Download ADJUSTING ROMANIAN VALUES TO EUROPEAN STANDARDS

ADJUSTING ROMANIAN VALUES TO
EUROPEAN STANDARDS
Values define Europe, not borders.
José Manuel Barroso
Abstract: the main assertion of this paper is that a proper
integration into EU structures requires a process of adjusting
national values to European standards, that is ideal-type (in the
weberian sense) European values. Unfortunately, recent surveys
have showed that Romania is characterized by value
incompatibilities in vital fields such as democracy, rule of law or
tolerance. After identifying the deep causes of this phenomenon
as due to axiological uncertainty, a common feature both for the
communist regime and the
post-communist transition, the
writer suggests that a suitable solution would be to increase the
levels of social capital in the Romanian society by fighting
corruption and promoting voluntary action.
Key terms: values, democracy, rule of law, tolerance, axiological
uncertainty, communism, post-communist transition, social
capital, corruption, voluntary action.
Introduction.
The European Union is
sometimes mistakenly identified as only a
geographic entity or a common market,
established to spur intra-European economic
integration. While the EU is certainly both of
these, it is in reality much more, since its
inception in the 1950s on through today the EU
has been a community based on the shared
values that guide Member States and their
citizens as they live, work and interact with
each other, with their neighbours and with the
wider world. It is because of this state of facts
that countries who wish to join the club not
only have to meet political, economic or social
criteria as imposed from above, but they also
have to realize that the most salient priority is
to internalize these shared values which
underpin the European project.
Detangling the value concept.
Defining the concept of value has always been
controversial. One of the causes responsible for
this difficulty is made up of the different
meanings the term holds in various disciplines.
In aesthetics or philosophy for example, the
concept has a normative connotation, values
thus representing the basis on which the
distinction between good and wrong or
beautiful and ugly is made.
In the field of social sciences, which deal with
the study of values as one of their main
preoccupation, a consensus on how to define
them has not been reached yet. Still, both
psychologists and sociologists agree upon the
fact that values are elusive to define and
therefore difficult to operate with. Despite this
initial agreement though, there is a lack of
consensus between the two categories, as
psychologists tend to see values as a way of
Ioana Lung-Adjusting Romanian Values to European Standards
selective orientation in connection with
individual motivations, needs and attitudes,
whereas sociologists tend to link values with
social norms, habits and ideologies.
Generally speaking and from a normative
perspective, values can be identified as general
criteria that make us orientate, lines between
what is and is not socially permitted or
desirable. One of the definitions which enjoy a
large acceptance among sociologists belongs to
Kluckhohn, who sees values as an explicit or
implicit concept, distinctive for an individual or
characteristic for a group, regarding what is
desirable and influencing the selection between
available ways and means of action (Voicu,
Voicu, 2002). In connection with this
definition, the author also defines the term of
value orientation, as a generalised and wellorganized outlook regarding the environment
and the place of the individual inside of it, but
also the relations of the individual with the
others members of the society and the social
rules it encompasses.
Among the most important characteristics
attached to the value concept is the fact that
they cannot be observed directly, but rather as
included in behaviour, decisions and attitudes.
To put it differently, they are not ways or
means of action, but principles that underlie and
guide actions, and thus the difficulty to quantify
them. One step further, Rokeach considers that
values do not exist independently, but
organised in what he calls a system of values, a
dynamic hierarchy influenced by culture,
society or personal experience (Voicu, Voicu,
2002).
European standards.
Besides the field
of psychology or sociology, it has become
obvious that values are highly topical in the
context of European integration too. The
beginning of the new century has seen the
Union submerged in an omnipresent debate of
unprecedented intensity on its underlying
values and the need for the Member States and
accession countries to internalize these values
both at societal and individual level. At least
four factors can be cited for bringing discussion
of values to a head: the drafting of the Charter
of Fundamental Rights in 2000, the so-called
Austrian crisis of the same year, the general
turmoil in international politics following
September 11 and, finally, the European
Convention’s drafting of the European Union’s
new constitutional treaty.
Truth is that in order to speak about a European
identity or its legal dimension, the European
citizenship, one cannot resort to concepts like
race, language or religion, but to more latent
realities such as guiding principles, attitudes or
beliefs. It has been emphasized that Member
States will not be able to find a common ground
on a functional level as long as they do not
agree on their ideas about Europe. Back in the
1950’s, Monnet used to say that building the
European project meant not only forming a
coalition of states, but uniting people. Half a
decade later, more and more EU high-officials
emphasize in their speeches the fact that the
European Union must be seen as a community
based on shared values (see, for example, dr.
Joe Borg’s speech, European Values, delivered
at the SDM International Conference “The
Common Heritage of Europe”, Malta, 14 May
2005). All in all, values are the noblest mean
we posses to tackling the non-material issue of
community belonging.
Despite this however, the notion of European
values remains foggy, as it is used with
different meanings in different contexts.
Toggenburg argues that the discussion
circulating around this issue is usually based on
one of the three different preconceptions of
what constitutes European values (Toggenburg,
2004:7-11). Firstly, European values are often
referred to as political principles underlying the
European Communities (founding values).
Secondly, the term arises regularly in the debate
on “European identity” and, in this context, one
refers to various ideological stances as
European values (European ideas). These
European ideas try to sketch a hidden
ideological agenda or a common cultural
Ioana Lung-Adjusting Romanian Values to European Standards
backbone for Europe and its integration
process.
Thirdly, the term labels the legal acquis
communautaire surrounding concepts such as
respect for human rights and fundamental
freedoms, liberty, democracy or rule of law.
Since Maastricht, these common principles
have been enshrined in the treaties, namely in
Article 6 EU. The latter circle of values is
nowadays the most prominent reference to
values in the treaty. However, in this internal
dimension, the treaty does not speak of values,
but of principles, the notion of values being so
far reserved to the realm of the Union’s external
relations. It must be mentioned here that it is to
the values attached to this category that I am
going to make references further on. All of
these values shall be considered as ideal-type
ones, in the weberian understanding of the
term, as it is not this article’s aim to make
empirical
comparisons
(qualitative
or
quantitative) between the different levels of
adherence to these values in different European
countries.
Romanian realities.
As an acceding
country, Romania has undertaken the task to
comply with economic, political and social EU
criteria. It is a well known fact, and the 2005
Comprehensive Monitoring Report shows it,
that our country has made important progress in
edifying a suitable legal and institutional
framework for EU integration: Romania, it is
said in the Report, continues to fulfill the
political criteria for membership. Overall, it has
reached a satisfactory level of compliance with
EU requirements. In addition, it has taken
significant steps to address some of the issues
within the political criteria which were
highlighted in the 2004 report as requiring
further improvements, such as the reform and
independence of the judiciary, ensuring greater
media freedom, new legislation on property
restitution, an overall improvement of the
situation of minorities and child protection.
Nevertheless, in the field of latent realities, the
Romanian population seems to be one step
behind regarding the process of adjusting
national values to European standards. In its
2005 Communication Strategy, the Delegation
of the European Commission in Romania
emphasizes that its main mission is to promote
the European values through different
instruments and to different target groups. One
of its most recent activities has consisted of
conducting a survey entitled “Romanian and
European values: the same or not?” The survey
has showed important discrepancies between
national and European values in three
fundamental fields: democracy, rule of law and
tolerance. These aspects are crucial both for the
Copenhagen criteria and the implementation of
the acquis communautaire.
In the field of democratic achievements, an
overwhelming majority (83%) believes that the
common people cannot by any means influence
political decisions; furthermore, more then a
half (55%) see no advantage in having a
multitude of political parties and a worrying
third (34%) considers that a strong leader is far
more efficient than laws and reforms. Overall,
there is a lack of trust in the participation
process, weak valorization for political
pluralism and a tendency towards strong
leaders.
Moving to justice and the rule of law, 85%
percent of the Romanians believe there is no
chance of fair treatment in the judicial system
unless one has connections, 62% agree that in
order to get a promotion one needs to commit
illegalities, and 58% subscribe to the pessimist
sentence that it is impossible to eliminate
bribery and the influence of politics over
justice. What these results show is a perception
of a highly eroded system, mainly by
corruption, both at a high and grass-root level.
Last, but not least, the picture also looks dim in
the tolerance field, where there have been
encountered strong negative feelings towards
ethnic groups and even xenophobia. Almost
two thirds (62%) of the ones interviewed
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strongly suggest that ethnic minorities should
be forced to learn the Romanian language. 42%
say that there are more gypsies committing
illegalities than Romanians and that the
Hungarians from Romania are more attached to
Hungary than Romania (68%).
Addressing the root causes.
The
legitimate question after looking at these rather
discouraging results would be: where do these
incompatibilities with Western values come
from? A vast number of sociologists have
linked this issue to the legacies of the
communist regimes and post-communist
transition, both features of Central and Eastern
European regimes.
Communism did teach its citizens lessons in the
decade of its rule. It did not create the model
“socialist men” it set out to create, nor did it
create the homogeneity that was its goal. It did
create a population that was highly educated
and mobilized with a sense of “rightful power”.
In doing this, it created citizens with values,
expectations and behavior patterns quite
different from those of their Western neighbors
and even other states (for example states in
Latin America and South-Europe) that have
gone from being authoritarian to being
democratic.
The answer to the above question therefore lies
in the remains of communist-era institutions, in
the problematic economic transformation
process with which these societies are dealing,
but also in the characteristics of the population
that communism crafted, that is the less
quantifiable and more subjective realm of social
attitudes, learned behavior and patterns of
interaction and expectation. None of these are
the same as those that underlay and underlie the
birth and survival of democracies elsewhere.
Their significance and impact not only color the
nature of political reconstruction in present-day
Eastern Europe, but will also have a long-term
effect on the nature of the region’s polities and
societies.
Starting with the educational legacies, it must
be mentioned that all of the population of
Eastern Europe, Romania included, is highly
educated, with literacy virtually universal, and
also higher and technical education more
widespread that in most Western European
countries. At the very least, Western theories of
development and political participation would
indicate that highly educated populations are
likely to be more politically conscious and
participatory than those with lower educational
levels. Education in communist regimes carried
out messages more politically pregnant than the
standard messages of Western-based education.
What was conveyed, deliberately or
inadvertently, in this education was far different
from the messages in standard educational
programs elsewhere. Rather than focusing
primarily on literacy and technical education,
communist societies tried to use their
educational societies to remake their people. It
created a mobilized, if disillusioned population
divided into groups with special skills and
interests.
Moving to industrialization legacies, the
populations of Eastern Europe are highly
industrialized populations that shifted from a
rural social base to an industrial one in the great
industrialization drive of the 1950s. A statecontrolled economy that employed virtually
every working person brought with it a
heightened sense of the relationship between
politics and economics: economic difficulties
were not seen as the fault of a firm or its
management, but as the fault of state. In this
light, too, individuals lost the sense of personal
responsibility that industrialization usually
creates. Instead of individual gains or losses
being seen as a result of individuals’ work or
failures, such gains or losses came to be seen as
the product of the government’s bad policy or
poor management.
Further on, the critical distinction that
communism taught people was the distinction
between “them” and “us”, a distinction that is
played out on all levels. On the most personal
level, the use of secret police created a situation
Ioana Lung-Adjusting Romanian Values to European Standards
in which individuals’ initial reaction to each
other was distrust. On a national level, the split
between “them” and “us” took on far greater
significance. The political elite was perceived
as imposed by the outside. The relative
secretiveness and insularity of the leaders’
lives, and the revelations of their privileged
positions, set them apart from the population.
From the perspective of those at the bottom of
the hierarchy, it seemed that the power wielded
by “them” made it impossible for the “us” to be
responsible or to act. This perception was
magnified by the sense that “they” were not just
an untouchable elite but a system imposed from
the outside, by the Soviet Union. This
perception also allowed people to avoid taking
responsibility for their society and its problems
by using “them” as a scapegoat.
Accompanying
this
“them-versus-us”
dichotomy has been a learned cynicism about
politics. For all the claims that East Europeans
states were workers’ states in which the
working class built their countries, the citizenry
learned early on that its voice mattered little.
Voting was something to be done because it
was required, not something done to affect
politics. With this cynicism came disrespect for
the law. Fear bred obedience, not support or
respect. Survival as a successful factory
manager, a citizen with a well-stocked larder,
or someone who had to make things happen,
required working around and bending the law.
To sum up, the decision-taking process has
been characterized by opacity, the decisions
being taken by a hand of people and behind
closed doors, or even imposed from the outside
(the Soviet Union); this discouraged civic
participation, mainly by decreasing the levels of
individual responsibility. On the other hand, for
the Communist rulers, the law was not
something that regulated them and so working
around and bending the law soon became
common practice. Coupled with economic
shortages, the disrespect for the law led to the
edification of a parallel society, governed by
informal ties, corruption and illegalities. Last,
but not least the freedom of expression was
buried under broken feedback mediated by
ideology and restrained by censorship.
Due to these communist developments, the
Romanian society has become characterized by
axiological uncertainty (Voicu, 2001:43), a low
level of prediction regarding the social
environment. A low level of axiological
uncertainty (which is equivalent to a high
axiological certainty) presupposes the capacity
of individuals to correctly forecast the actions
of the other individuals from a society due to
the knowledge of the decision-taking process
and the way of acting. This kind of knowledge
is only possible when the individuals are
similar as regards their value orientations
and/or way of action. An increased level of
axiological uncertainty eventually leads to
value uncertainty and hampers the process of
dynamic value change.
Unfortunately, some of the practices from the
Communist regime have been perpetrated
during the period of post-communist transition.
This period of time added economic insecurity
to the communist legacy, insecurity that has led
to changes in value hierarchy, giving priority to
the satisfaction of basic needs. This was added
to the malfunction of institutions and
corruption, which created a lack of trust of the
population, thus endangering the strength of the
democracy and creating a vicious circle almost
impossible to break (Zamfir, 2003).
Tackling the issue.
If we put axiological
uncertainty at the heart of the Romanian value
deficit, then reducing it would definitely help
increasing convergence in values with the EU,
and one mean to achieve this would be by
addressing the concept of social capital. A
highly popular concept which has emerged in
the social sciences during the last ten years,
social capital has become a synonym for
positive influence of informal norms and
institutions, the generator of development and
political stability. In recent years, the
importance of social capital has been
empirically confirmed in the transitional
Ioana Lung-Adjusting Romanian Values to European Standards
context as well, both in terms of linking the
trust in institutions and civic participation with
economic growth and pointing out the deficit of
civility and civic participation in the postcommunist societies.
By social capital we define a cluster of specific
characteristics of social life, norms and customs
that support cooperation and solidarity in the
society (Fukuyama, 2000). It is usually referred
to as a three-dimensional notion, made of
generalized trust (level of initial readiness to
cooperate with unknown individuals), civic
participation and trust in institutions (Putnam,
1993).
Studies have shown that increasing the levels of
social capital is the generator of economic
development and political stability, processes
that reduce axiological uncertainty and foster
dynamic
values
changes
(Marginean,
Precupetu, Precupetu: 2001). My main
suggestion that follows this line of reasoning as
regards policy recommendations is that two of
the most popular measures of increasing the
levels of social capital consist of fighting
corruption and promoting voluntary action.
The perception of corruption is the strongest
predictor in the case of trust in institutions, in
other words those who believe in the
omnipresence of corruption are less likely to
have confidence in important societal
institutions (Badescu, 2003). The logic behind
this is obvious: how to maintain trust where
norms can be breached regularly and without
sanctions? Therefore, the first policy
recommendation is to halt the spread of
cynicism and opportunism, particularly among
youth. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to
step up the work of the existing institutions and
to increase their actions’ visibility in the media
(Rimac, Stulhofer, 2005:322). Adding to this,
anti-corruption campaign must be systematic, in
that it should start in one sector and then move
to others (spillover effect) in order to attain the
highly sought rule of law.
The second policy recommendation is to
encourage voluntary action, as this has a direct
and positive impact on the levels of generalized
trust and civic participation, coupled with the
improvement of tolerance and democracy. On
one hand, voluntary associations are a mean of
expressing civic participation and assure a
better representation of the citizens, thus being
beneficial for democratic developments. On the
other hand, the range of activities developed
under the framework of voluntary associations
increase cooperation skills and a high sense of
responsibility, teaching people win-win
solutions, which breeds generalized trust and
therefore reduces intolerance towards the other.
Conclusion.
As showed above, Romania
still suffers form a value deficit in connection
with EU values, a deficit that is in connection
with the communist legacy, be it educational,
social or political, and this deficit has been
further perpetrated during the transition period.
The European Union, through its Delegation of
the European Commission in Romania as its
main spokesperson, has underlined numerous
times the salient need of reducing this deficit in
order to speak about a healthy and complete
integration of Romania into EU structures.
However, it should be strongly emphasized that
the desire for value change must not be
motivated by political correctness, or the need
to present ourselves more favorably to those
whose club we want to enter, but by efforts to
improve Romanian reality by subscribing to the
universal values that the European Union stands
for.
Ioana Lung-Adjusting Romanian Values to European Standards
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