I don’t believe the extended postponement of our Schengen accession deserves making us too uneasy. It seems obvious that this repeated refusal represents a political abuse. Romania has fulfilled the technical conditions of the Schengen accession for at least three years now. Ever since it spent approximately one billion Euros on securing its borders using the most modern technology. Our current Foreign Minister is right when stating that the repeated postponement reflects the EU’s weaknesses rather than our own. Practical but also moral weaknesses because failure to respect the criteria initially proposed by the EU itself represents moral guilt. If we also add the opinions of some analysts, including from the West, according to which at least some Western countries, still obsessed by the military defeat of 1945, look with suspicion towards their current “allies” in Eastern Europe, we have thus sketched the EU’s contradictory inner portrait.
And precisely this contradiction makes even the current generalized economic-social crisis manifest differently even between the countries of Western Europe. And these EU contradictions negatively impact future projects too, projects rightly considered decisive for the economic-social homogenization of the EU and for its very resistance in the face of global competition. The current scientific and technological revolution, the unprecedented informational boom, dictate the continued “adaptation” of each state, and the more so that of the union of states. Each government, each governmental and state association rightly considers that a social and national organism, no matter how far behind it lags, now has the possibility to “skip over” stages of its underdevelopment and to accede at the forefront of historical development. And the essential condition of success is the power to correctly and plenarily foresee tomorrow’s exigencies and of adapting to them today. This imperative of anticipation and of adapting “to the environment” is the source of the EU’s reason to be and also the reason for its main strategic goals. That is why, as far back as over ten years ago the EU planned to have the world’s most dynamic and competitive economy in 2010-2015, mainly thanks to its extended base of scientific knowledge obtained by the EU’s very expansion. A multinational basis as a veritable “society of knowledge.” Thus, it was forecast that in 2015 for instance 50-55 per cent of new jobs in EU countries would be for graduates of tertiary education, 40 per cent would be for graduates of secondary education and only 5-10 per cent would be for persons with a low level of education. It was a projection of the European future that initially stirred a lot of enthusiasm.But because the future depends on the present and the present is much more contradictory than could have been foreseen, the EU’s generous plans, such as the one aforementioned, experienced and continue to experience a lot of hurdles. Both externally and internally. The intensification of intra-European and extra-European emigration and immigration modified the proportions and the nature of the realities on which such EU projects were based. Also because the intensified movement of the labor force hiked unemployment in the most technologically developed European countries. It hiked unemployment precisely through the hiring of extra-European immigrants more poorly prepared professionally but preferred by Western employers because their salaries were far below the European average. That was the source of the EU’s economic-social crisis and that is how it was amplified. Until now when the EU’s leadership structures find themselves blackmailed, when taking new decisions, by some governments that threaten to leave the EU structure in case such decisions would not favor them. Anti-European protests have thus become a reality not just in Greece, Spain and Portugal, but also in Italy which, from an economic point of view is third in the EU. The Euro currency is thus suffering. So much so that some countries who are yet to adopt the Euro, Romania being one of them, today intensely ponder on economic-social advantages that would be the result of postponing by another 5-6 years the adoption of the single currency. And the EU contradictions do not end here because they stem not only from its inherent internal contradictions but also from the overall evolution of international life, featuring the emergence of new superpowers such as China and Brazil but also new global threats born from the proliferation of atomic weapons production. In these unfavorable circumstances, some of which directly concern her, Romania urgently needs a medium and long-term development strategy. A strategy that would start off preponderantly from her internal development needs and less so from the dictates of international banks. Such a national development strategy benefits from several favorable internal factors. The riches of the Romanian soil and underground are still real. The skills of her specialists and common workers are more appreciated in the West than they are in their own country. Moreover, we have the most productive agricultural sector in the whole of the EU and, at the same time, we still have a good tradition of farming which, despite its technologically deficient character, remains a good omen. We fare better at regional, group or individual level than we do at overall national level. That is why a possible regionalization, projected at the expense of the state, would favor the exacerbation of some local areas up to the stage of transforming them in the adepts of Romania’s federalization. That would lead to the break-up of the Romanian state, entailing the loss of everything positive we accomplished, including for Europe, after 1918. And such failures, derived from the lack of a national strategy, can be met in many of the economic-social and cultural domains. Including in the scientific research domain, the most dynamic and synchronous domain. Romania annually supports, with an important forex contribution, the EU fund for scientific research, a part of the financial resources of this fund meant to return to the country following the filing of our own research projects. Unfortunately, the lack of appropriate scientific projects, an absence caused by the difficult conditions in which our researchers, those who are left, work, results in most of the money paid by the Romanian state no longer coming back to the country. In fact, even a big part of the EU funds for the development of Romania remain unabsorbed because of the lack of the same appropriate projects proposed by Romanian authorities. And such deficits also grow because of the fact that the psycho-social motivation for education in Romania is in freefall. Over 20 per cent of Romanian children drop out of school before graduating from the compulsory and free education cycle. As a result, these minors are pushed either into unregistered employment, either towards criminal behavior ranging from theft from public and private property to bloody and sometimes deadly attacks. All these incongruities and many others similar to them are the result of Romania’s slow “adaptation.” But they are also the source of the certainty that Romania’s European destiny is decided primarily at home.
