Attitudes Towards Citizenship in Romania

Last week I was invited to make a presentation about participatory democracy in a seminar organized by the Association for the Development of Women Entrepreneurship (ADAF) in Romania. The goal of the seminar was to develop a network of active European citizens, which in my opinion was and is a challenging task. ADAF is part of a European project together with other women business organizations from Belgium, Spain, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. I care for this association, so I have accepted Cornelia Rotaru’s invitation. Cornelia is ADAF’s President and a very close friend of CIPE.

I promised to talk about participatory democracy to a very mixed audience: trade unions, public officials, police department representatives, prefect office, business associations, NGOs and students. Once I made that promise, however, my enthusiasm started to decline. Romania is a country fed up with presentations, a country in which words lost their meaning, where politicians have done everything in their power so that we lose even the concept of values. How and what can I tell these people that would be meaningful, interesting, and make them think? Why haven’t I stuck to what I know best – talking about how to do things, instead of making presentations?

So I thought a lot about Romania, about who we are and what we want to be. And I have thought about our values and how we want our life to be. I didn’t give answers to the question about what Romanian democracy should look like. It’s not for one person (or even for the politicians) to give such an answer. Rather it should be our joined task to find answers.

So, instead of preparing a presentation, I started to prepare a motivational/mobilizing sort of speech, something that would make the audience think about their own responsibility. I wanted to convey the idea that this is our job, that democracy should stop being for us another imported concept. We have to build our own democracy, based on our values. And it’s our job to determine our values, the values that represent us as a nation.

I understood there are no ready recipes for democracy: rather than looking for outside solutions, we should look at ourselves and see who we are, what we want and how we want our life to be. Building democracy is an exercise that should come first from the inside, not from the outside.

Well, it seems that the audience understood what I tried to convey. And as I was talking with them, I realized that my fears about people not caring or being fed up were false. People care and are interested when the discussion is about something that matters, when they participate instead of simply listening.

I was shocked when one person in the audience, the President of the Translators Association, called her husband to join the conference, as important things were being discussed. Another lady, member of ADAF and owner of a cosmetics company, told us at the end she never thought she was so ignorant in these matters!

At the end of the seminar, people in the audience told us we should go to schools and talk about these concepts with kids, not only with students. I say we because a large credit should also be given to Corina Dragomirescu, from the Advocacy Academy, who talked about citizen’s active participation in the public arena. Her presentation highlighted the idea that we do have the means to engage, we just don’t know about them or don’t use them.

This experience changed my perception about the willingness and readiness of Romanian people to become more engaged: I think we are getting close to being citizens. And this makes all the difference in the world.

Published Date: July 14, 2009