Romanian "Descurcăreală" — Between Necessity and Vice

Above all else, the Romanian knows how to be pragmatic. From tending the household to cultivating wheat, he has expressed his so-called practical spirit since ancient times. And yet, when the thread of simple life snaps and modernity comes crashing down upon the Romanian peasant, this pragmatism turns into political “descurcăreală” — "getting by" — and the mentality of "it'll do." Before tumbling down the slope of those who condemn this phenomenon with revulsion, we ought to look clearly at the true malady of the political class that lies at its foundation.

Already in the times of Phanariot rule, the draining of the treasury through tax evasion turned our customs officers into barons of corruption, moving public money about at their whim. Customs fraud was the order of the day, and trade was preferential. Often, merchants knew exactly "how much to drop in the customs officer's chest." Later, with the emergence of the rotating government system, party clientelism entrenched servitude to political interest, perpetuating influence peddling and the notorious bribe.

A bitter smile rises on the face of the Romanian who recalls what he inherited from the Red years: a shop-window freedom and an institutional sham. The old vice of the political class became, within the "great brotherhood," a way of life and a means of survival. Pilfering from the ration line, favors at the neighborhood grocery, little "attentions" slipped to the lady at the counter — none of this was anything more than a simple survival route, or rather, it was simply the natural way of things.

In our day, lectern politicians, perched on desks and podiums, wallow in endless talk about the collective good. Fiscal authorities descend with sanctions upon timber shops, small traders, and neighborhood hustlers. Such was the case of an old woman from the village of Babana who, to make ends meet, sold greens from her own garden at a food market near Pitești. She was fined by the Local Police over a missing label on her stall. And so, in a society rotten with clientelism and mass corruption, the system parades its power before a bunch of lovage. Meanwhile, the same system averts its gaze behind an old silk handkerchief, and the great plunder of the public purse is encouraged by the very institutions that claim to oppose it.

Collapsed asphalt, stagnant water, and lost time in traffic show the sad reality of national roads. The Bechtel case is preserved in collective memory as testimony to the plunder of the national budget through public investment. At the end of 2003, the Romanian government signed, without a tender, a 2.2-billion-euro contract with the American engineering and construction firm Bechtel. The contract provided for guaranteed payments regardless of the progress of the works, thus causing public funds to vanish. To this day, the consequences fall upon us, while the politicians involved remain without a trace of guilt. After losing the case in court, the notorious "Romanian road" becomes a brutal reflection of the Romanian state's passivity.

From earliest childhood, we carry our lives through a society that falls prey to patching up and half-measures. Fed up with the nuts and vices of the political class, the common man spares nothing. "Descurcăreala" and "cutting corners" become a social valve for the system's failings, while civil society turns into a passive reflection upon the state's injustice. Citizens end up victims of selective justice, and the supposed social contract becomes, rather, a gambler's wager. The inertia of the political class and its aversion to change reveal the true conflict between state and citizen, in which the latter is both victim of the system and of himself. To this day, the state treads crooked paths and yet wonders why people hack their own way through thickets and backwoods on the fly. In the end, the Romanian "gets by," and what seems a popular defect is nothing other than the fruit of institutional injustice — a harsh reality, at once necessity and vice, that accompanies us in daily life.