On the surface the European Union has been able to exercise strong and effective leverage over Romania. Probably no other candidate for membership has faced such a daunting range of obstacles since the fully totalitarian communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu ended in 1989. Many were taken by surprise when, exactly a decade later, in 1999 the EU agreed to open talks for full membership with a country whose unreadiness for the challenge had been plainly set out in 1997 by the EU when it assessed the state of reform in each of the Eastern European countries which had applied for...

Romania first made official contact with the European Economic Community (as it then was) at the height of the Cold War. In 1973 it managed to obtain preferential trading status from the EEC. This was long before Brussels established any formal ties of this nature with other ‘People’s Democracies’ of Eastern Europe.¹ Geopolitical concerns motivated the EEC in its relations with Romania. It was a communist state, indeed a dogmatic one, modelled in its later stages on North Korea. But it was also a maverick one which appeared to have become semi-detached from the Soviet-led institutions of the Warsaw Pact...

For Romania, the accession process was to be identical to that for the candidate countries joining in 2004 and indeed for those which joined in earlier rounds. It centred around the need to absorb the entire body of regulations of the EU which have been accumulated and revised over the last 45 years: theacquis communautaire. Thirty-one chapters would have to be opened and completed before it could be concluded that a candidate country had fulfilled the entry terms.

This chapter will examine the strategy which the PDSR employed in order to boost its credibility in Brussels. It will argue...

Romania was allocated €6.5 billion of pre-accession funding by the EU between 1990 and 2005.¹ Most of this assistance was meant to ensure that a process of economic and social modernisation was accelerated. This involved modernising the infrastructure of the country, neglected under Ceauşescu and left in disrepair afterwards. Assistance was also meant to ensure that Romania acquired a market economy based on free enterprise and private initiative. Overall, it was correctly assumed in Brussels that a large-scale absorption of aid was required if the country was to relate to EU norms and standards and narrow the developmental gulf with...

It took the EU some time to realise just how inadequate the justice system in Romania was for upholding the rule of law and offering the most basic level of protection to Romanian citizens and also to those of existing EU states coming into contact with the country. But from the outset, there was an understanding that the administration of the country was in a particularly deplorable condition. This was the legacy of over 50 years of rigid political oversight under the communist system. A survey carried out for the British government in 1999 summarised the mentality and practices of...

A compliant justice system was absolutely instrumental in enabling the postcommunist regime to consolidate itself. It is hard to identify any other branch of the state which rendered such assistance to entrenched power structures determined to maintain their grip while adapting to new rules and conditions. No separation of powers applied in Romania, limiting executive control over the judiciary and prosecuting service until the regime installed by Iliescu had entered its second decade. In light of this fact, it is surprising that the EU accepted in the late 1990s that Romania fulfilled the political terms of the Copenhagen criteria. This...

Running parallel with the EU accession negotiations during the PSD’s years in office was an accelerating process for Romanian membership of NATO. Talks commenced in 2002 after Romania was invited to open negotiations for membership and concluded in April 2004 when the country became a full member of the Atlantic alliance. Until a few years previously such a prospect had seemed a far distant one. Romania had actively sought to join NATO in the late 1990s, claiming that it fulfilled the military conditions for membership, only to be rebuffed. But after the attacks by Al-Q’aida on the East Coast of...

This chapter documents a series of abdications of responsibility by the EU during the last phase of entry negotiations with Romania. The failure of Brussels to uphold its own rules for entry negotiations during much of 2004 had long-term consequences ensuring that Romania would become a headache for most of its European partners following its accession to the EU in 2007.

The amended resolution tabled in the EP by Arie Őostlander and Nicholson in January 2004 requested the three main arms of the EU, the Commission, the Parliament and the Council, to collaborate closely in order to enable Romania to...

On 12 December 2004 the victory of maverick reformer Traian Băsescu over the unpopular Adrian Năstase in the presidential elections was confirmed. Five days later on 17 December 2004 the EU’s Council of Ministers agreed to sign the accession treaty with Romania in April, apparently paving the way for membership by 2007. But there was a snag. Finland had grown alarmed at the state of the Romanian justice system and was not prepared to ratify Romania on the terms just agreed.¹ Verheugen’s successor as Commissioner for Enlargement, Olli Rehn, was a Finn. His government invested a lot of importance in...

Corruption has been a long-term and deep-seated problem in Romania. Its depth and prevalence have acted as a check on the country’s economic development, impaired the state even in the performance of its normal duties, and created huge barriers of mistrust between society and the political elite which, on more than one occasion, has stimulated the rise of powerful extremist movements.¹ It is appropriate to locate an extensive appraisal of the phenomenon and attempts to bring it under control to near the end of the book. Corruption has disfigured the entire period of the transition from totalitarian rule to a...

Jonathan Scheele, the head of the European Delegation from 2002 to 2007, was the international official who ought to have had the deepest awareness of how problematic Romania’s bid to join the EU would turn out to be. But in the spring of 2004, just after the EU had briefly panicked abut Romania’s state of unpreparedness, he had declared that accession would mark ‘the beginning of much work to help the country to fully integrate into the European Union’.¹ Such complacency was followed by the prediction of Prime Minister Tăriceanu made shortly before accession on 1 January 2007 that this...

In conclusion, it is clear that Romania joined with the accession criteria relaxed or even set aside in key areas. Victory was declared on a flimsy basis with reforms in vital policy sectors waiting to be accomplished and an elite with no appetite for this work reaping the main benefits of membership. Confounded by the challenge it encountered, the EU revealed itself to be an institution which had great difficulty projecting democratic values and indeed ethical forms of capitalism into inhospitable terrain. Perhaps the task would have been easier if it had entered into partnership with the USA, which since...