"Romania’s Anti-Corruption Mania"
Misunderstood Democracy: Romania's anti-corruption mission
General info
Author: Patrick Basham
Newspaper: The New York Times
Publishing date: March 4 2015
Retrieved from: Link
Summary:
This 2015 article is centered oround the theme of corruption in Romania. However, contrary to previous opinion articles published in the New York Times, this one focuses on the downside of the fight against corruption: becoming a “prosecutorial state”. The anti-corruption creed has been used by politicians in elections (Traian Basescu and Klaus Iohannis are given as examples) in order to attract voters. The author argues that the anti-corruption sentiment has become a weapon against political adversaries.
The intensification of the anti-corruption efforts has resulted in overcrowded prisons, as well as a lack of trust in politicians and public institutions. The case of Alina Bica, former chief prosecutor of the Directorate for Investigating Organised Crime and Corruption (DIICOT), is presented to show the repressiveness of the whole system. The author also mentions the “Orwellian measure” of preventive arrest and mentions the rupture in the system of checks and balances: the judicial system is not completely independent from political interests.
In the end, the article proposes a reevaluation of the methods of investigation and charging of corruption deeds.
Analysis:
The article aims to shock the readers by presenting the Romanian capital as “reminiscent of the French Revolution” and “roiled by a legal reign of terror”. The judicial system, which should represent a normative space, is itself corrupted. It looks as if corruption is so endemic to the Romanian society that even those who fight against it are corrupted. In an attempt to satisfy the demands of the European Union and the United States, Romania brought the fight against corruption to an extreme.
The tone in the article is rather didactic, being reminiscent of the pseudo-clinical discourse identified by Andaluna Borcila in American Representations of Post-Communism. Moreover, by emphasizing Romania’s misunderstanding of democracy and its mistakes in building democratic institutions, the author reinforces the transitionary character of countries in the Balkans. This in-betweenness of the Balkans, seen as semi-civilized, semi-Oriental and semi-Occidental at the same time, was indicated by Maria Todorova in Imagining the Balkans as a way to construct the image of an “incomplete self” (18) of the West.
Sources mentioned:
Borcila, Andaluna. American Representations of Post-Communism Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives. Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2014.
Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 2009.
