Page 36 - Romania 100

For a long time, the challenge for us was to get others - and first and foremost our strategic partners - to recognise and adopt our conception of Romania’s role and strategic positioning. The strengthening
of our participation in NATO and the EU has considerably facilitated this approach.
For a long time, the geopolitical definition of Romania as “a Central European country, close to the Balkans” was one of the most plausible strategic identifiers for us. In the last decade, in the context of the mutations in the policies followed by
our co-riparian countries,
but especially in the wake
of the illegal annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation determined in eastern Ukraine, namely with the alteration
of the power dynamics in
the Black Sea region, the
most prominent geostrategic identifier for Romania became that of a responsible state that is able to generate security and confidence in an area carrying today at least as many strategic interests and tensions as the Baltic Sea region.
Now, when we celebrate the Centenary of the Great Union
– although we should mention that the Romanian state was born long before, and the Romanian people and the idea of Romania had appeared even before that - the mutations, the challenges and – as mentioned repeatedly
– the strategic opportunities for Romania mostly refer to the way in which we enter the global competition as part of larger entities, the only ones able to keep us all Europeans in the game in the era of hyper-globalisation.
There are at least 3 trends
in contemporary global dynamics, with which Romania, like other EU members and North Atlantic allies, cannot cope and which such countries cannot turn to their advantage unless they address and negotiate those structural changes together.
Mihnea Motoc, Defence Advisor to the President of the European Commission
First of all, today’s world marks a somewhat paradoxical rebound in high-power
politics, concomitantly with
the restriction of adherence
to multilateralism; military power considerations once again have a massive impact on the foreign policy of the major world players; the liberal offer for a reconsideration of global order is competing with alternative experiences that, for the first time in modern history, seem to be able only partially or in the short term
to deliver comparable results to those provided so far only by the order based on liberal rules, at least at the economic level.
Secondly, technological evolution is now taking place through quantum leaps, with consequences and effects that are paradigmatic. Today it truly changes and accelerates history.
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