Ceausescu's Legacy.

• Position: Nicolae Ceausescu

How long can Ceausescu's legacy be invoked to explain Romania's difficult transition to democracy? Can the late dictator's erratic policies - convincingly examined in Tom Gallagher's essay ("Ceausescu's Legacy", Summer 1999) - account fully for today's troubles? Ten years after the December 1989 uprising, a new explanation is needed. After all, Romania's revolution (the only bloody one in the Soviet bloc) was applauded at the time as the beginning of a new era. What followed, however, was the retrenchment of the nomenklatura and an attempt by Ceausescu's successors to prevent a resolute break with the past.

Among those successors, former president Ion Iliescu played a crucial role. Pretending to be a revolutionary, Iliescu pursued policies directly opposed to those that led to major transformations in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Iliescu and his Party of Social Democracy are primarily responsible for the dismal state of Romanian politics between 1990-96. It was only in November 1996, when democratic forces won parliamentary and presidential elections, that the country took steps to de-communize its major institutions and privatize its industrial sector.

But even after 1996 things have not moved as fast as many Romanians hoped. President Emil Constantinescu's government has focused on foreign policy, and done little to further the aims of social trust, a robust civil society and an open market. Rabid demagogues like Corneliu Vadim Tudor are of course exploiting the vulnerabilities of the pluralist order, but the real beneficiary of public discontent is Iliescu himself (a point not mentioned by Gallagher). A recent poll shows that 35 percent of Romanians would vote for the former communist as president, versus only 26 percent for Constantinescu. A restoration of the Iliescu regime - i.e., a return to ultracentralism, statism, kleptocratic cronyism and ethnocentric authoritarianism - is in my view the main threat to Romania's democratic future.

Vladimir Tismaneanu

University of Maryland

Gallagher replies:

When Vladimir Tismaneanu describes the regime of Ion Iliescu in such an unflattering light, I fully agree with him. Where we part company is when he describes a comeback by Iliescu as "the main threat to Romania's democratic future."

A greater threat is the proprietorial attitude to power exhibited by all the main parties in government since 1990, including the avowedly reformist ones now in office. One of the main culprits is...