Prof. Dr.

Viorel Roman, academic advisor at the Bremen University

roman@uni-bremen.de

STRATEGIES FOR ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

IN ROMANIA AND THE EUROPEAN UNION

Announcing the 25 year plan for a lasting development of Romania in the

presence of His Beatitude Patriarch Teoctist and other high ranking
dignitaries, president Ion Iliescu made a comprehensive review about the
state of the nation and the consequences of transition after the December
1989 revolution:
 disintegration of industrial type agriculture structures,
 return to outdated means of subsistence,
 reversing of industrialization and urbanization,
 weakening of social and national cohesiveness,
 degradation of education and health systems,
 dramatic reduction of buying power, birth rates and life expectancy.

This social and economic disaster places Romania at the lowest level
among the EU countries in 35 years. No wonder the college students do
not want to wait anymore and about three quarters of them prefer “an
individual integration” in the West.

The Romanians working abroad send annually home over one billion
American dollars. Individually, Romanians are competitive. Could not it
be possible collectively? What would be the strategies for transforming
the structures, the living style and standards in Romania?

East-West Discrepancy

To start with, let us acknowledge the divide between the Greek-Orthodox

East and the Roman-Catholic/ Protestant West. Emerging anew after
revolution with tragic results for Romanians, this divide is still ignored by
the post-communist elite.
 Agriculture and the rural subsistence culture are dominant in the East, whereas in
the West advanced industrial technologies and urban culture are prevalent.
 Wages, productivity, political participation, professional mobility, social
differentiation are modest in the East, yet in the West they register high levels.
 Social organizing is simple and informal in the East, but sophisticated in the West.
  Direct and personal in the East, social control is indirect and institutionalized in
the West.
 In the Orient, Christendom is of the state whereas secularism prevails in the
western world.
 The West has universal values, while the East has peculiar ones.

Outcome of a thousand year schism, of a separate evolution for

Orthodoxy versus Catholicism, this dichotomy of values generates
different societies: a deadlock. How could it be overcome?

Imperialist and Communist Strategies

The expanding of product and service exchanges, of western science and

culture, of the Roman Code of laws, and of reasonable contracts and
organizations – in a word the Capitalism – enters periodically in conflict
with the norms, values, interest entities, cultures, etc. otherwise known as
the religions of Eastern Europe, South America, Asia and Africa. As a
consequence in the globalization era, the economic sciences are again
thoroughly approached as during the 19th century imperialism.

The first strategists of change, of transition towards western civilization,

Max Weber and Karl Marx saw in capitalism a product of work protestant
ethics (Weber), considering impossible its implementation in Orthodoxy,
Hinduism, Islamism, etc. Since the norms and structures of religions have
consolidated along centuries, it is hard to imagine that they would be
adaptable to the mobility, productivity, reasonability required by the
Capital (Marx). Therefore the communists fought for a world market
against all religions that they labeled “opium for the masses”; religions
that surely are fortresses of resistance against the logic of borderless
capital, imperialism and globalization.

One and a half century after the Communist Manifesto there is an

obvious necessity for a global coordination of economies, as well as for
the protection of workers and environment against the excesses of
capitalism. Communism that was initially a tribute glorifying the
Prussian/German bureaucracy will, thought the communists, do away
with the bloody corrupt capitalists and afterwards the freed proletarians
will work according to their capacities and consume as dictated by their
needs. Heaven on earth! Administrated by idealist party activists armed
with Judeo-Prussian discipline and ethics.

Communism overtook the bureaucratic German imperial idea, continental

and authoritarian, as well as the Anglo-Saxon capitalist concept, maritime
and democratic. Lenin introduced the proletarian dictatorship in Russia
and Stalin expanded it to other countries including Romania. Reaching a
dead-end, Gorbachev and Iliescu abandon the communist dream and
search for an adjustment to the contemporary imperialism.

Together with the West, Romania is looking today for strategies that
endeavor the reforming of socio-economic life and structures with the
purpose of achieving EU integration in 2007.

Integration in the European Union

On one hand, all Romanians favor the integration of their country in the
Euro-Atlantic structures, West-European legislation and the social-
economic organization based on a 81,000 pages Acquis Communitaire.

On the other hand, the Romanians do not seem yet able to differentiate
between integrating individually and integrating collectively, between the
European laws or organizations and the Orthodox ones. They do not see,
or do not want to see the incompatibility between the economic and
socio-political systems of organizing in Orthodox countries and those in
the Catholic/Protestant countries.

If the Orthodox-communist camp and the Iron Curtain had helped to

institutionalize an incompatibility between East and West, between
Orthodoxy and Capitalism, there is in today’s Romanian transition a
tendency to overlook this reality.

Two societies cannot build an European common home in the absence of

a strategy deemed to harmonize divergent values and norms. Since the
collective Orthodox do not know the Acquis, the lay form of the Roman
Catholic canonic code, they fear the unknown and rather aspire for an
individual entry in EU.

The desire for integration is sincere. At the same time there are present
counterproductive actions such as the abstract presentation of western
norms outside the frame of the Roman Catholic law system and the
Orthodox effort to avoid the religious back-round of integration by trying
to use cultural palliatives in place of a dialogue with Rome. Such actions
are also undesirable from the perspective of the 25 year Plan because they
delay the process of organizational reform.

How is it possible to overcome this hurdle in the areas of communication,

cooperation and coordination of activities between Romania and the
West?
Religion and economy

Religion is the key, the foudation of socio-economic behavior, which

explains why the unification of Europe based on a tehnocratic and
abstract acquis, without the joining of Chritsian values, broken in two for
a thousand years, is illusory.

Let us remember, that the interdependence between religion and society

has been for a half century made into a taboo in the Comunist-Orthodox
camp and denounced as a reactionary sort of misticism. So it should not
be at all surprizing that Romanians avoid the issue with some trepidation.

From Weber, Marx there has been a continuity in approaching

communication barriers and conflicts generated by religious cultures.
Samuel P. Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations foresees the conflicts
with Afghanistan and Irak. Niall Ferguson of New York University sees
even today’s German economic stagnation as the result of a diminished
protestant ethics. Barro and McCleary, experts of the National Bureau of
Economic Research in the USA, have collected data and analyzed the
relationship between the belief in God, heaven and hell, between the
attendance frequency of worship-places and economic development in
the 59 states.

The University of Michigan (The World Values Survey) makes a period-

by-period classification of cultures, showing that behind them always
stands a dominant religion, based on four values; rational-secular;
traditional; survival; self-expression.

1) Catholic Europe. Austria, Belgium France, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain.

Here the degree of liberty, self-expression are high, with a good balance
between rational, secularized and traditional values. Social stability, and
an overarching system of social security makes for the individual survival
values to be less developed.

2) Protestant Europe. Denmark, Switzerland, Finland, Germany (West),

Island, Norway, Holland, Sweden. Here the degree of personal liberty,
self-expression, rational values, and secularism are the highest in the
world. As well as in Catholic Europe and for the same considerations, the
personal survival values are also weaker.

3) Orthodox Europe. Albania, Belarus, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Macedonia,

Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine. Lacking an
adequately functioning social system, the survival capacity of Russians
and Romanian is quite remarkable, while the Moldavians‘, closely
competitive with the Russian‘s, is among the highest in the world. In
Romania traditional norms are much more pregnant than the rational,
secularized ones. As a consequence, the will of self-expression here is the
weakest in the world.

4) English language countries. England, New Zeeland, Canada, Ireland,

USA. In Euro-Atlantic protestant countries the degree of liberty, self-
expression are similar, but the level of rational, secularized values is
much diminished. More than elsewhere, in the USA traditional values
predominate.

5) South America. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, El Salvador,

Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Venezuela. The Latin-
American Catholicism by being a combination between traditional,
liberty- and self-expression values with a clear preponderance of
traditional values is unlike North America or Europe, where the Spanish
and Portuguese colonists came from.

6) Confucian countries. China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan. In Asia religion is

in search of balance, a harmonization of human relations, based on astral
or natural models. Here the degree of secular, rational values is quite
high, on par to that of the North European countries. Moreover, here the
balance between survival and traditional values is a good .

7) Asia. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Iran,

Turkey. In countries where Abrahamic religions took root, that is the
belief in a single, unique and abstract Deity, both survival and traditional
values predominate. As a result, norms and values of individual liberty
and self-expression and those tied to secularism and rationalism are still
undeveloped.

8) Africa. Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, Niger, South Africa, Tanzania,

Uganda, Zimbabwe In traditionally animist countries or in those
converted to Christianity or Islam during the colonial era, the traditional
and survival values are strongest. Freedom, self-expression and rational,
secularized values are the least developed in the world.

The Cultural Code

In completing the American way of seeing and classifying the

predominating norms and values in religious cultures, let us review the
five principles of the Frankfurt School of sociologic thinking.
I. The principle of reciprocity. In each human society there is a code of
communication, rules upon which presents, greetings, compliments and
offences, etc. are exchanged, accepted or excluded.
According to these rules do people in the final analysis coordinate their
activities or cooperate positively, in realizing marriages, stable
organizations, or act negatively, by divorcing, entering in conflicts, wars,
etc.

II. The principle of preferences. In each society value judgments are

made permanently for he sake of differentiating between good and evil,
between tolerable and intolerable.
Based on this process moral judgments are continually passed, in the end
always for the victory of the past, of the holly tradition.
In our relations we always prefer or reject something. This is the reason
for which mutual tolerance has been institutionalized to the point of
belief that this might be applied in an unprejudiced manner even to the
study of social sciences.

III. The principle of collective identity. Human societies have limits--

some are accepted, others are excluded. In the name of individualism,
cosmopolitism, globalization we may certainly protest, but without great
success.

IV. The principle of camouflaged and subtle communication, indirectly or

by taboos. All human societies have a code of communication which
implicitly or very clearly prescribes whatever it is permissible to express,
or whatever is to be wailed, prohibited, a taboo.
Even those who will fight against taboos, as a rule will reformulate them,
by modernizing the old or by creating new ones, as was the case with
people of Enlightment, or more recently, with Communists and
Globalists.

V. The principle of lethal consequences. Each action, human endeavor

bring about more or less desirable consequences, which, in turn, generate
other even less controllable effects, and so on.
In the past this chain of weaknesses was defined as something destined to
happen, assignable to fate. In our days, in the era individualism, this
somewhat fatalistic principle is controversial at best, since the modern
human being believes that everything is dependent on his will.

Conclusions

In organizations, the cultural foundation of norms and values stands on

society’s religious code, as this may be observed by using the American
model and the German principles. This is an undeniable truth against
which all imperialists have fought in the 19., Communists in the 20.
century, and the theoreticians of globalization, the integrationists in the
UE, even today. So, without harmonizing the values of Orthodoxy with
those of the West, the social-economic integration between organizations
from East and West remains an illusory goal. Romania and the second
Romanian state, The Republic of Moldova, has a choice, either to reorient
and reorganize according to the Community acquisitions of the UE, or to
stay at Europe’s periphery. An old issue.

Re-forging Christian unity has been a goal for one thousand years. Only
this unity can create the necessary background for the political-
administrative union with Europe. Presently, the process is proceeding
exactly the other way around. This is exactly the way EU aquis is being
now implemented, that is, first the laic form of Roman-Catholic canonic
code, and only subsequently,--or in the best case simultaneously,--by
harmonizing values in Romania and Moldova.

In the cultural transition of Romanians towards the EU model, for more

than a decade now, new laws, Western organizations have been adopted
in the hope that the form will generate the substance, but since the
dichotomy of values, norms, that is the religion dimensions of integration
in Europe are still ignored, the results are also less than expected. This
much President Iliescu admitted in his 25-year plan for durable
development in Romania.
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