Founding Dilemmas: Bad or Good Continuity in the Romanian Narratives on Political Models?

Abstract

When discussing South-Eastern Europe and Romania in particular, we often talk about the failure of liberalism or the failure of democracy. The literature identifies several causes, many passing through different explanatory narratives that have varied over the last thirty-five years and that have considered, not exclusively but dominantly, the question of continuity, assumed or denied, with the old regime. The debate about continuity: was it there or not? still seems to structure to some extent the Romanian understanding of the relationship to democratic modernity. Does such a pattern exist? Can it be correlated, from a political science perspective, with the contemporary models shaped and discussed by modernity scholars? Is it based on the option of accepting or rejecting the idea of continuity with the previous regime? How exactly can they fit and how have they evolved, over this period, both explanatory models related to what we call the Romanian "difficult democracy" and more general ones related to a crisis of modernity? The present paper analyzes, starting from the dominant explanatory narratives, the discursive and explanatory implications for possible readings of Romanian political models.