In Romania, the national day is an opportunity to demonstrate the pious banalities of political mediocrity. The memory of 1918 and the miracle that happened since then are ritually remembered by those who no longer have anything to do with their revered ancestors. Drunkenness of words is a form in which attachment to the nation is manifested.

The call for clarity during these festive events is rather suspect. The impulse of demagogic flattery repels the gaze that returns to itself. The celebration of Greater Romania adequately covers doubts, failures, and collective anxieties. December 1, 1918, devoid of meaning and reduced to a certain cliché, ceases to be anything more than an occasion for military parades and festive meetings of the chambers. An emotional and tearful tone is the very image of contagious demagoguery.

We prefer to remain silent about the unfulfilled promises of December 1918, about the pledge of improper development of centralization, about the trauma of 1940 and the subsequent fall of totalitarianism, about crimes, complicity and guilty silence, so as not to interrupt this unanimity of false patriotism. The resolution in Alba Iulia is a distant sign of hope that never materialized: political freedom and equality before the law remained within the framework of this document, and the years of Greater Romania did not give them a chance to truly exist. Since then, the seal of the founding fathers has had the visionary tone of those who chose dignity over blind obedience.

As for Romania after December 1989, it is already more extended chronologically than the Greater Romania interval. The three decades that separate us from the fall of communism approach the communist era in historical terms. And maybe December 1 forces us to finally put a mirror in front of us in which we can look at ourselves, together.

Because the paradox of Romania today belongs to the regime of contrasts. On the one hand, the certainty of the Euro-Atlantic framework, an anchor that gives us a self-confidence that was never achieved in the interwar years. On the other hand, the political impasse that creates a network of accomplices ruthlessly undermining our state.

These contrasts are an image of Romania, which often lives in different times, diverse and fragile, complex and fragmented. A Romania torn between the energy of individual initiative and the lethargy of statesmanship, a Romania where the assumptions of freedom and the mediocrity of a public career sit side by side, a Romania that contrasts prosperity with dire misery, a Romania where the instinct of the citizen is anesthetized by weariness and anxiety. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro