Let’s admit it: during the Cold War, Europe was simplified, as it had been divided with great precision into the East and the West. After imposing the first pro-Soviet government (March 6, 1945), the Romanian communists (numbering eight hundred members in August 1944 and four million in December 1989) might be said to have really taken Romania out of the Balkans for the first time, because the word “Balkan” had been erased from their vocabulary. Having escaped the Balkans,
Romania was instead locked into the Soviet sphere of influence, as geopolitics—and the Balkans—dictated. On October 9, 1944, in Moscow, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin delineated on a paper napkin the spheres of influence in Southeastern Europe. In his memoirs, Churchill reveals that he offered the Russians 90 percent influence in Romania in exchange for 90 percent influence in Greece. This is how Romanian communism began. Constricted between Churchill’s cigar and Stalin’s pipe, the Balkans took revenge on Romania.
At the end of the 1940s, as a result of Stalin’s refusal of the Balkan Federation project,22 “Balkan” became a banned word. It seemed that Romania was anyway following another track, with its back to the Balkans, its face to the East. The salutary solution was soon to be found: Mitita˘ Constantinescu, one of the most renowned financiers and economists of the country, had a revelation which finally led the Balkans out of the vernacular Romanian language.23 He discovered that the Soviet Union was not only a state, but also a continent; and that the Russians were not to be blamed for what geographers had failed to understand. Constantinescu claims that the USSR is actually a continent as it covers a large area of the globe.
This new continental entity, accepted and consecrated as such by the general opinion of the world, expects to be acknowledged in geography books as a non-integrated part of Asia, reconsidering by that the outdated notion of the Asian continent. The obsolescence of these geographical concepts made it possible for Romania to enter the open arms of the Soviet continent. The Balkans seemed lost somewhere behind.
The cards of the world political game had been dealt between the East and the West,
and all former landmarks were gone.
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the Romanian leader in the gallery of Soviet satellites (general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, 1945–1965) apparently had.
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| Vasil Kolarov - Wikipedia |
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| Official photo of Ceaușescu from 1965 |
no feeling for the Balkans or Balkanism, and he discouraged the use of these terms.
Despite his ability to recruit his own clients and supporters, and to brutally eliminate his enemies in a manner reminiscent of the golden age of political Byzantinism,
despite his Levantine delight in long chats over nice meals and good drinks, it might be said that for twenty years Dej and the Balkans did not meet at all.24 Dej’s evolution from the minor Stalinist dictator of the early 1950s, who spoke dichotomously about the irreversible break between the East and the West, to the national leader of the early 1960s who spoke of “independence” and “sovereignty,” was perfectly linear, without any Balkan twists.
The rediscovery of the Balkans is, from this perspective, the achievement of Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, Dej’s follower and disciple (1965–1989). Should someone today undertake an analysis of Ceaus¸escu’s foreign policy toward the Balkans, he would see a silent clash between two incompatible goals: the desire to remain in (enjoying all political advantages involved) and escape from, at the same time. The Romanian leader wanted to avoid and yet conquer the Balkans.
Under Ceaus¸escu, the Balkans became present in Romanian diplomatic language.25 In September 1967, Suleyman Demirel (the prime minister of Turkey) visited Ceaus¸escu in Bucharest; during their meeting, according to the press release,
the two leaders “express their common wish to develop bilateral relationship, and their mutual interest in improving the climate in the Balkans and Europe.”26 One year later, in March 1968, when the Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov paid a visit to Ankara, Bucharest interpreted this event as underlining “the decision of the two countries to join forces for the implementation of collaboration in the Balkans.”27 Then, following the meeting between Ceaus¸escu and Zhivkov in September 1970,
a communiqué says that the two leaders “reiterated the common determination to contribute to an atmosphere of collaboration and security in the Balkans, in Europe,
and in the whole world.”28 In other words, when it comes to Ceaus¸escu, any Balkan matter becomes a European matter (if not an international one!).
It appears very clear to me that to Ceaus¸escu, the Balkans were never a purpose as such, but rather a step on the ladder leading to a policy at a planetary level. By the beginning of the 1970s, the Balkans shrank to the dimensions of a backyard for a Romanian leader who started to feel very uncomfortable there. I think that Ceaus¸escu had a superiority complex toward the Balkans—for reasons I will not analyze here—and it sometimes showed. Bulgaria’s Zhivkov was undoubtedly no rival for him. But things were different with Tito—Yugoslavia’s man and legend— as he was a rival in the battle for Western sympathy. Ceaus¸escu understood very early that the fight for peace could bring legitimacy to himself and his regime. United Nations General Assembly agreed, approving, on December 16, 1969,
Romania’s proposal to declare the decade 1971–1980 the “decade of disarmament.”29 However, relations between Romania and the Warsaw Pact had been shaky since August 1968,30 which is why Ceaus¸escu—perceived by the Western press as a maverick, a thorn in the Soviet Union’s side, and thus encouraged—could afford to call for the simultaneous dissolution of both the Warsaw Pact and NATO.
The first step toward this “disarmament decade” could be taken in the Balkans.
Before becoming a world champion of peace, Ceaus¸escu was to play for a while the role of a fighter for peace in the region; in June 1973, he proposed a “meeting of the Balkan states to discuss the ways to transform the Balkans into a zone of peace,
free of nuclear weapons and foreign military bases”31; but by the beginning of the 1980s, the demilitarization of the Balkans had become too small a game for a Romanian leader eager to play his trump card of world peace.
Ceaus¸escu left the Balkans without too much regret, eager to become the person of planetary importance mentioned again and again by the propaganda of Bucharest. The death of Josip Broz Tito on May 4, 1980, left Ceaus¸escu without his rival in the Balkan region; having gotten rid of any competition, Ceaus¸escu launched after 1980 an unprecedented peace campaign, turning the increasingly bleak streets of Bucharest into settings for huge human processions ardently calling for the cessation of the arms race. I have no doubt his ultimate goal was to acquire the Nobel Prize for Peace, which would have given perfect legitimacy to his regime and sufficient credit to him.
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Excerpt from Balkan as Metaphor
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