' inability to find domestic solutions to priority problems. The commitments made in Brussels have proved just words. And Mr. Cioroianu's Romania will pay for it instead of Mr. Cioroianu himself.

Cristian UNTEANU