ROMANIA’S TERRITORY HAS BEEN INHABITED SINCE PREHISTORIC TIMES, EVEN IF THE COUNTRY ONLY UNIFIED ITS TERRITORIES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. TRANSYLVANIA REGION BECAME PART OF ROMANIA AS RECENT AS 1920. HENCE, A BIG PART OF THE HISTORY IS ABOUT THE STRUGGLE FOR UNIFICATION OF ITS PRINCIPALITIES: MOLDAVIA, WALLACHIA, TRANSYLVANIA, DOBROGEA, BESSARABIA AND MARAMURES.
The Dacians in Antiquity, the first official inhabitants of this land
Romania was inhabited in antiquity by the Thracian tribes, which were a mixture between the East Balkan and the European tribes also known as Geto-Dacians, to which the Romans referred to as Dacians and the Greeks as Getae. These tribes over the centuries blended together, in the first century BC under king Burebista to counter the Roman Threat.
The Dacian Empire occupied the territory of today’s Romania, and much more. The religious and political capital of this empire was located in Sarmisegetusa, in the Orastie Mountains, this being the beginning of a tumultuous history of the Romanian Land.
Before the last Dacian king, Decebal managed to reunite his kingdom, the Roman Emperor Trajan conquered the lower reaches of the Danube in 101-102, and began to expand northwards. In 105-106, after further attacks, he conquered the capital of Dacia, Sarmisegetusa, as a final conquest of the region. Even if the Apuseni Mountains, Maramures and Moldavia were never subdued, most regions fell under roman rule, Dacia becoming a province of the Roman Empire.
Two famous monuments stand proof to their conquests: Trajan’s column in Rome, and the “Tropaeum Trajani’ at Adamclisi, on the site of their victory in Dobrogea. The colonization of Dacia began, Romans bringing with them settlers, what was thought superior civilization, from as far as Greece, Egypt and Persia to mix with the tribes and form a Daco-Roman people, which spoke Latin. Emperor Aurelian decided in 271 AD to withdraw the Roman legions from the Dacian territory due to the Goth attacks. Thus Rome governed the region for less than 175 years. The Romanized peasants remained in Dacia continuing their mix with the locals.
The Middle Ages an age of Mass Nomadic Incursions for the Land of Romania
Following the departure of the Roman’s, nomadic people swept across this territory coming out of Asia into Western Europe, during the Age of Migrations, including the Goths, Huns, Avars, Slavs, Bulgars, and Magyars. Each of them left their mark on local culture, language and the gene pool.
The settlements continued the trade with the Roman Empire despite their withdrawal. Romanians survived in village communities and gradually assimilated the Slavs and other peoples who settled there.
By the 10th century a fragmented feudal system ruled by a military class appeared.
Besides subduing local Cumans, Bulgars and Vlachs, the colonists had to withstand frequent invasions by the Tatars, nomadic warriors who devastated much of Eastern Europe in 1241-42 and continued to do so over the next five centuries. While the Teutonic Knights colonized the Barsa Land in 1211 but were evicted in 1225, the Saxons built up powerful market towns like Hermannstadt (Sibiu) and Kronstadt (Brasov), which were granted self-government as “seats”. The Szekely, acted as the vanguard of colonization, moving during the thirteenth century from settlements in the Bihor region to the eastern marches, where they too were allowed relative autonomy.
However, the Hungarians were either classed as plebs liable to all manners of taxes, or as nobles and thus tax-exempt. This group dominated the feudal system, being represented alongside the Saxon and Szekely “nations” on the Diet that advised the principality’s military and civil governor, the Voivode, who acted for the Hungarian king.
Under the Arpad dynasty, Diets included Romanian-Transylvania’s population. From the mid-fourteenth century onwards, the Vlachs faced increasing discrimination, both social and political. Besides the mistrust shown by Bogdan Voda’s rebellion in Maramures, religion played an important part in this process. Whereas the Vlachs were Orthodox, the other communities adhered to the Catholic Church.
The Medieval Principalities of Wallachia, Dobrogea, Moldavia, Bessarabia and Transylvania
In the 14th century, prince Basarab I united various political formations in the region south of the Carpathians to create the first Romanian principality – Wallachia. Its indigenous peasantry became known as Vlachs. Peasants dominated the population of these medieval principalities. In Wallachia and Moldova peasants were subjugated as serfs to the landed aristocracy, a hereditary class. There were some free, land-owning peasants’ as well.
The two principalities were ruled by a prince who was also the military leader. Most noblemen were Hungarians; the Magyar nobles formed a political alliance with the Szekely and Saxon leaders. This Union of the Three Nations became the constitutional basis for government in Transylvania in the 16th century.
Wallachia and Dobrogea
In the south of Carpathians and south east of the Romania’s territory from today, the principalities emerged somewhat later. Chronicles attribute the foundation of Wallachia to Negru Voda, who in 1290 settled in Campulung as its first capital, though they could also refer to his son Radu Negru, which was credited as the first of the Basarab dynasty.
The shift in Wallachia’s capitals over the centuries – from Campulung to Curtea de Arges and Targoviste and then to Bucharest expressed a cautious move from safety of the mountains to the financial opportunities of the trade routes with Turkey.
Oppression, anarchy and piety were common: the tithes and labor squeezed from the masses allowed the landowning boyars to endow Orthodox churches and engineer coups against ruling voivodes. In spite of that the commerce was entirely in the hands of Germans, Poles, Greeks and Jews; the Orthodox church was subordinated to the Bulgarian and Byzantine patriarchates, in part a legacy of Bulgar rule during the eighth and ninth centuries, but also reflecting the tendency of Wallachia’s rulers to look south for allies against Hungary.
Moldavia and Bessarabia
The attempts to enforce the Hungarian rule in Maramures region motivated some of the local population to follow Bogdan Voda over the Carpathians in 1359 to the cradle of a new principality, Moldavia; though the process of occupying the hills and steppes east of the Carpathians had begun centuries earlier.
Groups of Romanian-speaking pastoralists and farmers gradually moved to the Dnestr where they encountered Ukrainians who named them Volokhi. The capital of Moldavia shifted from Radauti to Suceava, and then to Iasi. Alexander the Kind may have gained his honorary title by ousting Turks, though it could well have been given by the Basarab family, whom he made feudal lords of the region, afterward known as Bessarabia. Besides Tatar invasions and rebellious boyars, Moldavia faced threats from Hungary, Poland and the Turks.
Ottoman expansion and a short lived unification of the principalities
The fate of Balkan countries was determined by the Ottoman Empire, subjugating Bulgaria in 1393.
Throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, Wallachia and Moldavia offered a strong resistance to the expansion of the empire towards north.
The Turks were stopped in their expansion by Mircea the Old at the battle of Rovine, Vlad Tepes and Stephen the Great.
Transylvania became an Ottoman Empire vassal when the Turks conquered Hungary in the 16th century, and in order to retain their autonomy, they paid tribute to the sultan. After the victory of the Turks in Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia also paid tribute to maintain their autonomy. The Wallachian prince Michael the Brave, joined forces with the Moldavian and Transylvanian princes against the Turks, this forcing the Turks to call a truce. However the Transylvanian prince, Andrew Bathory, turned against the Wallachian in numerous occasions, this forcing Michael the Brave to defeat and kill Bathory’s troups near Sibiu. Michael the Brave declared himself prince of Transylvania and in spring of 1600 he invaded Moldavia, where he was also crowned prince. The three main regions of Romania, Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania, were united for a short period of time under Michael the Brave in 1600, at Alba Iulia. This first political union lasted a little over a year, due to the fact that Michael was defeated by a joint Habsburg, and later captured and murdered in 1601 by beheading. In the 17th century, Transylvania was once again under the Habsburg rule, when the Turks got defeated at the gates of Vienna.
The 18th century brought the fight for political emancipation in Transylvania, the Transylvanian Romanians constituting 60% of the population and still being excluded from political life. 1784 was marked by a major uprising led by three serfs called Horea, Closca and Crisan. The uprising was squashed rather fast and its leaders were crushed to death on what is today a favored tourist site. Their death was not in vain, serfdom being abolished in Transylvania in 1785 by the Joseph II a Habsburg emperor. A period of relative peace, prosperity, cultural and artistic renaissance marked 17th century in Walachia under the rule of Constantin Brancoveanu. This was the result of the Ottoman advisers, also known as Phanariots, encouragement for the Orthodox Church to abandon the Old Slavonic as a language of scriptures and ritual in favor of Greek. Bucovina, a part of Moldavia’s territory was annexed by Austro – Hungary in 1775, followed in 1812 by the loss of Bessarabia to Russia. After the Russo – Turkish war of 1828-29, Wallachia and Moldavia became Russian protectorates while remaining in the Ottoman Empire.
The principalities as one state
In Transylvania the revolutionary spirit which gripped much of Europe in the years leading up to 1848 was entangled with the Hungarian revolution. Concurrently with Hungarian revolutionaries, Romanian revolutionaries demanded their political emancipation, equality and the abolition of serfdom.
The Transylvanian Romanian’s were promised national recognition by the Austrian authorities in return of joining forces against the Hungarian revolutionaries. Thus Transylvanian Romanians fought against and enacted revenge upon Transylvanian Hungarians for what was seen as centuries of mistreatment. Russian intervention finally quashed the Hungarian revolutionaries, ending a revolution in 1821 that had shocked all sides by its escalation into civil war led by Tudor Vladimirescu.
As a consequence the region fell under direct rule of Austria- Hungary from Budapest. Ruthless “Magyarisation” followed: Hungarian was established as the official language and any Romanians who dared oppose the regime were severely punished. Opposite to that Wallachia and Moldavia prospered. In 1859, with French support, Alexandru Ioan Cuza was elected to the thrones of Moldavia and Wallachia, creating a national state known as the United Romanian Principalities on 11 December 1861. This was renamed Romania in 1862.
Cuza was forced to abdicate in 1866 by mutinous army officers, and his place was taken by the Prussian prince Carol I. The Russian assistance helped Romania declare its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877. After the 1877-78 War of Independence, Dobrogea became a part of Romania. Romanian independence was recognized under the consequent Treaty of San Stefano and the Congress of Berlin in 1878. In 1881 Romania was declared a kingdom and on 22 may 1881 Carol I was crowned the first king of Romania.
Romania in the World War I
Intelligent political maneuvering had Romania to greatly benefit from the WWI. Despite having a secret alliance with Austro-Hungary in 1883, the country began the war with neutrality.
King Ferdinand, the successor of Carol I in 1914, was married to Princess Marie, granddaughter of both Queen Victoria and Tsar Alexandru II; thus, when Romania entered World War I in august 1916, it joined Great Britain, France and Russia and left it with an onerous peace treaty in may 1918. Though by October, the disintegration of the central powers reversed this situation entirely, and Romanian armies advanced into Transylvania, and then onto Hungary to overthrow the short-lived communist regime of Bela Kun in august 1919.
Bessarabia, Bucovina and a part of Banat regions were reunited with Romania after the defeat of Austro-Hungary in 1918. Even more, Transylvania was finally united with Romania at the end of WWI forming the Greater Romania, which has more than doubled its territory and its population.
On December 1, 1918, the Romanian assembly of Alba Iulia declared Transylvania’s union with Romania to scenes of wild acclaim from the people. The lost of half of it population and two-thirds of its land has been the source of great resentment between Hungary and Romania ever since. The acquisition of the new territory was ratified by the Triple Entente powers in 1920 under the Treaty of Trianon. The lives of the masses hardly improved in the Greater Romania, due to the expropriation of Hungarian estates and smallholders as well, the Hungarian employees being dismissed on a huge scale and Romanian immigrants brought in to replace them. The many peasants who expected to benefit from agrarian reform were rapidly disillusioned when speculators and boyars appropriated much of the land.
Romania was governed by the National Liberal Party, favored by King Ferdinand but soon damaging the economy by pursuing nationalist and populist policies. On Ferdinand’s death in 1927, The National Liberal Party was dismissed and replaced by the National Peasantry Party, led by Iuliu Maniu, which in 1928 won the only remotely fair election of that period. Despite a parliamentary majority and genuinely reforming policies, Maniu pursued conservative strategies, constrained by the world economic crisis of 1929, vested interests and entrenched corruption.
A moral issue was the thing that led to the government’s eventual fall. In 1930, after a three-year regency, Carol II took the throne and broke his promise to put aside his divorced Jewish mistress, Magda Lupescu. The puritan Iuliu Maniu resigned and the government fell apart. Exploiting the constitution of 1923, Carol II gave the king the right to dissolve the parliament and call elections at will, this leading to the development of a corrupt system where the government would fix elections by every means possible, only to be dismissed and replaced by the opposition when the king had tired of them. Between 1930 and 1940, there were no less than 25 separate governments, leading ultimately to the collapse of the political parties themselves. Strikes in the oil and rail industries in 1933 were put down by armed force; Carol II set up his own “youth movement” and soon began routine phone-tapping by the Siguranta, the Securitate’s predecessor.
The World War II and the Iron Guard
Under the guidance of the foreign minister Nicolae Titulescu in the years leading up to the WWII, Romania seeked security in an alliance with France and Britain, and joined Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia in the Little Entente. Romania also signed a Balkan pact with Yugoslavia, Turkey and Greece, and later established diplomatic relations with the USSR.
These efforts were weakened by the Western powers appeasement of Hitler and by Romania’s own King Carol II. Carol II succeeded his father Ferdinand I to the throne. Extreme right-wing parties opposed to a democratic regime emerged, notably the anti-Semitic League of the National Christian Defense which consequently gave birth to the Legion of the Archangel Michael in 1927.
This notorious breakaway faction, better known as the fascist Iron Guard, was led by Corneliu Codreanu and by 1935 dominated the political scene. The legion extolled the soil, death, and a mystical form of Orthodoxy; it also fought street battles against Jews and followers of the other political parties, and murdered four current and former prime ministers.
In 1937, the anti-Semitic National League of Christian Defense was installed in power by the king, but the prime minister, the poet Octavian Goga, immediately insulted Magda Lupescu, the king’s mistress and was dismissed in February 1938, just six weeks after taking power. This at last provoked Carol II to ban all political parties and set up a royal dictatorship. Unable to manipulate the political parties, Carol II declared a royal dictatorship in February 1938. All political parties were dissolved and laws were passed to halve the size of the electorate. Between 1939 and 1940 alone, Romania had no less than nine different governments.
In 1939 Carol II clamped down on the anti-Semitic Iron Guard, which until 1937 he had supported. Codreanu and 13 other legionaries were arrested, sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, and then assassinated. In revenge for their leader’s death, Iron Guard members murdered Carol II’s Prime Minister, Armand Calinescu, leading to the butchering of 252 Iron Guard members by Carol II’s forces. In accordance with the king’s wishes, the corpses were strung up in public squares. Only with the collapse of the Axis powers at the end of WWII did the Iron Guard disintegrate.
Romania was isolated after the fall of France in May 1940, one month later a Soviet ultimatum led to the annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bucovina, and two months later, Hitler forced Carol II to cede Northern Transylvania to Germany’s ally Hungary, and southern Dobrogea to Bulgaria. After giving away such huge portions of Romanian territory Carol II could not squash the increasing mass hysteria and on the advice of one of his councilors, the king called in General Marshall Ion Antonescu.
To defend the interests of the ruling classes, Antonescu forced King Carol II to abdicate in favor of the king’s 19 –year old son Michael I. Antonescu than imposed a fascist dictatorship with himself as supreme leader. German troops were allowed to enter Romania in October 1940, and in June 1941 Antonescu joined Hitler’s anti-Soviet war. One of Antonescu’s aims in joining forces with Hitler was to recover Bessarabia and this was achieved in August 1941. The results of this Romanian-Nazi alliance was gruesome, with over 200,000 Romanian Jews – mainly from newly regained Bessarabia – and 40,000 Roma deported to transit camps in Transdniestr and murdered in Auschwitz. After the war, Antonescu was turned over to the soviet authorities who condemned him to death in a show trial. Bessarabia fell back into Soviet hands.
As the war continued to go badly and the soviet army approached Romania’s borders, a rare national consensus was achieved. On 23 August 1944 an opportunistic Romania suddenly changed sides again, capturing the 53,159 German soldiers who were stationed in Romania at the time, and declared war on Nazi Germany. By this dramatic act, Romania salvaged its independence and shortened the war. By 25 October the Romanian and soviet armies had driven the Hungarian and German forces from Transylvania, replacing the valued territory back under Romanian control. The costs, however, were appalling: 500,000 Romanian soldiers died fighting for the Axis powers, and another 170,000 died after Romania joined the Allies.
The People’s Republic, a Communist Era
Romania’s Communist Party had no more than 1000 members prior to 1945. The first government formed by King Mihai was a broad coalition, with communists only playing a minor role, but gradually they increased their influence. A new coalition was installed in March 1945 under the premiership of Dr Petru Groza, which included politicians from the pre-war parties, but the key posts were occupied by communists.
The land reform of 1945 benefited millions of peasants at the expense of Saxons and Swabians of Transylvania and the Banat, who had become the biggest landowners since the dispossession of the Magyars, while women voted for the first time in 1946, supposedly contributing to the election of another ostensibly balanced government. A year later Prime Minister Petru Groza forced king Michael to abdicate to abdicate, the monarchy was abolished, and a Romanian People’s Republic proclaimed.
A period of terror ensued in which all the prewar leaders, prominent intellectuals suspected dissidents were imprisoned or interned in hard-labor camps. Antonescu and up to 60,000 were executed after highly irregular trials in 1946 and 1947. The nationalization of industries, banks and utilities in June 1948 placed the main economic levels in the hands of Communist Party, which openly declared its intention to reshape society on Stalinist lines. Police terror was used against real or potential opponents, with victims incarcerated in prisons or conscripted for reed-cutting in the Delta or work on the Danube-Black Sea Canal, The” Death Chanel” that claimed over 100,000 lives.
The loyalty to Moscow lasted until late 1950, when soviet troops were withdrawn from Romania. After 1960 Romania adopted an independent foreign policy under two “national” communist leaders, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and his protégé Nicolae Ceausescu, both of whom had been imprisoned during WWII. Under these figures the concept of a great Romania socialist state was flaunted.
Nicolae Ceausescu, a time for dictatorship
In his first years of rule there is little doubt that Nicolae Ceausescu was genuinely popular. A cultural encouragement, putting food and consumer goods into the shops, denouncing security police excess, and above all condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 he assured his popularity among the people.
His public condemnation of the intervention in Czechoslovakia by USSR, earned him praise and economic aid from the west. The most favored nation status was given in 1975 by the USA, which yielded more than US 1$ billion in US-backed credits in the decade that followed. Ceausescu’s “merits” were officially decorated by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II after condemning the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan and the participation in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games despite a Soviet – bloc boycott.
During this time, the Romanians suffered painfully during the 25-year dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu and his family. Thousands of people were imprisoned or repressed by the much-feared secret police, while huge amounts of money were spent on megalomaniacal and grandiose projects. However, the economic failure soon became obvious and the population was forced to work harder and harder, while all but a minimal amount of food was exported, to return thirty percent of GNP and $10.2 billion in foreign loans, which were invested in the industrialization of Romania in the 1970’s. Amazingly, all the foreign debt was repaid by 1989, although there was no prospect of any improvement in living standards thereafter.
Convinced that the key to industrial growth was laying in a larger work force, Ceausescu banned abortions and contraception for any married woman under 40 with fewer than four children. In the 1980’s he introduced the Baby Police and compulsory gynecological examinations; unmarried people and married couples without children were penalized by higher taxes. He also discriminated against the minorities: it became increasingly hard to get an education or to buy books in Hungarian or German, or to communicate with relatives abroad: and families were persuaded to give their children Romanian names.
Ceausescu tried to keep the right side of the German and Israeli governments, who purchased exist visas for ethnic Germans and Jews in Romania for substantial sums. The human rights abuses got worse through the 1980s, including the systematization program for rural development and constant repression by the Securitate, which produced an atmosphere of ubiquitous fear and distrust even between family members, as up to one in four of the population was rumored to be an informer. Increasingly, key posts were allocated to relatives of the Ceausescu’s, while all other senior figures were rotated every few years between jobs to prevent anyone building up an independent powerbase.
Everything went downhill rapidly in the 1980’s, as the truth about the country’s economic collapse was hidden from Ceausescu by his subordinates. Absolutely everything was in short supply, but Ceausescu and Elena pushed on with projects such as the Palace of the People in Bucharest, the Danube-Black Sea Canal and the village systematization program.
The 1989 Revolution and the fall of Ceausescu Era
In late 1989 the situation was so desperate that it seemed to be just a matter of time until the collapse of Ceausescu’s communist regime would take place. The spark that ignited Romania came on 15 December 1989, when father Laszlo Tokes publicly condemned Ceausescu from his Hungarian church in Timisoara, prompting the Reformed Church of Romania to remove him from his post.
Police attempts to arrest demonstrating parishioners failed and within days the unrest had spread across the city, leading to some 115 deaths. Ceausescu proclaimed martial law in Timis County and dispatched trainloads of troops to crush the rebellion. A series of strikes and riots culminated with a mass demonstration of 100,000 people in Timisoara demanding Ceausescu’s resignation. Despite his orders to fire, the army withdrew rather than launch into a massacre.
Another crowd of 100,000 this time corralled into appearing by Ceausescu’s security forces as an intended show of support on 21st December, gathered in Piata Republicii in Bucharest to hear him speak, but he was soon interrupted by heckling. The police and Securitate opened fire but were unable to clear the crowds from the city center.
The demonstrators later retreated to the wide boulevard between Piata Universitatii and Piata Romana – only to be brutally crushed hours later by police gunfire and armored cars. Drenched by ice-cold water from fire hoses, the demonstrators refused to submit and began erecting barricades under the eyes of Western journalists in the adjacent Hotel Intercontinental. At 11 pm the police began their assault on Piata Universitatii, using a tank to smash the barricades. By dawn the square had been cleared and the bodies of those killed removed. Estimates vary, but at least 1033 were killed.
On the morning of December 22 more demonstrators took to the streets and a state of emergency was announced. At noon Ceausescu reappeared on the balcony of the Central Committee building to try and speak again, but they were forced to flee by helicopter from the roof of the building. Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were arrested in Targoviste, taken to a military base and, on Christmas day, condemned by an anonymous court and executed by a firing squad. While these events had all the earmarks of a people’s revolution, many scholars have advanced the notion that they were just as much the result of a coup d’état as well: the Communist Party, tired of having to bow down to Ceausescu as royalty, had been planning an overthrow for months before the events of December 1989.
Free Romania, attempts to democracy and the future
It is still unclear at what stage the National Salvation Front , which emerged to take power from December 22, had been formed; supposedly shaped in the Central Committee building on the afternoon of December 22 by people who had gathered there independently, it was clear many of them were already in contact.
In May 1990, the National Salvation Front won the country’s first democratic elections since 1946, placing Ion Iliescu, a Communist Party member since the age of 14 at the helm as president. Protests ensued in Bucharest, but Iliescu graciously shipped in around 10,000 miners to deal (violently) with the crowds, leaving seven dead and 296 injured. US suspended non-humanitarian aid and boycotted Iliescu’s inauguration as president. At home, the nation went into shock, and it remained cowed for the next year while the economy collapsed.
Iliescu was nonetheless re-elected in 1992 as the head of the coalition government under the banner of the Party of Social Democracy. New name, same policies. The need for aid and a fear of international isolation kept the government on a reformist course in 1993, Romania becoming the last Eastern Bloc state to join the Council of Europe and in January 1994, it was the first to sign the Partnership for Peace. The granting of Most Favored Nation status by the USA in 1993 led to huge cuts in tariffs.
Industry, the economy and unemployment continued to improve, with real wages rising 16 percent in 1995, but it wasn’t enough to win Iliescu the 1996 general elections. The 1996 election was won by the Democratic Convention of Romania (CDR), a coalition of four main parties and a dozen smaller ones. Emil Constantinescu, a professor of geology and former rector of Bucharest University, was elected as president and appointed the youthful mayor of Bucharest, Victor Ciorbea, as prime minister. Constantinescu’s priorities were accelerated privatization, the slashing of the budget deficit and elimination of almost all price controls, introduction of a transparent tax system, and an attack on corruption.
Constantinescu’s reform-minded government made entry into NATO and the European Union its top priorities, together with fast-paced structural economic reform, the fight against corruption and improved relations with Romania’s neighbors, especially Hungary. Other moves included a law providing for multilingual universities, leading to renewed friction with Hungary and a law opening Securitate files. Increasingly, however, the Constantinescu government was seen as failing to deliver, in particular in the war against corruption and in reforming and reviving the economy, and became particularly unpopular. Constantinescu refused to run the 2000 elections, thus 70 year old Ion Iliescu was “reelected” president and Adrian Nastase became the prime minister.
His Social Democrat Party today forms a minority government. The notoriously nationalist, xenophobic Greater Romania Party led by Corneliu Vadim Tudor is the country’s second party having won 21% of the votes. Adrian Nastase was head of government as prime minister. The government’s main goals, aside from the domestic issues have been the integration with the EU and other international bodies. In 2002, Romania was invited to join NATO. During the American war against IRAQ in 2003, Romania was one of the first countries to guarantee access to airfields and allowed Americans to set up military basis on their soil.
In 2004 the elections appointed Traian Basescu as president of Romania and Calin-Popescu Tariceanu as prime minister. Despite the famous animosity between the two, one of the things achieved was the entry of Romania in the European Union in January 2007.
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