East European Perspectives: February 5, 2003

MEMORY, MEMORIALS, AND MEMBERSHIP: ROMANIA'S NATO QUEST AND MARSHAL ANTONESCU (A)*

By Michael Shafir

There can be little doubt that memory and memorials are interconnected. "Memorials" are etymologically linked to "memory" -- that is to say to that function defined by the "Concise Oxford Dictionary" as a "faculty by which things are recalled to or kept in the mind." The link between either of the two notions and "membership" is less apparent at first sight. Yet from the same dictionary one learns that memorials, that is to say man-made objects or events "serving to commemorate," are implicitly fulfilling a social function. The dictionary mentions as exemplification memorials statues, festivals, buildings. and religious services. It is hard to imagine either of these being inaugurated or held in the presence of a single individual. Those who unveil statues, launch festivals, build memorials, or conduct religious services have in mind other human beings. Whether "memory" is SINGULARLY social, as Maurice Halbwachs (1992, pp. 167-189 in particular) argued, is, of course, debatable. There can be no doubt, however, that at least ONE of memory's functions is both socially induced and SOCIALIZING -- in other words, linked to membership of a group.

Memory, Memorials And Membership In A Postcommunist Setting
People belong to multiple social groups and associations. Compatibility among them is not always smooth. What is more, people ASPIRE to belong to groups or associations other than those in which they were born, raised, or professionalized. Collectively, each of these groups might have not only DIFFERENT "memories," but those memories might clash with one another and even more so with the collective memory of the associations of which one aspires to become a member. In a world about to become one large village, aspirations to membership necessarily translate into a multiplication of those clashes. How many different "memories" are involved in, say, the Liberal International? What sort of common "memory" can a Socialist International made up of both traditional social-democratic parties and communist-successor parties have? Which is to "impose" its memory on the other, for what reasons, and how? Finally, can a NATO enlarged to include both former World War II allies and former Axis powers have a joint "memory"? It is quite obvious it can, since Germany and Italy have long been part of the Atlantic alliance. But the forging of the collective NATO memory only became possible after one side "imposed" its memory on the other. At the end of World War II, it was clear who the losers and who the winners were. It is less clear who the losers are at the end of the Cold War, although the winners might be indisputable. The "losing" side at the turn of the 21st century can -- and does -- claim victory as well. The argument of "return to one's own self" might not be very convincing to foreign audiences, but is very persuasive for domestic ones. Whence, then, is the new collective memory to start? Whatever the "global village" is or becomes we might be uncertain of, but one thing is inevitable: It is (and will remain) one huge festival of Festingerian "cognitive dissonance" (Festinger, 1957).

The literature on "memory" is by now so vast that one would need a huge, well, memory and a correspondingly enormous footnote just to mention the most prominent names associated with it in the last decades. Suffice it to mention that Paul Ricoeur (2001) traces preoccupation with what "memory" is all about to the ancient Greek philosophers, St. Augustine, John Locke, Freud, Halbwachs, Yersushalmi, and Pierre Nora (to mention but a few) before he produces his own theory. Nora's name, of course, is above all linked to that aspect of memory that is focused on memorials. The immense success of Nora's seven-volume "Les Lieux de memoire" (Places of Memory), the first volume of which was published in 1997, is, as Jean-Charles Szurek would eventually observe, both emblematic and paradoxical. What started as an enterprise aimed at "saving national memory" ended up concluding that there was nothing to save: On the contrary, we are living in the age of a "TYRANNY of memory" (Szurek , 2000, pp. 53-54. Author's emphasis).

Whence the obsession? Numerous explanations have been provided. Despite their multiple differences, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists converge on one point: Memory is about THE PRESENT. If the "tyranny of memory" cannot be escaped, this is because no one has yet devised the time machine for escaping from the present. In other words, there is no way to deal with the "then" without telescoping it from the "here and now." As Martin Malia wrote after citing Benedetto Croce's famous remark that "all history is contemporary history," we "invariably read the past through the prism of the present with all its political, cultural and ethical passions" (Malia, 2002, p.69). Memory, memorials, and commemorations are all about legitimation processes, be they the personal legitimation of politicians and the politics they are supposed to represent or the collective legitimation of a society's perceptions of itself. Anthropologists, such as Katherine Verdery, might strive to "think of legitimation in less rationalistic and more suitable 'cosmic' terms, showing it as rich, complex and disputatious processes of political meaning-creation," indeed even to formulate theories on the space-time axis proceeding from introspecting what happens with the movement of anonymous, re-interred dead bodes in the former Yugoslavia. But there is nothing "cosmic" about legitimation processes. Politicians and historical figures can be legitimized (or de-legitimized, or re-legitimized) only for the purpose of the present. Legitimacy will not thereby descend on the past, nor is there any guarantee that it would survive as such in the future. But Verdery, I believe, is quite correct in appreciating legitimation as "a process that employs symbols" (Verdery, 1999, pp. 52 and 198-127, respectively). Much as they diverge in their approach, Verdery converges on this point with Romanian historian Andrei Pippidi. For better or worse, Pippidi's views are also closer to mine than those of Verdery are.

Pippidi speaks of the need to develop a "theory of symbolic history" for the purpose of comprehending the handling (or mishandling) of memory as a social phenomenon (Pippidi, 2000, especially pp. 5-10). Symbols for what? For configuring of reconfiguring the present, of course. One can, as George Schopflin does when he analyzes "commemoration," see in it a "ritualized" recalling of what societies stand for. "A society without memory is blind to its own present and future, because it lacks a moral framework into which to place its experiences" (Schopflin, 2000, p.74). There is on the face of it little to argue against that perception. No polity can function without -- to use Benedict Anderson's terminology -- a positive "imagined community" to which reference can be made (Anderson, 1991). For, as Romanian historian Lucian Boia put it, "The past means legitimation and justification. Without having a past, we can be certain of nothing" (Boia, 1998, p. 7). The symbolic aspect of memorials and commemorations is even more pronounced in societies whose national identities are fragile and whose futures are uncertain. The distortion (but not obliteration!) of national symbols in East-Central Europe under the communist regimes and the search for either new or renewed "symbols" in the wake of regime change prompted Jacques Rupnik to observe in the early 1990s that "demolition of [communist] statues, restoration of former denomination to streets, are but the exterior aspects of the search for a 'usable past,' whose force is proportional to the fragility of national identity and uncertainty in face of the future" (Rupnik, 1992-1993, p. 4).

But one should not ignore the other side of the coin, and that side is particularly strong in societies that left behind one past but are uncertain of what should replace it and who should be chosen to symbolize it. Which past is deemed as worthy to be "used" or "re-used?" What Pippidi calls the "macabre comedy of posthumous rehabilitations all over Eastern Europe after 1989" demonstrated that the past was undergoing a process of being reshaped "by partisan passions, with each political family introducing in the national pantheon those historic figures in whom it can recognize itself or whom it abusively claims [as its own]." One must ask, we are told by Pippidi, "Who Is On the Way Out? Who Is on the Way In?" -- all while bearing in mind that, "[At] a time when all Central East European Countries reject the Soviet model, searching for an own (old or new) national identity, historians and politicians compete for the reinterpretation of the past" (Pippidi, 2000, pp. 8 and 22, respectively).

One of the main reasons for the emergence of this situation rests in what elsewhere I have called (Shafir, 2002a) the double dilemma of "Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung": Is it possible to overcome the communist past without leaning on that preceded it, and is it possible to overcome the authoritarian past that antedated communism without idealizing that past beyond recognition?

Memory can be, and memory is, used for the purpose of manipulation, precisely BECAUSE it has little in common with the past and is all about the present and future. Choosing between different "memories," Pippidi writes, is also a choice concerning different options for the future (Pippidi, 2000, p. 78). This is exactly what Ricoeur (2001, p. 104) has in mind when he writes that "the same events may mean glory for some, humiliation for others. One side's celebration is the other side's hatred." Schopflin seems to choose an apparently irreproachably democratic, but reproachably impractical, way out of the dilemma. "It is very difficult," he writes, "for one community to look with nothing worse than indifference at the commemoration pursued by another. Yet if we are all to survive in the European tradition that I believe is our heritage, living in diversity is a SINE QUA NON.� This, he adds, is sometimes difficult, but, "If we have the confidence in ourselves, in our values, then the commemorations of the others need not be seen as offensive." His advice is particularly directed at minorities, which are told, "[M]ajorities have the same rights to cultural reproduction as minorities and those rights should be respected." That Schopflin is aware of the "clash of memories" mentioned above there can be no doubt. What is, however, debatable is whether his rejection of a "multiculturalism that seeks to impose particular restrictions on majorities" takes into account that CULTURAL reproduction entrenched in the commemoration of those who denied REPRODUCTION from others might be out of line with "European tradition" (Schopflin, 2000, pp. 77-78). It might rather be related to what Ricoeur terms "manipulated memory," and might have little in common with democratic attitudes. On the contrary, that manipulation might reflect what Ricoeur describes as the "ideological" aspect of manipulated memory; and it is not by chance that he cites at this stage Tzvetan Todorov's "Abuses of Memory," taking distance from the "contemporary frenzy of commemorations, with their convoys of rites and meetings." Furthermore, it is not by chance that Ricoeur cites the Bulgarian-French historian's warning that the monopolization of memory is by no means singularly restricted to totalitarian regimes. It is, we are told, shared by all those who seek glory (Ricoeur, 2001, p.108). In other words, when we speak of the symbolic aspects of "memory," the question of "symbols for what?" must never leave aside the no-less-relevant accompanying questions of "which symbols?" and of "symbols for whom?"

It was precisely these questions that I posed in a 1997 article on Marshal Ion Antonescu's process of rehabilitation in postcommunist Romania, as the "Cui bono" part of the article's title illustrates (Shafir, 1997). There were three main points that were emphasized there. First, that the rehabilitation process was mainly aimed at undermining the nascent Romanian democracy, being inspired and (up to a certain point) instrumentalized by personalities with strong links to Nicolae Ceausescu's communist secret police; second, that the Greater Romania Party (PRM) led by Corneliu Vadim Tudor was the main venue through which the process was pursued, but at the same time its partial success was imbedded in the strong roots of Romanian national communism; and, finally, that the "utilitarian antisemitism" of the country's "successor party" (called first the Front of National Salvation, then Democratic Front of National Salvation, then Party of Social Democracy in Romania, or PDSR, and, as of 16 June 2000 the Social Democratic Party, or PSD) leadership had also played an important, if somewhat self-defeating, role in that process. "Utilitarian antisemitism" refers to the occasional exploitation of anti-Semitic prejudice for the needs of the hour by politicians who, by and large, are probably not anti-Semitic. As described in that article, the drive to rehabilitate the wartime Hitler ally had included.

"[T]hose in whose eyes the rehabilitation is mainly perceived in utilitarian terms: if it serves the political needs of the hour, these forces are ready to 'close an eye' to it, expecting to deal with its unwelcome implications at a later stage. Evidence shows that this is precisely the case of the PDSR. For a second group, however, Antonescu's figure is not merely an instrument (though it is that too) but a 'legitimation model.' In other words, the Marshal is not only a means but also a purpose. And the purpose is simply the liquidation of Romania�s incipient democracy. The members of this group have one thing in common: some direct or mediated link to what... I am inclined to label as 'the Forces of Old.' I mean that Romanian version of the "extended family" that is the 'extended Securitate'" (Shafir, 1997, p.364).

I was pointing out in that article that the communist mishandling of history is partly explaining the facility with which Antonescu had been transformed into a "hero-model." Yet the study also insisted on the attraction that Antonescu could exert as an anticommunist symbol. At that point in time, I was not sufficiently aware of parallels elsewhere in the region, which I eventually came to "dissect" in my subsequent research (see, in particular, Shafir, 2002b). As Tony Judt would put it in 2000, the:

"mismemory of communism is...contributing...to a mismemory of anticommunism. Marshal Antonescu, the wartime Romanian leader who was executed in June 1945 [sic], defended himself at his trial with the claim that he had sought to protect his country from the Soviet Union. He is now being rewritten into Romanian popular history as a hero, his part in the massacre of Jews and others in wartime Romania weighing little in the balance against his anti-Russian credentials. Anticommunist clerics throughout the region; nationalists who fought alongside the Nazis in Estonia, Lithuania, and Hungary; right-wing partisans who indiscriminately murdered Jews, communists, and liberals in the vicious score settling of the immediate postwar years before the communists took effective control are all candidates for rehabilitation as men of laudable convictions; their strongest suit, of course, is the obloquy heaped upon them by the former regime" (Judd, 2000, pp. 309-310. The year of Antonescu's execution is, in fact, 1946)."

Unlike the earlier article, this study will not concentrate its attention on the PRM, whose activity "in the service of the marshal" (the title of an apologetic book on Antonescu that does not deserve citation) and its own deriving self-serving political purposes underwent hardly any change in the years that elapsed after the completion of Qui bono. Instead, in its first part, the present study returns to scrutinize utilitarian anti-Semitic attitudes in the old-new regime, returned to power by the electorate in the year 2000. The study then concentrates its attention, in its second part, on the reasons that prompted the issuance of Emergency Ordinance 31, which forbade the cult of Antonescu and introduced penalties for Holocaust denial, as well as on an analysis of that ordinance's saga. It concludes by posing a few questions pertaining to "constrained memory."

Utilitarian Anti-Semitism Revisited
The outcome of the 2000 parliamentary and presidential elections in Romania should have taught the PDSR (or its successor, the PSD) a hard lesson in the dangers inherent in the ambivalence of courting the extreme nationalist electorate and its representatives. The PRM garnered nearly 20 percent of the vote for the Chamber of Deputies, and more than one voter in five (21.01 percent) cast a ballot for Romania's extreme nationalist party. Moreover, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the party's leader, forced Iliescu into a runoff in which he garnered 33.17 percent of the vote. It would be inaccurate to claim that anti-Semitism, or extreme nationalism in general, was the main factor behind the PRM's electoral performance, one that had transformed the party into Romania's second-largest parliamentary formation. (For a discussion of the PRM performance in the 2000 elections see Shafir, 2001 and Mungiu-Pippidi, 2002, pp. 126-131.) The vote was above all a protest vote triggered by the dismal governance of the center-right cabinet that was voted out of power. Even so, for many Romanians the anti-Semitic and xenophobic attitudes of the PRM were not reason enough to refrain from supporting that party, which increased its parliamentary representation nearly fourfold from the last elections.

Much of Ion Iliescu's campaign between the runoffs was geared toward emphasizing his rival's extremist postures and the dangers involved in them for Romania's international image. Yet as he kicked off his campaign to regain the office he had lost to Emil Constantinescu in 1996, quite different notes were being played on the electoral score. In October 2000, in an interview with the daily "Adevarul," Iliescu was keen to tell the electorate that he had always valiantly defended Romania's historical record. His detractors -- of which Tudor had been orchestra conductor, one should add -- were insisting on unimportant gestures (Iliescu had covered his head during visits paid to the Choral Temple in Bucharest and to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 1993) but were overlooking significant matters, Iliescu said. For instance, he added, no one had remarked on the difference between himself and Polish President Lech Walesa: Unlike Walesa, when visiting the Israeli Knesset he had refrained from apologizing for his countrymen's participation in the Holocaust. The issue, Iliescu emphasized, was one that still required elucidation by historians ("Adevarul," 12 October 2000).

Instead of telling his critics that the time has come to assume collective responsibility (which is by no means tantamount to collective culpability), Iliescu was thus striking one more note of utilitarian anti-Semitism. While stopping short of exonerating Antonescu, he was "leaving judgment" to historians. On the eve of his renewed mandate, he told an audience at a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty briefing in Washington that Marshal Ion Antonescu "had some merits" too. It was Antonescu, he said, who had quashed the Iron Guard rebellion in early 1941, and "Antonescu had proved more tolerance" toward the Jews than did Admiral Miklos Horthy's Hungary, not to mention the fact that he "had the merit of liberating the territory occupied by the Soviets." And why, he asked, are double standards applied? Why is Romania being singled out for attempts by some people to rehabilitate Antonescu, while the fact that Marshal Philippe Petain in France is being venerated by some followers is overlooked, as indeed is the fact that Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim is considered a national hero in Finland? Unfortunately, no one in the audience had either the knowledge or the audacity to point out that (despite his personal responsibility for anti-Jewish legislation and the death of enforced labor Jews in 1941 or those massacred as "alien Jews" in and around Novi Sad in 1942) Horthy was a strange anti-Semite who, up to the country's invasion by Germany in March 1944, had in many ways protected Hungarian Jews from a worse fate (see Deak, 2000). And there was no one in the audience to tell Iliescu that Mannerheim, while a Hitler ally because of the Soviet invasion of Finland, had kept Finnish democracy in place and was not guilty of any war crimes, or that a total of seven Finnish Jews perished in the Holocaust -- indeed at least 300 members of the tiny (2,000-strong) Jewish community in that country fought in Finnish uniform alongside the German army for their country's liberation (Pippidi, 2000, pp. 241-242; Deak, 2000, p. 73n). Estimates for Jews exterminated during the war in the territories under Romanian rule, on the other hand, range between 102,000 and 410,000.

Having regained the presidency, Iliescu had lost the electoral "excuse" for employing utilitarian anti-Semitism. Yet he was showing no sign of renouncing it. In a speech at the Choral Temple in Bucharest marking the 60th anniversary of the Iron Guard pogrom in Bucharest on 21 January 2001, he said the Iron Guardist "aberration" had been a "delirium of intolerance and anti-Semitism." However, the president added, that brief "delirium" excepted, there had been no Romanian contribution to "the long European history" of persecution of the Jews and it was "significant" that there was "no Romanian word for pogrom." In other words, there had been no "Antonescu episode" in the history of Romanian Jews. Furthermore, he hastened to add, it was "unjustified to attribute to Romania an artificially inflated number of Jewish victims for the sake of media impact." Romania's distorted image, according to Iliescu, was likely to be corrected when "Romanian (i.e. rather than Jewish) historians will tackle the subject" ("RFE/RL Newsline," 22 January 2001).

Hardly six months had passed, however, and Iliescu's "unique aberration" of 1941 grew slightly larger. With Romania banging on NATO's doors and against the protests in the United States and Israel triggered by the Antonescu cult in Romania, Iliescu attended a ceremony marking the Iasi pogrom where he felt compelled to declare that "NO MATTER WHAT WE MAY THINK, international public opinion considers Antonescu to have been a war criminal" ("RFE/RL Newsline," 26 June 2001. Emphasis added). But what he called "international public opinion" had spoken out before and had then been largely ignored; or, rather, attempts were made to misinform those protesting the Antonescu cult, including by Iliescu himself (see Shafir, 1997, p. 357). Suddenly, Iliescu was discovering it. Still, he was not telling his countrymen that they must change their MINDS about Antonescu (no matter what we THINK) -- only that they must change their DISCOURSE about him -- an option Romanians were certainly not unfamiliar with after nearly half a century of communism.

At the beginning of the same month, a scandal of proportion had shattered the Romanian military, and with it the public at large. General Mircea Chelaru, former chief of staff of the Romanian Army, attended in Bucharest on 1 June the ceremony of the unveiling of a bust of Antonescu. The event took place on the 55th anniversary of the marshal's execution, with the bust being displayed in the courtyard of the Sts. Constantin and Elena church, which Antonescu had founded in 1943. Alongside Chelaru, present at the ceremony were also PRM leader Tudor; his deputy and Senate deputy chairman, historian Gheorghe Buzatu; and Marshal Antonescu League honorary Chairman Iosif Constantin Dragan (Mediafax and AP, 1 June 2001). Known for his extreme nationalist postures, Chelaru had the briefest term a postcommunist chief of staff ever had: from 15 February to 31 October 2000. In between, he had presided over an attempt to unveil an Antonescu statute in Iasi on what was planned to be a "Marshals' Alley." The alley was to host the busts of Romania's two other marshals -- Marshal Constantin Prezan and Marshal Alexandru Averescu. Following protests by the town's Jewish community, the planned Antonescu bust was replaced by one of King Ferdinand, and the bust representing Antonescu was removed to the nearby Letcani Cemetery, which was named on the occasion in Antonescu's honor. According to media reports, there had been pressure to renounce the project from abroad as well, in other words from the United States (see "Azi," 3 April 2000).

Chelaru was forced to resign as chief of staff after having displayed what appeared to be Bonapartist postures: He warned publicly against alleged dangers to the country's territorial integrity by "enclaves" being formed not only in Transylvania --under Hungarian inspiration -- but also in the southern parts of the country, allegedly under Bulgarian inspiration. The suspicion arose that Chelaru might be contemplating some form of military takeover, and that suspicion was perhaps confirmed by his membership upon his dismissal of a group calling itself the National Association of Military Personnel. The group comprised active and retired soldiers who purported to represent an effort to "prevent corruption, anti-social and anti-national acts, and the struggle against crime." Since the group infringed on military statutes, it was not recognized by the Defense Ministry and was forced to disband. According to a U.S. intelligence report, President Constantinescu had argued against Chelaru's resignation, but the Supreme Defense Council decided to impose it "to avoid any misinterpretation [on]...the exercise of democratic control over the armed forces" by NATO ("RFE/RL Newsline," 1 and 2 November 2001). The general became chief of the army's Institute of Strategic Studies upon his resignation as chief of staff.

His participation in the bust-unveiling ceremony was to lead to his departure from the army itself. Under obvious pressure from NATO circles -- as could be read between the lines of a press release by the Defense Ministry -- the general was charged with having infringed on military regulations forbidding participation in manifestations of political character. "It is regrettable," the press release said, that "individual gestures that are connected to a person who has been condemned by the international community [risk] overshadow[-ing] the collective efforts of the Army...to join NATO and the European Union" (AP, 3 June 2001; Mediafax, 4 June 2001). Prime Minister Adrian Nastase intervened personally in the affair, telling a forum of his party that "at least two countries," the United States and Israel, are "disturbed" by the continued Antonescu cult in Romania. As a "representative of the army," the premier added, Chelaru should have "taken into account these sensibilities, particularly at a time when politics are vital for Romania in its relations with NATO and its members" ahead of the planned November 2002 summit in Prague, where enlargement figured high on the organization's agenda (Romanian Radio and Mediafax, 4 June 2001). President Iliescu, in turn, said that each time Chelaru had visited the United States as chief of staff, he had been confronted with a "bad impression" the pro-Antonescu cult created there and questioned on the matter by his counterparts. A man in Chelaru's position, Iliescu added, should have been aware of the "bad marks" detrimental for the country's present efforts to improve its image abroad (Romanian Television, Channel 1, 5 June 2001). Rather than face being court-martialed, Chelaru retired from the army.

Before submitting his resignation, Chelaru stated on Romanian Television that he was "wondering why we should take into account the sensibilities of others, while everybody can scoff at and mock our own sensibilities." Earlier, he told Mediafax "We are being ordered to spit [on everything that is dear to Romanian collective memory], so spit, brothers, spit" (Romanian Television, Channel 1 and Mediafax, 4 June 2001). In an interview with the Romanian Radio about one month after his departure from the ranks, Chelaru emphasized that his decision to leave the army had been determined by the inner conflict (Festinger would have called it "dissonance") he was confronting as a result of an "arbitrary cosmopolitan act" toward a "high-ranking officer" committed by that very organization that should be the "guardian of the nation's symbolic values." As a result, he said, he took the decision to go into retirement and "regenerate" himself (Romanian Radio, 6 July 2001). On the other side of the Atlantic, U.S. Helsinki Committee Co-Chairman Christopher Smith was professing to be "encouraged by the swift and unequivocal response by the Romanian government to the inexcusable participation of General Mircea Chelaru" in the unveiling ceremony of a bust of "Romania's war-time dictator" (declaration in the House of Representatives, 27 July 2002). The "clash of memories" could not be more blatant. As for "regeneration," Chelaru re-emerged in 2002 as the newly elected chairman of the extraparliamentary extreme nationalist Party of Romanian National Unity.

Utilitarian anti-Semitism had thus reached a crossroads. On one hand, what was once a bastion of the marshal's rehabilitation -- the army itself -- was beginning to get rid of some of the cult's most ardent supporters. On the other hand, there could be no doubt that there was both resistance and rejection of the drive within the ranks of the military. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than a volume produced by military historians from the Institute for Defense Political and Military History Studies in 2000. The body of the volume, whose "coordinator," that is to say editor, was Antonescu apologist Colonel Dr. Alexandru Dutu, was a continuation of what Romanian military historians had produced ever since the institute was still called the Center for Military History and Theory and headed by presidential brother Ilie Ceausescu. The introduction, however, took the opposite position. It carried the telling title "A Futile Saga" and was authored by General Mihail Ionescu, who became the new head of the institute in August 2000 (Ionescu, 2000; for an expanded version see Ionescu, 2002). Which of the two sides would now get the ear of Romania's hitherto utilitarian anti-Semites?

* This is an abbreviated version of a paper delivered at the international conference "Jews and Anti-Semitism in the Balkans," Bled, Slovenia, 21-23 October 2002.

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