NATO accession comes with tough test

The risk is that a certain category of triumphalist Romanians could regard yesterday, November 21, 2002, just as they did December 22, 1989 – as a panacea-event, a cure-all that will suddenly solve all of our problems and will wipe the slate clean of all the disreputable facts we have been showing the world for years.
Just as it happened after the downfall of Ceausescu, the announcement made yesterday by Lord Robertson sent most first-rank politicians calling for “responsibility, maturity, reform acceleration,” and so on. Only their eyes were alive rather with the satisfaction of having scored a personal victory – “I did it!”, and not with the comprehension of the fact that things cannot possibly go on this way, especially in their case.
The shindigs and the folk bands visible yesterday in Romania’s public squares were also imbued with the scents of cheap triumphalism, specific to the eternal uninvited, who was at last allowed to taste the nectar at the honourable table of the great.
Beyond the national salute of the blue flags, we should perhaps comprehend that Romania’s being invited to join the NATO in 2002 does not mean we are scoring a victory that we missed in 1997, when the Alliance’s eastern border stopped short of Curtici. Things have changed, and, besides making up for what we lost in these five years, there is also a whole list of new problems in need of a solution.
Five years ago, there still was talk of the Russian appetite for getting back influence over the former Warsaw Pact territories, still talk of the danger that Romania could be stuck in a grey, uncertain area. Now, these perils seem almost derisive. The world has been through a fast and profound change: since last September, warnings of new terrorist attacks being prepared are just as frequent in the West as the weather news; when Western leaders speak, they talk of economic recession and the difficulty of building security; economists speak of problems bordering upon collapse, in the event of a war against Iraq, which could send oil prices skyrocketing; the Russians have invested in the US more than the Americans have invested on the huge Russian market.
For many Romanians, NATO accession is just like a medicine for the deep, subconscious fear of the Russian aggression. Finally, the Americans have landed, they say. However, had the Americans landed in 1945, they would have had someone to protect us from and save us from. Now, if there’s anything they should fight against in Romania, it’s ourselves: they should save us from managerial inability, indolence, corruption and unreliability.
However, while the Americans have welcome us in the Alliance, even if we do not deserve it, according to Britain’s The Times, they are not willing to clean up our mess. They will, at most, put us in a “positive straightjacket”, as a Romanian minister put it.
Fear of the East is no longer grounded, at least for now. Putin’s Russia has recently had its own 9/11 and no one is surprised at the West and Russia being on the same side. Even Moscow’s reaction to yesterday’s decision – “NATO expansion is a virtual menace”, was simply inconceivable a few years ago.
The problem lies elsewhere: we are joining NATO at a time of strong world polarisation, when the battle over resources and markets is getting tighter by the minute. A complicated world, rich in paradoxes, where the cutter in a terrorist’s pocket is stronger than ten satellites or a radar.
We should bear some facts in mind, such as the ones above, before we even speak of a spearhead of investors, the good omens of the past years, the consolidation of democracy, etc.
We are joining a club which may ask for more than it is prepared to give, but which provides us (besides security) with an essential opportunity: acquiring the reliable behaviour of the civilised world. And the civilised world never intends to gamble. And this is the world that has given us a chance. Even though we failed to persuade them for 13 years (this December).