The issues was that according to Romanian law, brilliantly ambiguous, abortion is illegal after the foetus is 14 weeks old, except in exceptional circumstances. When the “situation” became apparent to this little girl’s parents, she was already in her 20th week.

A panel of state officials have ruled that this are indeed special circumstances: rape, underage mother, incest etc. Some “Christian Orthodox groups”, yet to be named by either the Romanian or foreign press coverage, have both threatened to press charges if the girl goes ahead with the abortion and offered their support to raise the child if she gives birth.

I firmly believe that abortion, as well as birth, is a right of the mother and decisions regarding either are solely hers, or in this case, her parents’, since she is so young. I also believe I wouldn’t like to have the child if I were in her shoes.

I was really surprised, and this is really why I’m posting this, that the Romanian Orthodox Church has agreed with my position, saying that, while they believe abortion is murder, that rule only applies to normal life, not to rape and incest and, in such exceptional cases, they believe it is the family’s decision what to do.

I am so utterly surprised because the Romanian Orthodox church is also supporting things such as compulsory religious education in schools and, to my mind, these positions aren’t entirely consistent.

Nonetheless, I wish to extend my personal heartfelt congratulations to the church officials who took this decision! I am not religious, but the more than 80% of Romanians adhere to this church and it sure is a rare and wonderful thing to find such unexpected convergence between humanist views and religious ones.

Romanians surely are a people who know how to belittle themselves. If you don’t think so, just read how the supporters reacted when Romania was eliminated at the groups stage of Euro 2008.

But.

We Romanians have a reason to be proud, too. According to Akamai‘s 2008 State of the Internet report [registration required] we are the 5th most broad-band-ised country in the world, ahead of the US for example. The study uses Akamai data to count how many connections from each country are made at a speed of above 5Mb/s (their definition of broadband). For Romania, that fraction is 21%. US came in on the 7th place, with only 20%.

We’re still a long way ahead from streaming HD video onto our bathroom walls, which is what must be happening in South Korea, but there it goes: one reason to be happy with ourselves!

I remembered another Italian-press craze a couple of months ago, which had Italy in uproar over a potential rape and murder of an Italian woman by a Romanian immigrant. And the news all over the world who attempted to compensate for that reminding their readers of Romanian immigrants in Italy handing over to the police wallets full of cash that they’d found on the ground. That’s some counter-argumentation to racism! Romanians are all the same, but they’re good, instead of evil! (please note the sarcasm, please!)

I wanted to remind those Italians who want to fingerprint gypsies that they could do something better, along the lines of the US “give us your tired and your poor”. But it was out of fashion. I wanted to remind them of their own age-old Imperial past, of times when Rome (sic) flourished by the graces of slave and mercenary labour and military talent imported from all over the Mediterranean basin (apparently they were second class citizens, but Romans did not burn foreigners, they taught them and put them to work; that seems better).

In short I just couldn’t believe how near-sighted some Italians can be, how crippled their own civility has become not be able to assimilate a destitute minority.

Well… then I realised that I know why most of those gypsies (most of whom are Romanian-born and citizens of this country) went to steal in Italy. And one of the reasons why they steal here as well, as a way of living. It’s because, like in Italy, they are facing intense private discrimination in Romania, their home-country as well!

Some of them if not all have been servants/slaves to our aristocracy for hundreds of years and since that went out of fashion they’ve been treated even worse, despite the laws we have against discrimination. Here too they are treated badly and take revenge on society. Here too, society takes revenge on them by discriminating even more, by generalising even more, by ignoring their individual deeds and appearance and forcing them all under the ill-famed umbrella of their color and ethnicity.

Our President once called a gypsy reporter (who was admittedly harassing him) a “stinking gypsy”. Did he think that she was bothering him as a result of being gypsy? I don’t think so, he seems to me smarter than that. I think him, just like many other Romanians, Italians and who know what other nations just act based on irrational beliefs caught up during childhood, from parents. This shows up especially when under stress, fear, anger etc.

I for one cannot see any solution to this other than being weary of whatever may be threatening, defend one’s person and property, but not hurl irrational insults, for that breeds hatred and future violence against self and property. That’s rule-of-law in a nutshell. So, going back to Italians: sue them, fingerprint them, hand-cuff and jail them as you want. But after they break the law! If you do it before, you yourselves deserve no more.

Consider the following:

1. Israel may be planning to attack Iran before November 2008,
2. the new US President would be reluctant to go to war with Iran in support of Israel without the support of at least their European allies,
3. the EU needs to find a new reason to exist after the Lisbon failure in Ireland
4. Sarko is giving security assurances to Israel, even if advising them to go back on colonisation
5. Iran could get nuclear strike capabilities before US missile shield is installed over Europe
6. the EU people talk more and more of a EU fast reaction force and common foreign policy
7. Romanian officials are head over heels with the Lisbon treaty (our President says Lisbon is not dead for instance) and playing the EU card all over
8. Romanian officials are also eager to revive Romania’s traditional ties (i.e. ex-communist economic ties) with Iran, for unknown reasons (in theory still economic in nature)

I’d say there’s a pretty high chance that Israel will indeed attack Iran and attempt to destroy it’s nuclear capability pre-emptively and the US will be seeking ways to help. In fact the US is already preparing for that, having just build 4 military bases in Irak, near the border with Iran.

If that were to happen, the EU people will be jumping around at the opportunity presented: a crisis is a good way to push for further integration, and military integration is perhaps the best building stone for the political integration they seek.

In that case, perhaps France would be at the lead (Germany is still too war-weary) to suggest EU involvement in Iran. They would know that it would be a good PR stunt, and they could rely on the US to to do the heavy lifting, dying and paying the billions in exchange for the legitimacy European presence would provide.

Everybody wins, right? Well, for Romania it may not be so. Our government would surely want “in” on this, to prove how good Europeans we are, how much part of the team we are. There may be Romanians dead in a foreign conflict or terror attacks in Bucharest, but it would probably go a long way to secure a blind eye from the EU Commission and Parliament on such trivial matters as “corruption” in our backyard.

Well, if it weren’t for the reasons above, I may even support such a development. Israel may not be a great ally or very democratic state, but they do strike me as determined, pragmatic and reasonable. On the other hand, Mr. Ahmedinejad seems brilliant in his strategy, but barking mad in all other respects. I just checked and there are around 2300km between Tehran and Bucharest; given the strike radius of Iranian missiles, which seems to be around 2000km, I don’t feel in the “green zone” in regard to him getting a red button to push.

Not only that time will tell how good my speculations are, but apprently it will do so pretty soon. As I said, “coming this fall”…

In the English language Romanian news site, Nine O’Clock, he says (among others):

Undeniably, the European process cannot continue through referendum. Such a method does not function when the electorate is unequally informed and educated about the problems in discussion. The Irish reconfirmed the fact that politics has become a profession which supposes the knowledge of the complex compromises, the contextualization and the prioritization and which cannot be appropriated at mass level or practiced by the ordinary citizen of the complex contemporary society. Therefore, the Irish message is irrational and incomprehensible. The arguments expressed by the partisans of the rejection of the Reform Treaty do not have any connection with its objectives and content. Thus, the act of refusal cannot be translated into subsequent political action at European level because it was not learnt from the Irish what a likable treaty should look like. Thus, the “No” is without consequences.

If I understand correctly the not so veiled point of this paragraph is that regular citizens are not able to handle decisions on a European level, due to the inherent complexity of such political matters and should therefore not be asked at all to do so. The solution he seems to favour is that of constricting democracy only to the process of electing representatives who then go on to govern or legislate without ever consulting the public during their mandate.

In my opinion that is just a way of giving up on constitutional democracy for the expediency and thrill of a government by some sort of tribal elder’s council. There are constitutional traditions with great backing from history which mandate exactly that kind of popular consultation (referendum) on matters of great importance and regarding decisions not easily reversible.

Since any representative body can sometimes fail to represent the interests of those who govern, the logic of those constitutions is that the legitimacy arising from being elected to an office of public trust (such as an MP or MEP) is not enough to justify taking the most important of decisions without a specific and direct public assent.

In disagreeing with that logic, it seems to me that Mr. Severin, along with a similarly-minded MEP’s, wishes to change the very core of democracy, which is government for the people and by the people (directly or indirectly).

The referendum in Ireland was meant to obtain legitimacy for a political reform of the EU from those citizens which hold the proper right of making decisions about their own lives. Since the decision of those people proved inconvenient to some career politicians, there are the likes of Mr. Severin who would change the rules entirely. He doesn’t want the Irish to vote again until they get it “right”. He doesn’t want to persuade. He goes on directly to say that it is his and his colleagues’ right to make “informed” decisions for 400+ million people, and do away entirely with the cumbersome pretense of deriving political legitimacy from the governed.

To my mind that is clearly an invitation to dictatorship, and a pretty clumsy and delusional one at that. I would not deride Mr. Severin and the likes just for wishing to be dictators. I am however bemused by his inability to comprehend that democracy in its current inconvenient form exists not because of its inherent goodness, but because the “uninformed” nobodys he so disconsiders have not been quite so easily to push aside during more recent history.

I do not think it is quite so accidental that democracy is the dominant form of government in the West and hasn’t been until the last couple of hundred of years. Until some point in a culture’s material development cycle the “masses” really are not able to take any decisions, purely because they are too easily manipulated due to lack of education. After that phase, with the advent of communications, mass print, increased mobility and other technological breakthroughs, the masses become able to form opinions of their own and -crucially- to fight for them. It matters less if said masses make “good” decisions. What does matter is that the “masses” have proven their ability to secure their rights arms-in-hand in events like the French Revolution. That is the true reason why Mr. Severin is wrong: not moral, but practical.

If some MEP’s desire to change the rules of politics and wish themselves closer to divine right, they would do better to first eradicate the internet, the post, to reduce mobility, to sap the right of free association, to ban independent journalism, closely control the public broadcasters, ban all but one religion, control the state religion etc. Granted a lot of that is underway, but the work is not nearly completed.

Having such outbursts of dictatorial wannabism without proper preparation is puerile and dangerous. Having that come form someone like Mr. Severin is doubly laughable, as his precious career as an MEP would become just a costly and useless facade in the kind of regime he advocates.

I guess CTP is disappointed with this and wishes for more radical departure from the mentality that ruled Romania before the ’89 Revolution. However, he doesn’t point to any workable alternative, doesn’t name potential replacements for today’s political elite, doesn’t specifically say what values exactly he would like to permeate Romanian seats of power. His point is just that Romanians vote for populism, demagogy, lies and sweet empty promises and that this is somehow unacceptable.

This reminds me of a conversation between CTP and former prime-minister Petre Roman, which was described by CTP himself on national TV sometimes during the ’90s. Allegedly CTP had fired off a round of “idealistic” criticism at Roman, to which the then-PM replied with “Mr. Popescu, you seem to have absolutely no idea how things actually work in politics”, or something along those lines.

It seems to me that either Roman was right in his assessment, or – more likely – CTP is not in the business of actually suggesting workable political solutions. He’s more in the business of pointing out undesirable facts and publishing them for profit and fame. That is absolutely fine with me, I very much admire his insights.

But what point is there to lament a situation which is entirely predictable and unavoidable for the foreseeable future? The situation is – and I interpret a bit what CTP probably means – that Romanians vote in ways that do not benefit them at all. And why is this unavoidable right now? Because there are no issues to take positions around and win votes in a “logical” way.

Let me explain. In a true democracy and perhaps in any political regime with a plurality of opinions, there are so called issues, matters of some importance which can be treated in any of a number of ways: gay marriage, war participation, foreign policy decisions, gender equality, minimum wage, income taxation, inheritance taxation, legal status of various goods (esp. drugs, substances), freedom of speech etc. These are or can be issues, in that they are topics of discussion and many citizens could have their own interests in the way they are addressed by public policy.

Politicians usually take positions around these issues, such as one saying he would ban abortion and allow free speech and another saying that he would allow gay marriages, but keep the ban on marijuana. Citizens then are incented to vote for the politicians whose electoral platform best matches their needs.

I dare say that in Romania there is almost no need to vote. Most really important positions are taken en-masse by all candidates for any office. Nobody wants to go back to monarchy or ban religion. So, no need to vote in order to prevent change.

Then, there are very few changes that are desired by a wide spectrum of potential voters which actually find their way into actual electoral platforms. A rare exception is the nominal vote for Parliament, which when championed by President Basescu, brought him great popularity. But other than that it’s hard to make a political wish and go vote for it.

We have recently made it compulsory for high-school students to study religion in schools. This is a big issue for all students and their parents, regardless of how religious they are. Some of them want this to stay, some want it to go. But no politician speaks about it, rallying people for or against this behind him.

Economic policy is also a hot-bed for “issues” and “positions”, as they affect everyone, and everyone wants deeper pockets. But there is absolutely no champion for economic causes in sight. Of course all politicians speak about a “generalised” wishy-washy program that will make all things better for everyone, but it’s obviously impossible to believe them with such non-sense on display.

Some overly general fake-issues that worked in the past feel more and more deja-vu and are not working anymore (such as the old “anti-corruption champion”, “defender of light”, “against everybody else”). But still, it seems that our politicians are all clones of the same individual, promising non-descript happiness, the best of luck and health etc. to all who will vote for them.

The sad and unavoidable (as I’ve said before) truth is that Romanians are yet an immature lot when it comes to politics. Just like on any other market, the market for political services matures only so far and so fast as the consumers. Even if Romanians vote for politicians based on looks or faux-revolutionary allure, who can blame them for creating the best future they can imagine?

Largely there are three roles to play in today’s Romania. The naive get what they vote for so they are ok. The discerning have more options: easily lie their way into politics, or get into business and make money, or become journalists. The business people donate money to the politicians, for campaigns. The politicians make favours to those in business, so that they can make even more money. The journalists get money from business people, to fund papers in which they describe how awfully politics works to a curious but numb audience. Journalism provides legitimacy to the political process (it’s transparent, right?) and entertainment to the masses.

This may seem absurd, but it’s stable enough to suggest that no better alternatives have been found.

Today I hope to learn the result on the Irish referendum on the EU Constitution Lisbon Treaty. Some say it’ll be a “no”, by a slim margin. Strike that, this just in: it actually is a “No”.

So what will happen now? Will the Union collapse? Will France declare war to Ireland and solve the problem of this no vote? In theory this is a very abrupt end to political integration in Europe. As many others have pointed out Lisbon is already the cosmetically enhanced, mildly revised “plan B”, after the aborted Constitution project and there seems to be no plan “C” in sight.

The chances of the monetary union (read European Central Bank and euro) surviving for long without any form of political integration are slim, and without the monetary union the benefits of the common market are lessened themselves. It is not inconceivable to see all past integration revert back to pre-Rome status if political integration fails over the next decades. This is why the stakes are so high, why the French didn’t get to vote again and why the Irish may be seriously blamed for ruining it for everybody else with their skeptic “No”. This is why Romania, being the junior member that it is in the great union, didn’t even have the benefit of public discussion before it ratified Lisbon, let alone a referendum.

In the short run, there will probably be no screeching halt of the bureaucratic machine of the EU, but this is a serious set back. The future will probably see more and more of the democratic niceties dropped and ever more aggressive governmental moves to push integration forward, while avoiding referenda and dodging public awareness. The euro-skeptic movement will intensify its campaigns too and we’ll hear accusations of conspiracy, treason and what not leveled at the europhile team. It may even get to the point where Romanians at least pretend to have a debate on this too.

The stakes are high, because as Paul de Grauwe (EU Commission President Barroso’s economical adviser) puts it,

A political union is the logical end-point of a currency union. But if that political union fails to materialise, then in the long term the euro area cannot continue to exist. Now that nobody appears to want that political union, you can begin to wonder whether monetary union was such a good idea. I hardly dare predict that, in the longer term, the monetary union will collapse. Not next year, but on a time-frame of ten or twenty years. There is not a single monetary union which survived without political union. They have all collapsed. [...] A monetary union becomes very fragile without a political framework.

The elephant in the room however is that the assumption underpinning the EU has been invalidated, at least in part. Several decades ago, ECC was founded on the belief that economic integration will spontaneously lead to political integration, or in other words to the reduction of cultural differences to the point that people feel comfortable joining a federal European state. That assumption, at least as far as the time required is concerned, has already proven wrong.

As French President Sarkozy said, on the occasion of the French “No” vote to the original EU Constitution:

France was just ahead of all the other countries in voting No. It would happen in all Member States if they have a referendum. There is a cleavage between people and governments…

But a lot of people already put their political careers on the line and perhaps some their business plans too, so now there is a tendency to “force” the facts to follow the theory, by replacing the “spontaneous” cultural integration that failed to happen by itself, with political coercion.

To put it differently, Mongols, Turks, Napoleon, Hitler and others have already tried to unify Europe by force and failed. Now a team of multinational bureaucrats is having their go at it. Obviously this is so much better than war, as it is based on manipulation rather than guns and involves no death and destruction of property. But, I also believe it is even less likely to succeed, for the same reasons. As long as a lot of people actually feel more like Italians, French, Spanish etc, rather than European, they will not like it. And there is only so far as they can be tricked into something they don’t like, eventually they will notice the effects, strongly disagree and demand change, possibly by force (though I hope it will not get to that).

From a certain perspective, a realistic and practical one, the EU is already a failure. But, having learned that lesson in the corporate world, I surmise that in the world of politics, too, there are no failures. Issues, yes. Set-backs, yes. But failures, no. Never.

Without ever pretending to know the future with absolute certainty, I expect the EU will slowly devolve into a glorified free trade area, while keeping a lot of useless bells and whistles to justify the pretense of it being much more and having a bigger budget allocation.The only good thing about that is that it may actually be able to continue with political integration when the time is ripe, when the Italians will welcome gypsies, the Brits and French will quit poking bad fun at each other and when Germans will get a sense of humor. I don’t hold my breath over that however; for all I know we may all be conquered by aliens before it happens.

I was quite surprised by this news piece on Hotnews today: “13-15 June 1990 Mineriad Turns 18 without Convicts”. It isn’t so unexected that responsibility for it hasn’t yet been assigned to anyone, what’s almost baffling is that there is still enough interest on the subject to justify a news piece.

Though it might sound cynical to say so about an event that killed people and severely breached all the rules of a free society, but, in full honesty, the relevance of the subject wanes as time goes by and at this point it may be more useful to try to understand why the mineriad happened in order to prevent similar events in the future, than to invest further finger pointing.

One can read the charges that have been raised against various officials active at the time and parse through the evidence perhaps. While finding out who exactly to blame and how much may take very long, a more simplistic image of what happened may be easily used today to find out the causes of the incident and what may be done to make it less likely in the future.

1990 was the year after the Romanian Revolution, which saw the communist Ceausescu regime toppled and its leader executed. There was a sense of chaos floating in the spirits of Romanians, as a very strict and brutally oppressive regime was suddenly replaced with a real lack of legislation and policing. Private enterprise for instance was unregulated due to being only recently allowed to exist. Unbelievable an example as it may seem, there were no corporate taxes. Older people were shocked by the way youngsters dressed in import clothes. Teachers were scared by the irreverence of their pupils and students attempted little coup d’etats, chasing provosts around university campuses “asking for” their resignation.

The atmosphere was such that even a hardcore libertarian from the west would have shuddered and thought of Hobbes instead of Thoreau. One can only imagine how it all looked to 40 year olds, accustomed to an uneventful life of absolute obedience to the state and perfect conformity. Before ’89 there were people ordered by height (literally), their bodies used to spell party dogma, couple of months after, all the previously reviled behaviours, symbols and consumer goods of the West poured in and were subjected to adoration by many. The ones that didn’t feel comfortable with such drastic and disruptive change were left on the sides of this joy parade mumbling, confused and, above all, full of angst.

In the midst of all this, some people, many students, some released political prisoners and perhaps others decided to hold the first public political protest in recent history. Their demands are not really essential here, neither is their exact identity.

The point is how having a rally in the streets for political ends was completely beyond the comfort zone of most Romanians. It must have seemed almost surreal to the participants themselves, let alone to those less open-minded, older politicians who were left in charge after Ceausescu’s death. It seems like the apocalypse or an alien invasion for middle-aged and senior people, as well.

The mineriad was in essence a defense mechanism against rapid change of values, and the sudden dissolution of the oppresive mechanism. In less words, a defense against liberty and the anxiety and uncertainty it brings forth.

President at that time Iliescu first ordered the Army to defend against the protesters, and portrayed them as a threat to the state and democracy. The Army however played lesser role in quelling the protests in University Square. What was needed was for Iliescu to call publicly upon the poorest, least educated parts of Romanian society to intervene in force and restore “order”. Thousands of miners from a relatively distant part of Romania promptly answered his call and, upon arriving in Bucharest, killed or severely beaten hundreds, destroyed the meeting places of all opposition political forces and attacked innocent bystanders because they looked “intellectual” or “student-like”.

The actual instruments of the mass murder that took place were the miners, hence the name of mineriad (unfortunately there were several of them, hence it becoming a common noun and spellt without capitalisation or quotation marks). They were not professional killers, mercenaries, psychopats, not even soldiers. So what provided the permission and motivation for such mindless killing?

The paternal aura of Mr. Iliescu helped. TV reinforced the message by misrepresenting the crowd in University Plaza as a bunch of drunkards, anarchists, nazis, drug-addicts, puppets of hostile foreign powers etc. Their own lack of proper education amplified their fears, insecurities and provided the instinctual motivation to destroy that which was challenging to accept and those who, by doing the unimaginable, didn’t appear anymore as fellow human beings. For further mineriads, it also helped that President Iliescu gave a speech after the event, praising the miners, letting them feel good for the massacre: it was for a good cause and it showed just how strong, united and righteous they were.

Today, pretty much nobody thinks that the miners are to blame. All fingers pointed towards Ion Iliescu, who presumably had superior moral discernment and was consequently accountable for the beating and the killing, despite his lack of direct involvement.

It may appear controversial, but I believe no mastermind is more responsible than the footmen. Iliescu is responsible for ordering the killings, the miners are responsible for implementing his call to action. Of course it could be said, in fact I just pointed that out myself, that the miners were ignorant and dominated by fear. To that I reply that no man grows to the state of bearing arms and being able to kill other men without ever being taught that murder is wrong. No man grows up without being at least once introduced to the basic ideas of punishment requiring some sort of trial, of guilt requiring proof.

Morally, when the president tells miners to kill it’s just as if a fellow miner told them to kill another fellow miner. If the union leader tells them to kill, it’s the same as if they came up with the idea themselves. Morally. Aside from moral considerations however, actual living miners regarded the president as having a right to order killings without trial or evidence of wrong-doing. They took his word on it. That is their crime: giving up their individual power to one man, in exchange for being relieved of personal responsibility.

The same thing, although at a much grander scale happened with Nazi Germany and that’s why after the War, Germans were apparently puzzled at what they had done and claimed, absurdly, that they didn’t know what had been going on in their country and were only following orders.

This criminal pattern of dumping responsibility on few as if the many were not capable to think at all is wide-spread. In fact, it’s a twisted form of contact, honoured even by those who bemoan its effects: the less educated, the poor, anybody who’s not well-off politically or economically receives as consolation the absolution from personal responsibility. Some get wealth, some get power, all the rest get moral immunity, a get-out-of-jail-for-free card, as it were.

This only goes on and on because all parties involved are motivated to participate. While the politician’s invitation to “blind” obedience can hardly be prevented, there may be things that could make it easier to resist. People could be educated in ways that will help them enjoy and cherish their individuality, personal freedom should be emphasised just as much as personal resposibility in schools and families, for one has little chance to survive without the other.

That end seems to me more worthy of effort than the protracted mineriad “investigation” whose only expected benefit is to jail a now-octogenarian ex-president.