The Authoritarian Temptation: Turning a Modern Tyrant into a Political Role Model in post-Communist Romania

Abstract

A survey of post-1989 Romania is to indicate that while looking forward and striving for democratic achievements, the country also had to look backward and “come to terms” with her non-democratic recent past. Unfortunately, for more than 15 years after the collapse of communism no firm resolution has been brought to any of these pasts. The present paper is an overview of the politics of memory and its impact on the process of democratization in the case of Romania from 1989 to 2004. In this sense it focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on the way Romanian society dealt with history, memory, and amnesia when it came to Ion Antonescu and the Romanian Holocaust.