The King, the most powerful man
01.02.2012 Tipareste Trimite prin email
I believe that the years since 2000, in which the Royal House has had an address on the map of post-1989 Romania, provide a sufficient answer to the question of what sort of role the Royal House can have in a republican system.
The Royal Family represents a certain part of the national identity and the institutions of modern Romania, a part that the instruments of the new democracy cannot possible represent. Over the last seventy years we have gone through a multitude of experiments in political and institutional life, trying various constitutional improvisations, and unfortunately we have been slow to draw certain conclusions, or have not yet drawn them at all. All this has not been the ‘fault’ of Romania; it is because in the twentieth century humanity experienced unprecedented mutations. The passage from capitalism to communism was an exhausting experience, which contemporaries failed to anticipate, and which some understood with difficulty and others not at all. The system of communist dictatorship was installed in the Soviet Union in 1917, and brought to an end by the same Soviet Union in 1989. In all the communist countries of Europe, the subsequent passage from communism to capitalism was likewise an unprecedented experience, from which some have not yet emerged spiritually, mentally, or in some cases institutionally.
But in order to understand as fully as possible the tragedy that took place on 30th December 1947, we ought to speak frankly and with a sense of responsibility about all the aspects that it involved. The departure of King Michael from Romania had three consequences, but we tend to talk about and concern ourselves with only two of them. The first was the change to the republican form of government; the second was the change to communist dictatorship. Much has been said, and much of it well founded, about these historical consequences. However the third consequence, the most serious and the hardest to repair, was the replacement of the Romanian State represented by Michael I by a group of people who answered to the orders of interests other than the national interest. From 1948 to 1989, this fracture at the level of statehood only got deeper. In the name of the State, a series of crimes and illegalities were committed, actions in harsh contrast with democracy, and people began to perceive the State as a source of evil, of fear, of humiliation. Democracy came in 1989, but statehood, as a sum of values, as the virtue that the nation looks towards with hope, comfort in its identity, and affection, deteriorated even more. This was because the people who served the institutions, though performing democratically, continued to damage the establishment and its rigour by their dilettantism, sometimes in bad faith, sometimes in good faith. All this time, Romanian society, even at the level of its elites, was preoccupied with the political and economic wounds left by communism, but less so with the value represented by the category of leadership known as statesmanship.
The passage from dictatorship to democracy was achieved by the appearance of numerous political parties; freedom came a bit later; slowly the mentality changed for the good.
Unfortunately, whenever the subject of the events of 1947 came up, what produced heated discussion was the dispute between monarchy and republic. However for King Michael, with his historical function in the State, what was most visible was the fracture of the institution that he embodied, the particular form of government that that institution adopted being a secondary issue.
The return of the Royal Family to Bucharest in 2001 did not legitimate the republic, but opened up the road to the reconstruction of the Romanian State. It is a long road, which calls for patriotism, patience, generosity and vision. It has to be travelled alongside the politicians, with all their limits and all their incompatibilities. But it also has to be travelled together with the Romanian elite, which no one today can oblige to be guided by altruism or a sense of duty
If the Republic ensures democracy and freedom for Romania in a fair manner, if it repairs the country from the institutional point of view, if it ensures a Fundamental Law that is respectable and public life under the rule of law, then the Royal House is ready to work with it for such noble ends. However this will never change the attachment of the Royal House to the monarchical form of government, which it embodies. Nor will it change the conviction that the Romanian Fundamental Law of 1923 is the best that our country has ever had (without, of course, denying that it has its limitations, due the conditions of its time).
When the King left Romania on 3rd January 1948, the last bastion of democracy in South-eastern Europe fell. The King represented the last piece of institutional Romania that was still free. This part of the legitimate State lived in free countries and opposed, as far as he could, the system that had been forced on Romania. But it was not just the form of government that he opposed, or the communist dictatorship, but above all the fundamental injury that had been done to Romania, the illegal transplant of the State.
In the years of the Cold War, the Romanian Diaspora continued to exist, and did much to oppose Ceauşescu’s dictatorship. There were hundreds of Romanians outside the country who, like the King, dreamt of a democratic, free and prosperous Romania. Some of them wanted a monarchy, not a republic. But the King, though he was in the midst of them, represented in himself an institution that kept alight the flame of state principles, over and above issues of form of government or political circumstances. That is why he was not accepted in the country until 1997; that is why some of the democratic politicians did not want to meet him, and even to day hide behind all sorts of pretexts. What kept the King at such a geographical and political distance from his native land was not that a majority of Romanians were republican, but that the country did not have the strength to return to its institutional and state coherence.
From the start, in December 1989, to the present, the King has upheld a series of principles that it is hard for those who blocked his way on the road to Curtea de Argeş in 1990 to accept. The last decade of the twentieth century was an ambiguous one. Not from the political point of view, for democracy slowly developed in those years, though the economy and freedom stagnated. The ambiguity did not arise from a lack of political will, but from the state and institutional inconsistency of Romania. The third part of the story of post-war Romania began in 2000, and it is the most interesting of all and the richest in events. Today, of course, the King is no longer stopped by cars blocking the road. He continues to be discouraged or harassed in subtler, minute, invisible ways, in keeping with the instruments of the electronic age. But just as in the period of the Cold War or in the first post-communist decade, hostility towards the King does not come from anti-monarchism, but from resistance to the idea that Romania should change as a system, as a State, for the good.
It is true that the popularity of the King and his family, and public sympathy towards him have increased. People know and understand much more than they did twenty years ago. Young people are better informed, more connected, and they feel the need for identity and state reference points. They are sympathetic towards the courage and moral stature of the King, and towards the selflessness and charming modesty of the Crown Princess. Millions of Romanians in Europe and America, young and competent, understand better, more profoundly the importance of living in a country that is proud, dignified and respectable. Moreover, my candidacy for the Presidency of Romania in 2009 brought the royal principles to the attention of a large part of Romanian society, achieving for us a recognition rating of over ninety percent.
The Elisabeta Palace, where we now live, is made available for the use of the King and his family by virtue of a law passed by the Romanian Parliament for former Heads of State. Our position has been institutionalized, in the sense that His Majesty receives a certain degree of support from the State (for his NATO visits in 1997 and 2002, other visits connected with the European Union from 2002 onwards, and his activities within Romania, as a former Head of State), while I served for six years as Special Representative of three successive governments, in support of Romanian interests. The moment when the Family began to support the cause of the country from within the system marked a step forwards in the direction of consolidating the Romanian present. However it was not a step towards monarchy, as some have considered, or a pact with the political parties in power, but a step forward in the direction of a recovery of the values and institutions of the State, which were crushed six decades ago.
Even without the form of government being changed, the Royal Family is a transatlantic and European argument. It is not just a historical, cultural or diplomatic argument, but also a state and political one. That is why it was possible, before and after 1948, before and after 1989, before and after 2007, for the King continuously to uphold the same principles in which he believed, and which were not, in his view, sufficiently respected or applied.
King Michael, who is older than NATO or the European Union, who shook hands with Truman and Churchill, who met Marshall, who turned his back on Hitler, still finds himself ignored or disrespected by many people in positions of power, whether on the right or on the left, and by prominent voices in civil society. The reason certainly has less to do with any rejection of monarchy as a form of government, than with the fact that our current leaders belong to a recent past that will not let them (either mentally, spiritually or organizationally) overcome the complex of being history’s lodgers.
The king has been powerful since he was born, but each time in a different way, according to his age. As a child, he was powerful because in him were bound up the hopes of the nation, the aspirations of all the generations that coexisted at that time. After 1927, he was powerful because for three years this child effectively saved the State and institutions of the nation. From 1930 to 1940, when his father returned to Romania, he was powerful because he embodied people’s hopes, and he came to represent the democratic alternative in a decade that was going crazy. Between 1940 and 1947, he had his mother, Helen, were alone in opposing successive dictatorships, first of the right and then of the left. After 1947, he was powerful because he symbolized three virtues: the crushed statehood that no one thought about any more, the Crown, and democracy (when half the continent was under dictatorship). After 1989, the King was no longer the symbol of democracy, because it had come without him, with a series of people of indisputable merits, courageous and principled, but who did not want to share the new democracy with him.
Since that moment, the King has represented only the Crown and the true principles of the State, and in time this has come to annoy those in positions of power: the Crown because the country is a republic, and the principles of the State because it is difficult for all those in positions of power to accept that the broken arm has been badly set in plaster.
The values that the King upholds are not to be taken only as moral and historical values, for this is exactly the tepid water in which those people bathe who consider the Royal House a museum piece, venerable and irrelevant. If we set the King somewhere in history and put him on the wall like an icon, then we can sleep very well in our institutions, because he will not bother us any more. Michael the good and mild smiles down from the wall at all of us, and lets us carry on doing what we want. This is not the King’s position. He is not a priest, a father figure, a village schoolmaster, or an elder to teach us wise sayings. He represents much more than this. When the King calls on the people with power in Romania to be as generous as they are democratic, as responsible as they are free, he is speaking as a state leader. He is talking about the instruments with which development and stability can be built in this country, not giving lessons in good behaviour. Principles such as generosity, the power of personal example, loyalty to one’s country, the sense of responsibility, and the role of the model: these are the foundation stones of Romanian geopolitics.
This is what makes Michael I a force today, as he approaches the age of ninety, in a Romania that lacks institutional ethics. He is the most powerful of us all.
In today’s democratic concert, the King is one of the few people who are able to speak about the defect of democracy: the fact that it politicizes excessively. Almost everywhere in the free world, the mass media and the political class together give the false impression that our lives are largely made up of politics. It is not at all true. People, the citizens of the democracies of the world, have lives full of many meanings and preoccupations other than politics. They aspire, they love, they eat, and they need the sun, friends, music or sport.
The consequence of this exaggeration is that politicians are trusted by people less and less. Since they are obsessively present in the communication media, they come to be reflected as having a greater impact on our lives than they are actually capable of having. Leaders of a different character, such as parents, teachers, bishops, academicians, thinkers, army officers, kings, and so on, have no place in this narrow democratic reflection. However that does not change the human need for a diversity of models and examples.
Some years ago, a journalist from the New York Times, one of the world’s most influential newspapers, came to ask for an interview with King Michael. Why did he come to the King and not to the politicians with ‘real’ power in Romania? Because he represents that part of power which does not get to be seen any more in the democratic world, but which exists nonetheless.
The King’s power is not just great, but of a quite rare essence. His historical labour is not yet over. Although it extends over nine decades and is full of hopelessness, his story is a beautiful one, because it has not only duration but also meaning for the future.
