A decade of accelerating ruptures. Ten defining characteristics that will enter the history books. And, at every chapter, the Romanian condition alongside its historical parallels — because our trajectory is not an exception to the rule, but a concentrated mirror of it, repeated with uncomfortable fidelity.
A note on perspective. This essay is written from Romania — a country of nineteen million people on the eastern flank of the European Union, bordering Ukraine to the north and east, the Black Sea to the south-east, and five other states in between. Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007. It has one of the fastest internet networks in Europe and one of the lowest rates of EU structural fund absorption. It has produced global technology companies and exported several hundred thousand doctors, engineers and programmers to Western Europe over the past two decades. It is, in other words, a country of persistent paradoxes — which makes it an unusually instructive lens through which to examine a decade that was itself full of them.
Introduction: The Decade of Multiple Crises
There are decades that pass. And there are decades that break things.
The decade 2016–2026 broke things. Not uniformly, not simultaneously, not with the same instrument everywhere — but it broke. Historians writing about it will likely reach for the term "polycrisis" — coined by the political theorist Johan Galtung in the 1970s and revived by economists Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan in 2022: not a single crisis with a single cause and a manageable resolution, but multiple structural crises that overlap, amplify each other, and render ineffective the remedies that worked when crises arrived separately.
The pandemic that locked the world. The war that returned to Europe. Artificial intelligence beginning to reshape the nature of work itself. Democracies fragmenting from the inside. Climate that ceased to be a warning and became a weekly weather event. Economies exiting the era of near-zero interest rates and rediscovering inflation. All of this in the same decade, sometimes in the same year.
History books will see 2016–2026 as a period of accelerated transition — the end of a long cycle of relative stability that had held since 1991, and the beginning of something whose name we have not yet found. Perhaps a new multipolar order. Perhaps prolonged disorder. Perhaps, with luck and better choices, a reorganisation towards something more robust.
Romania will be present in these books. Not at the major chapters — there we will appear in parentheses, unless something spectacular occurs. We will be at the bottom of the page, in the footnotes, in the grey-shaded case study boxes. The example that illustrates how a difficult road can be made even harder than it needs to be, when choices are consistently mediocre and reform is perpetually deferred — after the elections, after the crisis, after the next "after".
This essay follows ten major characteristics of the decade 2016–2026 and, at each, deepens the Romanian condition with concrete historical parallels. Romania's history is, among other things, an exceptionally rich archive of repeated crises, missed opportunities and partial adaptations. To ignore it is to fail to understand the present. To understand it does not guarantee change — but it improves the odds.
A necessary methodological note: historical parallels are not determinism. This essay does not argue that Romania is condemned to repeat the same errors indefinitely, that there is some immutable "national character", or that change is impossible. It argues something more precise and more verifiable: that institutional structures tend to reproduce themselves unless deliberately altered; that problems unresolved by one generation return to the next in different forms but with similar mechanisms; and that understanding the mechanisms — not accepting the fatalism — is the necessary condition for change. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes — and the rhymes have a logic that can be anticipated, if you know how to read it.
1. The COVID-19 Pandemic: Global Shock, Contested Response, the Erosion of Trust
On 11th March 2020, the WHO Director-General declared a pandemic. The declaration produced a global synchronisation without modern precedent: within days, borders closed on every continent, schools moved online, the streets of major cities fell silent.
History books will record the pandemic as the first global health shock of the information age — an event that killed millions, produced excess mortality significantly above any previous influenza season in most countries, and subjected democratic societies to an unprecedented test: how much control over individual liberties is acceptable in the name of public health? Lockdowns, vaccination mandates, movement restrictions — these will be analysed not merely as emergency responses but as moments in which the boundaries between state and citizen were fundamentally renegotiated.
The transparency failures will form a separate chapter. PCR testing criteria changed without clear explanation. Emergency procurement — masks, vaccines, tests — conducted through compressed procedures, without competitive tendering, with documented cases of overpricing and conflicts of interest. Contradictory communications that transformed masks from "unnecessary" to "mandatory" within weeks. The collateral costs — deteriorating mental health, delayed diagnoses for other conditions, educational losses for an entire generation of pupils — began to be properly quantified only once the acute emergency had passed.
Romania during the pandemic — and the historical parallels.
Romania entered the pandemic with a chronically underfunded healthcare system — the second-lowest percentage of GDP allocated to health in the European Union, with hospitals unrenovated for decades, and a haemorrhage of medical professionals towards Western Europe that had persisted throughout the previous decade.[^1] The autumn of 2021 brought the highest daily Covid death toll per capita in the EU, whilst Romania simultaneously had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the Union. These two indicators are not independent. They are two faces of the same coin: institutional distrust accumulated across generations, and insufficient medical capacity.
[^1]: By 2022, estimates suggested Romania had lost between 14,000 and 43,000 doctors to emigration since EU accession in 2007. The figures vary by methodology, but the scale is not in dispute. Some counties in rural Moldavia (the north-eastern region of Romania, not to be confused with the independent Republic of Moldova) had no resident cardiologist or oncologist.
The striking historical parallel is not with the Spanish flu of 1918 — which struck a Romania already devastated by war, with a medical system practically non-existent in rural areas. It is with the cholera epidemics of 1831 and the recurring outbreaks of the nineteenth century: a rural population institutionally unprotected, a state that responded with sanitary cordons and brutally imposed quarantines — without the infrastructure to make quarantines bearable — and an educated urban class that adapted more easily precisely because it possessed the resources to do so.
The structure is identical in 2020-2021. Bucharest residents with garden terraces, food delivery apps and the possibility of working from home passed through relatively well. Elderly people in the villages of Moldavia — without a genuinely accessible family doctor, without rapid ambulance response, without a hospital within less than an hour's drive — died at significantly higher rates. The pandemic traced, in 2021, exactly the same map of inequality that cholera had traced in 1831: those with access to resources and institutions survive. The others pay with their lives for their distance from the state.
Pandemic procurement scandals — overpriced masks purchased from intermediary firms with political connections, contracts awarded without competitive tendering — reproduce another historical constant: the military procurement scandals of 1916-1918, when state suppliers delivered spoiled tinned food and cardboard-soled boots to the Romanian army retreating through Moldavia.[^2] Criminal files opened then produced no significant convictions. Criminal files opened in relation to pandemic procurement followed, predictably, the same trajectory. This is not coincidence — it is a structure of impunity that reproduces itself because it has never been systematically dismantled.
[^2]: The Romanian military campaign of 1916 is one of the most painful chapters of the country's First World War experience. Romania entered the war in August 1916 on the Allied side, was quickly overrun by a combined German-Bulgarian-Ottoman offensive, lost Bucharest by December 1916, and spent 1917 fighting defensive battles in Moldavia before the collapse of Russia forced a humiliating separate peace in May 1918. The procurement failures were extensively documented in post-war parliamentary investigations.
There is a subtler parallel, perhaps more important in the long run: the erosion of the state as protector of the citizen. The pandemic revealed, with brutal clarity, that the Romanian state was not organised to protect its citizens in a crisis. The hospitals were insufficient. The medicines ran short. The oxygen was inadequate. The deaths of autumn 2021 were partly avoidable — not through fault of the disease, but through fault of the infrastructure that had never been built. This revelation confirmed what the peripheral, rural and impoverished populations of Romania had known from daily experience. But it struck, for the first time, social categories that had previously considered themselves relatively protected — the urban middle class, families with decent incomes, people with private medical insurance who discovered that private insurance was largely useless when every emergency hospital was full.
The Romanian state has produced this same disillusionment in comparable historical moments: in the winter of 1916-1917, when refugees from the occupied south died of typhus in Moldavia and the state could guarantee neither food nor basic medicines; and in the famine of 1946-1947, when the newly installed communist state chose to deliver grain quotas to the USSR rather than feed its own population.[^3] Each of these moments produced a scar of distrust in the state that transmitted itself, at varying intensities, to subsequent generations. The pandemic of 2020-2021 added a fresh scar.
[^3]: The Romanian famine of 1946-1947 is not well known internationally. Estimates of deaths range from tens of thousands to over 150,000. It resulted from a combination of severe drought, the devastation of the Second World War, and — most critically — the new communist government's decision to honour Soviet grain extraction demands at the expense of the domestic food supply. It contributed significantly to the consolidation of communist power, as the government used food distribution as a political instrument.
2. The Return of War to Europe: From Crimea to the Invasion of 2022
History books will not treat 24th February 2022 as an event without precedent. They will place it in its continuity: Crimea 2014, the Donbas conflict 2014-2022, the gradual consolidation of NATO's eastern flank through Enhanced Forward Presence, military and training support for Ukraine. The full-scale invasion was an escalation, not a beginning. Europe rediscovered that European peace was not a law of nature — that the post-1991 security system, built on the assumption of Russia's progressive integration into the liberal order, had been a wager. And wagers in geopolitics are paid for with people's lives when they are lost.
Historians will weigh carefully: the aggressor's responsibility is beyond contestation. But the security dynamics created by NATO's eastward expansion, the disputed or unfulfilled commitments, and the thirty-year failure to resolve Ukraine's geopolitical status will be examined as contextual factors — not to diminish responsibility, but to understand the mechanisms by which international systems produce wars that nobody truly wanted but nobody prevented.
Romania in the geopolitics of war — and the historical parallels.
Romania raised its defence budget towards 2% of GDP, accepted NATO bases on its territory, and received several hundred thousand Ukrainian refugees — a humanitarian response that, in several respects, exceeded reasonable expectations. Its strategic relevance has increased substantially: since 2022, Romania features prominently in alliance security calculations as a critical South-Eastern flank. But this relevance grew not because Romania had systematically prepared for it, but because events imposed it.
The direct historical parallel is with Romania's position between the great powers on the eve of the First World War. Romania entered 1914 as neutral, bound by a secret treaty with the Central Powers signed in 1883 — a treaty that the political class knew no longer corresponded to the country's real interests, but which nobody had formally renegotiated. Romania waited two years, negotiated simultaneously with both sides, and entered the war in August 1916 on the Allied side — with an army whose uniforms were adequate but whose heavy weaponry was insufficient, whose logistics were improvised, and whose allies had promised support they could not deliver at the required speed.[^4]
[^4]: Romania's 1916 military disaster is sometimes called the "Romanian catastrophe". The initial offensive into Transylvania — then part of Austria-Hungary — succeeded briefly before a devastating counter-attack from the south by German and Bulgarian forces overwhelmed the Romanian army. The speed of the collapse shocked Allied commanders and has been attributed to a combination of poor logistics, inadequate artillery, and the gap between the promised and actual Allied support.
The result was the disaster of autumn 1916: Bucharest occupied by December, two years of occupation in the south of the country, the government and King fleeing to Moldavia. Followed by the Treaty of Bucharest in May 1918 — a humiliating peace forced by Russia's collapse. Followed by the spectacular reversal when the Allies won in November 1918 and Romania achieved its greatest territorial expansion, the so-called Great Union of 1918.[^5]
[^5]: Romania's "Great Union" (Marea Unire) of 1918 brought together the Kingdom of Romania with Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bukovina, roughly doubling the country's territory and population. It remains the foundational national narrative of modern Romania and is celebrated on 1st December, Romania's National Day.
The lesson that the history books of 2050 should extract is not that Romania chose wrongly in 1916 — it ultimately chose correctly and won. It is that Romania entered the greatest conflict of the era with insufficient preparation, trusting that allies would compensate for what was lacking internally. It survived through the good fortune of Allied victory — not through its own resilience. The same pattern recurs in 2022-2026: Romania is on the right side of the conflict, but its own capacity — military, cyber, infrastructural resilience — remains dependent on what allies deliver rather than what Romania systematically builds.
A second echo: Ukrainian refugees in 2022 reproduce, in mirror image, the flight of Romanians from the south in 1917. Then, internal refugees from occupied Wallachia — hundreds of thousands of civilians — overwhelmed unoccupied Moldavia, producing supply crises and typhus epidemics. The state's response was chaotic, generous in intention and devastating in execution. In 2022, Romania managed better — but the structural problem was similar: a state with limited administrative capacity confronted with a population flow it had not anticipated and for which it had built no reserve capacity.
A third echo is less comfortable to examine: Romania's strategic posture in 2022-2026 reproduces, at a different scale, its posture of 1939-1940. Then, Romania was the formal ally of Britain and France, bound by British guarantees given in 1939 — but possessed no concretely executable military guarantee with rapid response capability. When France fell in June 1940 and Britain stood alone, the guarantees proved without substance: Romania ceded Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to the USSR, Northern Transylvania to Hungary, and the Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria in the same year, without firing a shot, because British military power could not reach the Black Sea faster than Soviet armour.
NATO's guarantees in 2026 are substantially more concrete than the British guarantees of 1939 — Article 5 is a more solid foundation than a declaration of intent. But the lesson of 1939-1940 about the distance between a formal guarantee and rapid concrete defensive capacity is one that Romania's generals today read with close attention. Hence the defence budget increase. Hence the American military bases on Romanian territory as a bipartisan political priority. The lessons of 1940 have entered the institutional DNA of Romania's security establishment — which cannot be said for other historical lessons.
3. The End of Unipolarity: From an American World to Multipolarity
India refusing to align with Russia sanctions. Saudi Arabia negotiating directly with China. Brazil declining to follow Western consensus at the United Nations. Turkey purchasing Russian S-400 air defence systems whilst remaining in NATO. The American world has given way to a world in which America remains the most powerful single actor — but can no longer dictate the agenda alone. The Global South emerged as a collective actor refusing automatic alignment and using great-power competition as leverage for better terms.
Romania in the multipolar world — and the historical parallels.
Romania is formally anchored in the Western bloc — NATO, EU, strategic partnership with the United States. These anchors are real and valuable. But they do not resolve the structural problem of a small, peripheral economy with limited negotiating power within the bloc. Multipolarity, for a country of Romania's scale, is not necessarily an opportunity — it is more likely a risk of simultaneous marginalisation by all poles.
The historical parallel is with the diplomatic navigation of the Romanian Principalities in the nineteenth century.[^6] Between the Treaty of Adrianople (1829, which opened their markets to Western commerce) and the Treaty of Berlin (1878, which recognised their independence), the Principalities and young Romania navigated constantly between the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary and France. Romanian foreign policy of that period — from Cuza to Carol I — was an art of survival through equilibrism: never sufficiently aligned with any single power to become its satellite, never sufficiently autonomous to impose its own agenda.
[^6]: The Romanian Principalities refers to Wallachia and Moldavia — two autonomous vassal states of the Ottoman Empire that merged in 1859 under Alexandru Ioan Cuza to form the basis of modern Romania. They occupied a geopolitically complex position between the three major empires of the region and developed a sophisticated tradition of manoeuvring between them.
Ion C. Brătianu — perhaps the most gifted statesman in nineteenth-century Romanian politics — understood that Romania could not resist great-power pressures alone.[^7] He also understood that the country's only currency was its geographical position and its willingness to be a useful partner to whichever power was passing through the region. He deployed this currency with considerable virtuosity at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, securing recognition of Romanian independence in exchange for concessions Romania could not have avoided in any case.
[^7]: Ion C. Brătianu (1821-1891) was the dominant figure of Romanian liberalism and the principal architect of the country's independence. His son, Ionel Brătianu (1864-1927), led Romania through the First World War negotiations. The Brătianu family represented Romanian liberalism across two generations of critical national decisions.
In 2026, Romania occupies a structurally comparable position — with one essential favourable difference: NATO and EU membership provides incomparably more solid anchorage than the Principalities possessed. The unfavourable difference: fully anchored in the Western bloc, Romania no longer has the equilibrist's room for manoeuvre — but nor has it built sufficient weight within the bloc to influence its agenda. It is a small state in an alliance of larger states, with an underfunded diplomatic service, inadequately resourced embassies, and a presence in European decision-making that is inverse to its demographic weight.
A second, less-cited historical parallel: Romania's foreign policy during the neutrality of 1914-1916, when Brătianu's son negotiated simultaneously with the Central Powers and the Entente, ultimately securing better terms than would have been available had Romania entered the war immediately in 1914 alongside either side. That art of strategic delay — waiting until one's value as an ally is at its maximum — is a form of soft power that small states can practise during periods of global realignment. Interwar Romania, through Nicolae Titulescu at the League of Nations, practised it again with some success: building a diplomatic reputation disproportionate to the country's military or economic power, using multilateral institutions as an amplifier.[^8]
[^8]: Nicolae Titulescu (1882-1941) was Romania's most prominent interwar diplomat, serving twice as Foreign Minister and twice as President of the League of Nations Assembly — one of only two people ever to hold the presidency twice. He pursued a foreign policy of collective security and was a strong advocate for the Little Entente, a regional alliance of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania. He was removed from office in 1936 as Romania drifted towards accommodation with the Axis powers.
Today the available multilateral institutions are the EU, NATO, the UN and the Council of Europe. Romania is present in all of them — but presence is not equivalent to influence. The lesson from Brătianu and Titulescu remains: the only viable exit for a small country is to make oneself sufficiently useful and sufficiently credible that ignoring you costs more than consulting you. This is not won through diplomatic declarations — it is won through demonstrated capacity, through concrete proposals that solve real problems for the alliance, and through consistency in commitments made.
4. The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: The Moment Machines Learned to Speak
November 2022. ChatGPT. Fifty million users in the first month — faster adoption than any previous consumer technology in history. More importantly, a qualitative shift: for the first time, a machine could produce coherent text, functional code, plausible analysis and artistic creation at a level that challenged the boundary between human and artificial competence. History books will mark this as the second wave of the digital revolution: if the first wave (the internet, smartphones, social networks) changed the distribution of information, the second changes the production of knowledge itself.
Who gains: the countries that produce AI, language models, processing chips. Who risks losing: countries that consume AI without producing anything in the equation — that become dependent on tools created elsewhere, regulated elsewhere, optimised for other markets and other languages.
Romania and the AI revolution — and the historical parallels.
Romania possesses a genuine technology sector — estimated at 6-7% of GDP, with over 150,000 software professionals and several notable global success stories (Bitdefender in cybersecurity, UiPath in robotic process automation). But the sector is overwhelmingly a sector of outsourced services: it produces code to order for external clients, not products with proprietary intellectual value. The AI revolution strikes precisely this niche: routine programming services are among the first candidates for substitution by generative AI.
Romania has, as of 2026, no competitive Romanian-language large language model. It has no articulated AI policy. It has EU structural funds for digitalisation that are absorbed partially and with delay. It has sound technical universities — without genuine mechanisms for technology transfer to the economy.
The historical parallel is with Romania's relationship to the Industrial Revolution of the second half of the nineteenth century. When Western Europe was building factories, railways and heavy industry, Romania was exporting grain and raw materials. It was entering the European industrial economy — but as a supplier of inputs, not as a producer of added value. Bogdan Murgescu documented this mechanism in detail in Romania and Europe (2010): not an absence of human capability — Romanians of the 1870s were not less capable than Belgians — but an absence of the institutional and financial capital that would have transformed human capacity into domestic industry.[^9]
[^9]: Bogdan Murgescu, România și Europa. Acumularea decalajelor economice (1500–2010) [Romania and Europe: The Accumulation of Economic Gaps, 1500-2010], Polirom, 2010. This is the most comprehensive economic history of Romania in relation to Western European development and remains the essential reference for understanding Romania's long-run developmental trajectory.
The interwar Romanian state eventually understood that without industrialisation there could be no genuine economic sovereignty, and applied industrial protection and public investment policies through the 1920s and 1930s. The results were mixed but real: an industrial base that, however modest by Western standards, reduced complete dependence on agricultural export.
The equivalent for 2026 would be an active digital industrial policy: incubation of Romanian products with global markets, public investment in applied AI research, genuine university-to-economy technology transfer mechanisms. Not a guaranteed recipe — the interwar policy was not guaranteed either. But the alternative — exporting raw human capacity without accumulating proprietary value — has been demonstrated, over one hundred and fifty years, not to produce convergence. It is a repetition of the same extractive model, with grain replaced by billable programming hours.
There is a more recent parallel that overlaps with the Industrial Revolution comparison: Romania's economic integration into the EU after 2007. Integration brought genuine and substantial benefits: access to the single market, structural funds, freedom of movement. But it integrated Romania primarily as a supplier of cheap labour and low-cost services — not as a producer of added value. The multinationals that established themselves after 2007 came largely for advantageous wage costs, not for Romanian innovation. The German automotive component subcontractors in Sibiu or Timișoara produce quality parts — but design, engineering and profit remain in Stuttgart or Munich. The AI revolution of 2022-2026 repeats this asymmetric integration structurally, but accelerates it: the risk is no longer merely that high added value remains with parent companies, but that even routine work will be substituted, leaving Romania with less than it had before.
5. Political Polarisation and the Crisis of Liberal Democracies
Brexit 2016. Trump 2016 and 2024. The Gilets Jaunes in France. Alternative für Deutschland at 20% in the Bundestag. Giorgia Meloni in power in Italy. The Western middle class that had grown up with the certainties of globalisation discovered that upward mobility was no longer guaranteed — and voted with anger. History books will describe this as the crisis of the political centre — not the triumph of extremism, but the erosion of the coalition that had sustained the postwar liberal order. Populism is not an anomaly: it is the symptom that the distance between what democracies promise and what they deliver has become too great for too many people.
Romania and polarisation — and the historical parallels.
Romanian polarisation has its own distinctive character. It is not primarily structured on a conservative-progressive axis. It runs between those who stayed and those who left, between university cities integrated into European networks and the rest of the country, between the generation that believes the EU is the answer to everything and the generation that grew up with the certainty that the EU took their parents and left their village with elderly people and empty houses.
The elections of 2024 produced the case of Călin Georgescu — a candidate without a party, without a coherent programme, with sovereigntist and Orthodox Christian rhetoric, who won the first round of the presidential election with nearly 23% of the vote, predominantly from rural areas, the diaspora, and online communities where he had been promoted aggressively through TikTok algorithms.[^10] The Constitutional Court's annulment of the elections produced a crisis of legitimacy without precedent in post-1989 Romania — whatever the legal grounds, the perceived effect for a substantial portion of the electorate was that their vote had been eliminated by the system.
[^10]: The 2024 Romanian presidential elections produced one of the most dramatic political surprises in post-communist European history. Călin Georgescu, an agronomist and mystic virtually unknown before the campaign, came first in the November 2024 first round. The Constitutional Court annulled the election citing evidence of coordinated digital influence operations, including documented TikTok algorithmic amplification that the National Audiovisual Council described as unprecedented in scale. New elections were held in 2025.
The most pertinent historical parallel is with Romania's political crisis of the 1930s. The mainstream democratic parties — the National Liberals and the National Peasants' Party — were eroding through their inability to respond to the simultaneous crises of the Great Depression, ethnic tensions and visible political corruption. The Legion of the Archangel Michael grew in this vacuum — not because Romanians of 1930 were fundamentally more radical than their European neighbours (France had the Croix-de-Feu, Germany the NSDAP, Italy had fascism already in power), but because the movement offered identity, community and a clear enemy in a period when normal institutions were producing neither identity nor solutions.[^11]
[^11]: The Legion of the Archangel Michael, also known as the Iron Guard, was a far-right ultranationalist and antisemitic movement that became the third political force in Romania by the late 1930s. At its peak it had several hundred thousand members. Its ideology combined Orthodox Christian mysticism, Romanian ethnic nationalism, violent antisemitism and anti-communist sentiment. It was responsible for numerous political assassinations and pogroms, and participated in government briefly in 1940-1941 before being crushed by Ion Antonescu's dictatorship.
The parallel is not that Georgescu is Codreanu's equivalent — it is a structural parallel, not an identification of persons.[^12] The vacuum left by corrupt mainstream parties unable to deliver reform, combined with an economic crisis leaving many behind, and a new communications infrastructure that bypassed institutional filters (in 1930 — mass rallies and the Legion's own press; in 2024 — TikTok with its amplification algorithms), produces a recognisable dynamic. What prevented complete disaster in the 1930s and delayed it until 1940 was the institutional resilience of the monarchy, parties that retained some coherence, and an independent press. What might prevent disaster in 2026-2030 is a similar combination: an independent judiciary, professional journalism, an articulate civil society, and a party system that recovers from collapse with credible programmes. None of this is guaranteed. It was not guaranteed then either.
[^12]: Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899-1938) was the founder and leader of the Legion of the Archangel Michael. He was killed whilst in prison in 1938, on the orders of King Carol II. The comparison between 1930s Romanian far-right movements and contemporary European populism is a topic of active historical debate: some historians emphasise the structural similarities; others stress the radical differences, particularly the absence from contemporary movements of the Legion's explicit commitment to political violence.
There is a third parallel, less commonly explored: the electorate of the 1907 peasant revolt and the electorate of Georgescu in 2024. Not in the sense of being the same people or the same causes — a century separates them and conditions differ radically. But in the sense that both electorates express the frustration of the same structural category: people who live in Romania but do not benefit from its dominant economic and political system. The peasants of 1907 were those excluded from the selective modernisation of Carol I's Romania — which built Bucharest, railways and the Romanian Athenaeum from the rent of the countryside, without reinvesting in the countryside. The rural and diaspora electorate of Georgescu in 2024 are the structural — not biological — descendants of those people: those excluded from the benefits of thirty years of economic growth, which concentrated in Bucharest, Cluj, Timișoara and the IT sector, leaving the rest of the country with poorly maintained roads, hospitals without doctors, and schools without prospects.
6. The Transparency Deficit and the Decline of Leadership Ethics
The digital age means that no contradiction can be hidden — old statements are recoverable instantly, inconsistencies are documented in real time, public contracts are available to anyone who knows how to search. Paradoxically, increased informational transparency has not produced greater political accountability — it has produced deeper cynicism. People know more and have less faith that knowing more can change anything. History books will note that this period saw trust in authorities reach historic lows in Western democracies — not from ignorance, but from disappointed knowledge.
Romania and structural corruption — and the historical parallels.
Romania sent former prime ministers, ministers and county council presidents to trial and secured convictions. The National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) functioned, during its stronger periods, remarkably well by any regional standard.[^13] This is a genuine and underappreciated achievement. But structural corruption — the kind that makes rules written to permit exceptions and exceptions distributed according to relationships rather than merit — continued uninterrupted. Overpriced public procurement, contracts awarded to politically connected firms, party-based appointments to public offices, EU funds accessed through front companies.
[^13]: The DNA (Direcția Națională Anticorupție) was established in 2002 specifically to investigate high-level corruption. Between 2013 and 2017, under chief prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi, it achieved conviction rates and case volumes that attracted international attention. Kövesi subsequently became the first European Chief Prosecutor, heading the newly established EPPO (European Public Prosecutor's Office) from 2021. The DNA's independence has been subject to periodic political pressure, including attempts in 2017-2019 by the then-governing Social Democrats to modify criminal legislation in ways that would have benefited politicians under investigation.
The historical parallel is direct and brilliantly documented. Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea wrote in 1910, in Neoiobăgia (Neo-Serfdom), about the mechanism by which the modern Romanian state — formally constructed along Western models, with constitution, parliament and free press — produced in practice an oligarchy in which democratic form concealed feudal extraction.[^14] Boyars had become politicians and lawyers. Serfs had become voters. But the extractive relationship remained structurally similar: those with access to the state extracted from those without.
[^14]: Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea (1855-1920) was a Marxist literary and social critic, born Karl Katz in Ukraine, who became one of the most important intellectual figures of late nineteenth-century Romanian socialism. Neoiobăgia (1910) is his major sociological work, arguing that Romania had imported the forms of Western modernity — the constitution, the parliament, the legal system — without the social and economic substance that made these forms meaningful in the West. The resulting hybrid, he argued, produced a "neo-serfdom" in which peasants were formally free but practically dependent. The book remains relevant reading for understanding Romanian institutional pathologies.
Gherea called this "neo-serfdom" — a new, subtler dependence mediated by lease contracts and controlled voting. In 2026, the mechanism is mediated by public contracts, administrative concessions and party financing networks. The form has modernised with each decade — serfdom became corvée labour, corvée became speculative leasing, leasing became public contracting. The substance — extraction through preferential access to the state — is discomfitingly continuous across nearly two centuries.
Titu Maiorescu observed, in his 1868 critique Against the Current Direction in Romanian Culture, that Romania had adopted Western institutions — laws, universities, banks, a press — without having built the social, educational and cultural substance that made them functional.[^15] The imported institutions operated as scenery, not as real mechanisms. The critique was formulated a hundred and fifty years ago and recurs, with appropriate updates, in the European Commission's annual Rule of Law reports on Romania. It is not a new problem. It is a constant.
[^15]: Titu Maiorescu (1840-1917) was the dominant figure of the Romanian literary and cultural movement Junimea (Youth), and later a leading Conservative politician and prime minister. His critique of "forms without substance" (forme fără fond) argued that Romania was adopting the external appearance of Western modernity without the internal conditions that made those forms meaningful — and that the gap between form and substance was itself a source of social pathology. The critique anticipated much of what later social scientists would call "institutional isomorphism" in developing countries.
There is a third parallel, less obvious: the Phanariot administration of the Romanian Principalities. The Phanariots — Greek administrators from the Phanar district of Constantinople, appointed by the Ottoman Porte — were not uniformly corrupt and incompetent.[^16] Some were intelligent reformers. But the system in which they operated rewarded short-term extraction, not long-term construction: appointments were temporary, conditional on substantial payments to Istanbul, and each new prince arrived with his network of favours to distribute and costs to recover quickly. The structural result was an administration chronically preoccupied with recovering its political investment rather than with effective governance. The system of political appointments in contemporary Romanian public administration is not identical to the Phanariot model — there is law, there is civil service legislation, there are, in theory, competitions. But the cumulative effect of governmental changes that bring new waves of political appointees to the top of the administration — prefects, secretaries-general, agency directors — is a cycle of institutional discontinuity with comparable consequences: public policies abandoned halfway through, investment projects restarted from zero by each new government, institutional expertise that does not accumulate because the people who hold it are replaced along with the government that hired them.
[^16]: The Phanariot period in Wallachia and Moldavia lasted from 1711/1716 to 1821. The Phanariots were Greek families from the Phanar (Lighthouse) district of Constantinople who had acquired influence in the Ottoman court and were appointed as hospodars (princes) of the two principalities. Historians debate the Phanariot legacy: some emphasise the cultural and administrative contributions, others the extractive character of the regime. The period ended with the Greek War of Independence and the subsequent appointment of native Romanian princes.
7. The Climate Crisis: From Warning to Lived Reality
2023 was the hottest year in recorded history. 2024 exceeded it. The summer of 2025 brought simultaneous heatwaves across three continents. The climate crisis ceased to be a subject for conferences and became a weekly news item. The energy transition accelerated in real terms — renewable energy exceeded fossil fuels as a source of newly installed electricity generation capacity globally in 2024. But the social costs of transition produced political tensions exploited successfully by anti-system movements.
Romania and climate — and the historical parallels.
Romania possesses a relatively advantageous energy mix and could become a net exporter of clean energy in the region. It is not, or not yet. Illegal deforestation continues as a documented and insufficiently penalised haemorrhage. The heatwaves of 2021-2025 produced avoidable deaths and massive agricultural losses. The floods of 2024 — in Moldavia and in the Dobrogea region — demonstrated that drainage infrastructure and water management systems have not been substantially upgraded since the 1970s.
The historical parallel is with the mass deforestation of the second half of the nineteenth century — precisely the phenomenon that transformed the hills of Moldavia and the Wallachian plain from areas of mixed forest alternating with pasture into agricultural monocultures vulnerable to drought. The deforestation of that period was driven by the need to increase arable land and maximise agricultural rent in the short term — exactly the logic applied today by those who fell forests for farmland or timber.
The consequence of nineteenth-century deforestation is visible today: eroded soils in the eastern half of the country, the altered hydrological regime of small rivers in Moldavia, the drought vulnerability of Wallachian plain agriculture. The consequence of current deforestation will be visible in the decades 2030-2050 — in the form of more frequent flooding in deforested valleys, more severe droughts on hills without moisture retention, and landslides in areas that had, until recently, the root systems of mature trees to stabilise them.
Romania is in the position of a state that has seen this film before — that knows from its own experience that short-term destruction of natural resources produces long-term crises — and that repeats the scenario with discouraging consistency. Romania's National Recovery and Resilience Plan contains correct chapters on energy transition and forests. Implementation is partial, blocked by insufficient administrative capacity and by economic interests that prefer immediate extractivism. The lesson of 1880 has not been absorbed.
There is an important distinction from 1880, however: then, there was no public consciousness or research framework documenting the long-term consequences of deforestation. People felled forests because they needed arable land and because nobody had explicitly calculated the hydrological value of the forests lost. Today, the consequences are known, documented by Greenpeace Romania, WWF, and Romania's own Ministry of Environment in mandatory reports to the EU. Illegal deforestation continues not from ignorance — but despite knowledge. This makes it more culpable and harder to explain politically than the destruction of 1880.
A second relevant climate parallel is with the drought of 1946-1947 — the last great famine in modern Romania. Estimates of deaths range widely but reach into the hundreds of thousands. It resulted from a combination of severe drought, the devastation of the Second World War, and — most critically — the decision of the new communist government to honour Soviet grain extraction demands at the expense of the domestic food supply. The droughts of the 2020s-2040s, which will be more frequent and more severe according to all credible climate projections, will strike a materially more resilient population — but one served by agricultural infrastructure and irrigation systems that have not been systematically renewed since collectivisation.
8. Digital Transformation and the Attention Economy
Amplification algorithms that reward emotionally intense content over nuanced complexity. Echo chambers that isolate users from differing perspectives. Disinformation that spreads six times faster than verified information (MIT study, 2018). The geopolitical power of platforms — Twitter/X under Musk, TikTok under de facto Chinese sovereign influence, Meta with three billion users. History books will note that the democratising internet — the one that was going to give voice to the voiceless and distribute the power of information — also produced an unprecedented concentration of media power in the hands of a few private companies accountable democratically to nobody.
Digital Romania — and the historical parallels.
Romania has one of the fastest internet networks in the EU — a characteristic paradox: the basic infrastructure is excellent; its use is imbalanced. Digital competences among the adult population rank among the lowest in the EU. The digitisation of public administration remains a project with inconsistent results: online service portals that do not function, systems that do not communicate with each other, databases incompatible within the same ministry.
TikTok played a demonstrated role in the 2024 elections — promoting sovereigntist and anti-system content with an algorithmic intensity documented by Romania's National Audiovisual Council. Romania discovered that it was vulnerable to digital manipulation not because its citizens are naive, but because no systemic resilience to this type of influence had ever been constructed.
The historical parallel is less immediately obvious but genuine and relevant. In Romania's 1937 elections — the last relatively free elections before the installation of royal dictatorship — the Legion of the Archangel Michael achieved 16% of the vote, placing third, using communications and mobilisation methods without precedent in Romanian politics: rallies of thousands with torches, candidates walking through villages on foot, youth networks transmitting the message more effectively than the traditional party press. This was, in the terms of the era, an alternative communications infrastructure that bypassed the filters of traditional parties and the partisan press.
TikTok in 2024 played a structurally similar role: a platform that bypassed conventional institutional filters and amplified anti-system messages directly to audiences that no longer consumed traditional media. This is not a moral comparison — not all anti-system messages are fascist. It is a structural comparison about how alternative communications infrastructures function: they are exploited first by forces that have the least to lose from institutional destabilisation. And the state, typically, ignores them until it is too late — precisely as the Romanian state of the 1930s underestimated the Legion's mobilisation capacity until it had become the third force in the country.
There is a second, more recent parallel: the partisan press of interwar Romania and the first years of communist rule. Interwar Romanian journalism was formally plural — dozens of newspapers existed — but was overwhelmingly the explicit organ of a party or a politically affiliated economic interest. The sophisticated reader of 1930 knew that Universul was more neutral, that Curentul was pro-Goga, that Dimineața was liberal. Pluralism existed, but it was a pluralism of tribes, not of independently verified information. Communist propaganda completed the destruction of independent journalism through nationalisation and direct control. Generations raised under communism inherited, in 1990, either the reflex of total distrust towards any media (because they knew the media lies) or the reflex of uncritical consumption (because no models of critical media literacy had been available). Both reflexes are visible in 2024: audiences that no longer trust any institutional information source and therefore treat all sources as equivalently suspect — including verified journalism and deliberate disinformation alike. In a market where everything is equally suspicious, the loudest and simplest voice wins. TikTok, in 2024, was the loudest.
9. Mental Health: The First Decade of Recognised Crisis
Anxiety, depression and social isolation increased with statistical significance among people under 25 in every country with available data. The pandemic amplified existing vulnerabilities. Major health authorities — the WHO, the US Surgeon General — publicly acknowledged, during this period, the link between social media use and the deterioration of adolescent mental health. History books will note this as the first period in which digital technology was officially recognised as a major public health factor.
Romania and mental health — and the historical parallels.
Romania has, per thousand inhabitants, among the fewest psychiatrists and psychologists in the EU. Mental health has remained underfunded, socially stigmatised and geographically inaccessible — in the counties of Moldavia and Oltenia, a psychologist in private practice is an urban luxury, not a standard health service. The generation that experienced the pandemic with schools closed — two years of screens, without physical interaction, with the family pressures of economic crisis — paid a documented cost in rising anxiety, reduced academic performance and increased self-destructive behaviours reported by school medical services.
The historical parallel is with Romania's relationship to the "new diseases" of modernisation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Tuberculosis, alcoholism and venereal diseases are the "modernisation diseases" documented by Romanian doctors and sociologists of the 1880s-1910s — Constantin I. Istrati, Nicolae Manolescu: diseases that had grown alongside accelerating urbanisation, rural poverty and the rupture of traditional community networks that had provided, however inadequately, a form of social cohesion. The state recognised them late, allocated insufficient resources, built a few sanatoriums and hospitals in urban areas without ever reaching rural areas in any systematic way.
The mental diseases of digitalisation — social comparison anxiety, the depression of digital isolation, screen addiction — are the "modernisation diseases" of the twenty-first century. Romania is recognising them with the same delay with which it recognised tuberculosis in 1890: with official reports confirming the existence of the problem, a handful of pilot programmes in a few large cities, and a complete absence of any systemic response that would reach the adolescent in Vaslui or Suceava who has no psychologist at their school and spends six hours a day on TikTok.
The historical constant is uncomfortable: Romania has systematically treated the health of its population as an expenditure to be minimised rather than an investment to be maximised. Each health crisis — cholera, tuberculosis, Spanish flu, Covid, digital mental health — has produced recognition that the system is insufficient and the promise that it will be remedied. Remediation has arrived partially, with decades of delay, and only after the current crisis has been superseded by a new one. The rhythm has not changed. Only the nature of the disease.
There is a significant asymmetry worth noting explicitly. The individual capacity of Romanian doctors and psychologists is generally high — university training is solid, competition for medical school places is intense, results at international biology and chemistry olympiads are consistently strong. The problem is not human capacity — it is the system that neither retains nor capitalises it. The same doctor trained in Romania, working in the Romanian public system on a salary of roughly 600 euros a month in 2015, moves to France, earns five times as much and works with modern equipment. This is not an immoral choice. It is a rational choice in the face of a system that has not decided that population health merits systemic investment. The mental health crisis of 2016-2026 is, from this perspective, an additional diagnostic: it is a crisis for which Romania has not exported the solutions, because psychologists in the diaspora do not treat adolescents in Vaslui. And it is a crisis whose solution — unlike infectious diseases manageable through acute hospitalisation — is distributed, continuous and community-based: exactly the type of service that the Romanian mental health system is not built to deliver.
10. Economic Shocks: Inflation, Debt and the Reconfiguration of Globalisation
The years 2021-2023 brought inflation not seen in Western economies since the 1970s-1980s: partly pandemic-driven (disrupted supply chains, compressed demand suddenly released), partly geopolitical (the war in Ukraine and its impact on energy and grain prices), partly monetary (years of near-zero interest rates and massive quantitative easing had inflated central bank balance sheets and created asset bubbles). The central bank response — aggressive interest rate increases from 2022 — reduced inflation but produced a cost-of-living crisis with severe political effects. The younger generation found that access to home ownership — the pillar of middle-class integration — had become prohibitive in most European capital cities. Globalisation reconfigured: partial decoupling, friend-shoring, competition for strategic resources.
Romania and the decade's economy — and the historical parallels.
Romania entered the decade with solid growth — 4-7% annually in 2017-2019 — and exited the pandemic with a budget deficit exceeding 9% of GDP in 2020. The deficit remained a permanent theme: Romania repeatedly breached Stability and Growth Pact criteria, negotiated fiscal consolidation trajectories respected partially and with delay. Public sector wage growth, unresolved pension privileges, EU funds absorbed below potential — these are the decade's realities. Romania will not join the Eurozone in the decade 2026-2036, maintaining a currency vulnerability that amplifies any external shock.[^17]
[^17]: Romania has committed to adopting the euro but has consistently missed its own target dates, currently set at 2029. The main obstacles are fiscal (the budget deficit consistently exceeds the Maastricht 3% threshold), inflation (above the EU reference value in most recent years), and exchange rate stability criteria. The leu (RON) has remained managed rather than freely floating, but without the stability of a formal exchange rate mechanism.
The historical parallels are, at this chapter, the most abundant.
First parallel: the external debt cycle of 1880-1914. Independent Romania contracted massive external loans to finance modernisation infrastructure — railways, bridges, public buildings, military capacity. The loans were largely necessary and productive. But they were contracted at rates that reflected Western creditors' perception of country risk, and frequently financed current expenditure or prestige investments without economic return. Debt service consumed, at its peak, nearly 30% of the state budget. Romania navigated this pressure — but with real social sacrifices and reduced fiscal room for manoeuvre in moments of crisis. The structural deficit of 2016-2026 follows a similar logic: recurring expenditure increases — wages, pensions, transfers — financed by deficit during periods when fiscal buffers should have been accumulated. When crisis came, Romania had no buffer. It borrowed expensively. Its room for manoeuvre contracted.
Second parallel: the incomplete land reform of 1921 and its effects. The reform distributed six million hectares to 1.4 million families — a massive property transfer. But it distributed land without the agricultural capital necessary for efficient cultivation: no machinery, no accessible credit, no functioning cooperatives, no organised distribution markets. The result was a small and medium agricultural sector structurally inefficient, which — at the first major crisis (the Great Depression of 1929, which collapsed grain prices) — generated massive rural poverty. The contemporary equivalent is the privatisation and economic liberalisation of the 1990s-2000s: reforms correct in direction but applied without the institutional and financial infrastructure that would have allowed new property owners and entrepreneurs to survive the first years of competition. The result — thousands of SMEs created and quickly bankrupted, a private sector surviving partly through tax evasion, an entrepreneurial middle class underdeveloped relative to the country's demographic potential — is structurally analogous to the small rural proprietor of 1922: free on paper, vulnerable in reality.
Third parallel: the economic shock of integration into the global grain market after 1880. Romania discovered that its agricultural production was competing with cheap grain from Russia, the United States and Argentina on Western European markets. Competitiveness through low prices was sustained by low wages and speculative rents — an equilibrium that maintained export profitability but condemned the rural population to subsistence. Romania in 2026 faces a structural equivalent in the digital economy: Romanian IT companies compete on the global services market through prices lower than their Western European equivalents — an advantage sustained by lower wage costs, not by superior productivity or innovation. When AI erodes the cost advantage, Romania risks finding itself in the position of the 1890 grain exporter: with a commodity no longer competitive at the price it sold it, and without proprietary high-value products to replace the revenue source.
Fourth parallel: EU fund absorption and the modernisation loans of 1866-1914. Carol I's state contracted external loans to finance infrastructure — railways, the port of Constanța, public buildings. The infrastructure was generally well built: Romanian railways of the period functioned; the port of Constanța transformed grain export. The problem was not the quality of the loan-financed infrastructure, but the ratio between what could have been obtained and what was actually obtained, and the social cost of debt service. Romania paid high rates to build things that brought it smaller benefits than they could have, because it lacked the capacity to negotiate better terms or to build more efficiently. EU structural funds of the decades 2007-2026 have a comparable structure, with roles reversed: they are not loans but grants. They cost not interest — they cost absorption capacity. And Romania has systematically demonstrated below-potential absorption capacity: infrastructure projects that take three times longer than in Poland, costs per kilometre of motorway among the highest in the EU, funds returned to Brussels due to missed deadlines.[^18] The benefits obtained are real — motorways built, irrigation systems rehabilitated, schools renovated. But the ratio between what was obtained and what could have been obtained with the same funds, with the same administrative capacity organised differently, remains an unresolved structural problem.
[^18]: Romania's EU fund absorption rates have improved over successive programming periods but remain among the lower performers in the Union. For the 2014-2020 programming period, Romania absorbed approximately 70% of allocated cohesion funds — better than previous periods but below the EU average. Administrative capacity constraints, including frequent turnover in institutions managing EU funds due to political appointments, are consistently identified as the primary obstacle.
Conclusion: Romania in the History Books of the Decade — and the Structural Lesson
History books will present the decade 2016–2026 as a period of accelerated transition in which certainties collapsed without new structures consolidating. The pandemic tested state resilience. The war removed European peace from the category of the inevitable. AI put in question the nature of intellectual labour. Climate moved from warning to emergency. Democracies fragmented. The economy reconfigured.
Romania will appear in these books — at the chapter on the health crisis, at the one on polarisation, at the one on digital manipulation, at the one on structural corruption. It will be a correct presence, but not a glorious one.
The structural lesson pursued through all ten chapters is a single one, formulated in different forms: Romania possesses real human capacity and a persistent gap between this capacity and the institutional systems that should harness it. The gap is not new. Gherea called it "neo-serfdom" in 1910. Maiorescu called it "forms without substance" in 1868. Murgescu called it "accumulation of gaps" in 2010. The same diagnosis, reformulated at each generation, systematically untreated by any of them.
The mechanism is consistent: Romania produces human capacity and exports it. It produces natural resources and exports them with minimal added value. It accesses European capital and consumes it predominantly in current expenditure rather than long-term productive investment. Crisis comes, produces a window of reform, the window opens partially and closes before reform is complete, and the cycle restarts.
Historical parallels are not fatalism. They are a warning. The warning that the same film, watched with sufficient attention, shows moments in which the cycle could have broken and did not — and moments in which it broke unexpectedly, through a combination of external pressure, internal crisis and a handful of people who made choices different from the average of their era.
There are, in Romanian history, at least three moments in which the cycle genuinely broke: 1864 — Cuza forcing land reform and the secularisation of monastery estates against boyar resistance, producing a structural change that nobody had been able to force in the preceding decades; 1918-1921 — the combination of military victory, social pressure (the 1907 uprising remained alive in institutional memory) and political will that produced the Great Union and land reform; and 1989-1994 — the exit from communism and the anchoring in European and Euro-Atlantic structures, though at massive social cost and with incomplete transition.
None of these three moments arrived fully prepared, fully planned or fully successful. Cuza was dethroned three years after his reforms. The Great Union came to a country exhausted by war with extremely heterogeneous territories to integrate in a few years. 1989 came with a governing movement — the National Salvation Front — that was neither communism nor liberal democracy, and with a transition that produced spectacular winners and massive losers.[^19] Historical ruptures are never complete, never clean. They are fractures through which fresh air enters — and through which cold also enters.
[^19]: The National Salvation Front (Frontul Salvării Naționale, FSN) took power immediately after the December 1989 revolution, led by Ion Iliescu, a former communist official who had fallen out of favour with Ceaușescu. Its ambiguous relationship to the communist past — it was dominated by former party members — and its early use of miners' violence against opposition demonstrators (the mineriade) set the parameters for a contentious transition. Iliescu won the first free elections in 1990 with a substantial majority. Romania's post-communist transition is generally considered slower and more conflicted than those of Poland, the Czech Republic or Hungary.
Each of these ruptures combined an external pressure (a favourable international conjuncture), an internal crisis acute enough to force action, and a small number of actors with the capacity to decide and to implement. None of them emerged from abstract reformist will in periods of calm. They emerged from necessity, from crisis, from the moment when the cost of inaction had clearly exceeded the cost of action.
The question posed by the decade 2026-2036 is whether a fourth forced rupture will be necessary — or whether the current generation can, for the first time in modern Romanian history, make the necessary reforms in the absence of the crisis that would impose them. That would be unprecedented in Romania's modern history. Not impossible — but without precedent.
A note on what "appearing in the footnotes" means — because this essay's title is deliberately provocative. Appearing in the footnotes of history books is not a permanent sentence. Ancient Greece appeared for several centuries in the footnotes of Roman imperial history — and survived as the foundational cultural source of Western civilisation. Japan appeared in the footnotes of the global economy until 1950 and became the world's second-largest economy twenty years later. South Korea was poorer than Romania in 1960 and has, by 2026, a high-technology economy with per capita income four times higher.
The footnote is not a permanent destination. It is a current position, the product of accumulated choices. And choices change — when conditions change, when people change, when inflection points are recognised and used.
Romania possesses, in 2026, more resources than it had at any of the previous rupture moments: solid European integration, a young generation with mobility and education, a functioning civil society, independent journalism that survives despite pressures, and a party system that — however eroded — has not completely collapsed. These are real resources, not fictitious ones. They are the basis on which an inflection can be built.
What is missing is not capacity. What is missing is the collective will to make difficult reforms in the absence of the crisis that would impose them. It is far easier to reform when you have no choice. It is far more valuable to reform when you still have one. The decade 2026-2036 will show which of the two paths the present generation chooses.
History books record what we chose. They do not choose for us.
Selected Bibliography
Primary sources and Romanian historical scholarship:
- Bogdan Murgescu, România și Europa. Acumularea decalajelor economice (1500–2010) [Romania and Europe: The Accumulation of Economic Gaps], Polirom, 2010 — the essential economic history
- Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Neoiobăgia [Neo-Serfdom], 1910 — available in the Romanian Digital Library
- Titu Maiorescu, În contra direcției de astăzi în cultura română [Against the Current Direction in Romanian Culture], 1868, in Critice, vol. I
- Keith Hitchins, Rumania 1866–1947, Oxford University Press, 1994 — the standard English-language history of this period
- Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, Final Report, 2006: iiccmer.ro — available in Romanian and partially in English
- Dorin Dobrincu & Constantin Iordachi (eds.), Transforming Peasants, Property and Power: The Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1949-1962, Central European University Press, 2009
International sources:
- Human Rights Watch — World Report 2026: hrw.org/world-report/2026
- Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism — Digital News Report 2026: reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
- WHO Europe — "Teens, screens and mental health" (2024): who.int/europe
- US Surgeon General — Social Media and Youth Mental Health Advisory: hhs.gov
- Ipsos — What Worries the World (monthly reports 2024–2026): ipsos.com
- IPCC — Sixth Assessment Report and updates: ipcc.ch
- Pew Research Center — pandemic impact and public attitudes: pewresearch.org
- Brookings Institution — analyses on multipolar order: brookings.edu
- Romania's National Audiovisual Council — reports on digital influence in the 2024 elections: cna.ro
- Wikipedia — Timeline of the 21st century (2016–2026): en.wikipedia.org
Petru Cojocaru is the founder of ABSOLUT WEB EXPERT SRL and writes essays on technology, society and Romanian identity at cojocarupetru.info and petrucojocaru.ro. This article is part of the "Historical Parallels" series, published at cojocarupetru.info/similaritati-istorice. It is a translation and adaptation for international audiences of the Romanian-language original.