NATO's Geoana: Romania, in the best moment in history - protected from outside, vulnerable inside

Author:

Published: 19/10/2023 13:25

Sursa foto: Facebook

Romania is at its best moment in history, "safe and secure from the outside, but more vulnerable than ever from the inside", NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana Thursday told the annual conference of the Romania 2030 Project Association.

"For Romania, historically a country of form without substance, this paradigm shift and adaptation to the new global political and economic reality will be extremely complicated. The dictatorship of mediocrity and the extreme politicisation of state institutions make it impossible for politicians to deal with such complex phenomena. And the existing model is itself difficult to understand and even more difficult to transform. Deeply neo-liberal institutions and policies (privatisation, deregulation, a reduced role for the state in the economy, reduced taxation of capital) have been thrown in with a veneer of welfare state, in which education and health, pensions and social benefits come, at least on paper, from the providential state. I have repeatedly spoken of the Romanian paradox in which the country finds itself at the best moment of its history, safe and protected from the outside, but more vulnerable than ever on the inside," Geoana affirmed.

He said that this is a paradox, "because Romania's strategic potential has never been greater, nor has its inability to transform this exceptional strategic valence into economic and development dividends".

"A competitive economy goes hand in hand and mutually reinforces itself with a generous social contract. Investment in education, health, infrastructure and innovation are not mere budgetary expenditures, but catalysts and indicators of any nation's success. It is not the level of taxes that reflects a particular social contract, but the importance and quality of these policies and public services, reflected as norms and values in society," Geoana added.

He spoke about the political capacity of Romanians.

"We have potential, as they say, but we have no relevance. We have geography, but we don't have an economy to match. We have natural resources, but we have squandered our human resources. We have politicians, but we don't have political intelligence," said the NATO Deputy Secretary General.

He said that "Romania has sunk into a crisis of national intelligence, leadership and political education".

"Its scope has stagnated both at state and society level. The country seems to be suffocating under the pressure of a programme of stagnation, not development. We have all fallen into a cadence of treading water, in which nothing seems to work. There is no development because there is no science to design and implement it. The economy and society are held back and dragged down by the way the political class operates," he said.

In his opinion, "the political class needs to review its human resource and this must not only be said, but also assumed".

"You cannot build an economy without culture, without education, without the awareness of value," Mircea Geoana stressed.