Tony Judt: Romania: Bottom of the Heap, The New York Review of Books, 2001. november 1.
By every measure, Romania is at the bottom of the European heap. The Romanian economy, defined by per capita gross domestic product, ranked eighty-seventh in the world in 1998, below Namibia and just above Paraguay (Hungary ranked fifty-eighth). Life expectancy is lower in Romania than anywhere else in Central or Southeastern Europe: for men it is just sixty-six years, less than it was in 1989 and ten years short of the EU average. It is estimated that two out of five Romanians live on less than $30 per month (contrast, e.g., Peru, where the minimum monthly wage today is $40). By all conventional measures, Romania is now best compared to regions of the former Soviet Union (except the Baltics, which are well ahead) and has even been overtaken by Bulgaria. According to The Economist's survey for the year 2000, the "quality of life" in Romania ranks somewhere between Libya and Lebanon. The European Union has tacitly acknowledged as much: the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament lists Romania as last among the EU-candidate countries, and slipping fast.
[...] Romania will be a hard pill for Brussels to swallow, and most Eurocrats privately hope it won't join for a long time. The difficulties faced by the German Federal Republic in absorbing the former GDR would be dwarfed by the cost to the EU of accommodating and modernizing a country of 22 million people starting from a far worse condition. Romanian membership in the EU would bring little but headaches. Western investors will surely continue to look to Budapest, Warsaw, or Prague, especially once these are firmly within the EU. Who will pour money into Bucharest? Today, only Italy has significant trade with Romania; the Germans have much less, and the French-oh irony!-trail far behind.
Romania today, Mr. Nastase's best efforts notwithstanding, brings little to Europe. Unlike Budapest or Prague, Bucharest is not part of some once-integrated Central Europe torn asunder by history; unlike Warsaw or Ljubljana, it is not an outpost of Catholic Europe. Romania is peripheral and the rest of Europe stands to gain little from its presence in the union. Left outside it would be an embarrassment, but hardly a threat. But for just this reason Romania is the EU's true test case.
Szóval az "eredményes" román diplomácia ellenére is ilyen Románia nemzetközi megítélése. Még belegondolni is rossz, milyen lenne kevésbé eredményes diplomácia esetében ... |