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establishing and institutionalizing political multilateralism as an instrument for the political resolution of tensions and conflicts. Unfortunately, the revanchist instincts of
the defeated and those unhappy with the outcomes of the war eventually brought down the League of Nations and sparked the Second World War, whose degree of devastation in human and material terms was to outdo by far those of the First World War.
That the Second World War was won by largely the same that were victors in the previous war made the results of the Paris Peace Treaties smaller in scope than those of Versailles, but no less portentous.
The rebirth of globalist multilateralism through the establishment of the Organization of the United Nations was a great leap forward, coinciding however with the outset of the Cold War, as the world was divided into two social, political and economic systems, which were not just competing, but in fact antagonistic.
The 1975 signing of the Helsinki Final Act
and the birth of what was to become the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe - OSCE marked a moment of detente between the two opposing camps, which in turn opened the way to the wave of anti-communist revolutions around and after 1989 and the collapse of the USSR. Far from foreboding the “end of history”, those developments injected a new dynamic into its course.
Out of this various trends and processes have since grown in an accelerated globalization, changing the way in which people, societies and states inter- related, in ways often and mostly unanticipated, as some actors grow in influence and multiple poles of power emerge internationally, with advanced integration at some regional levels based on shared values and interests, but also with centrifugal trends in other structures of the international order no longer viable in a highly dynamic environment. And in some respects, one may regretfully note 18
that in many parts of the world, the end of the Cold War has given way to situations of hot peace with instances of local conflicts behind which one can easily detect the influence of outer actors competing on multiple levels.
Where we are
Throughout the first 100 years of its existence, Romania’s path has closely reflected many convolutions of European and world history that it mostly unable to shape.
The end of the First World War brought along the crowning achievement of the completion of the national ideal of the Great Union, firmly establishing Greater Romania on the way already opened by the Little Union of 1859, that of Europeanization, modernization and development. On the other hand, the Second World War resulted in its losing freedom of decision and autonomy, as well
as territories, and in sacrificing a whole generation and, worst yet, with the end of the war, in our country being caught behind a dark curtain.
The communization of Romania amounted
to an abandonment of European and liberal values, straying off the path of democracy, and the loss of opportunities for economic development by the squandering away of its human and material potential in exorbitant projects far removed from its genuine needs.
Romania freed itself of the Communist utopia with the price of numerous lives, and in so doing regained its rightful place in the family of societies built on the true European and universal values, on democracy and freedom as the foundations for real prosperity.
In foreign policy, whose commitments
have translated into solid internal norms, Romania’s new status was enshrined successively through its accession to the fundamental institutions of the European and Euro-Atlantic communities: the Council of Europe, the North-Atlantic Treaty