The paper provides the ideal-typical narrative of European integration manufactured by Romanian intellectuals and the official national Church (Greek-orthodox), that could be summarized as follows: in the realm of the spirit, Europe would have survived mainly in the East, shepherded by such intellectuals as the Romanian ones and by the spiritual legacy of the Orthodox Church; in political and economic terms, European Union is monitored according to secularist and relativist guidelines by the bureaucracy in Brussels. Whatever the latter, together with their Romanian counterparts, may have realized in the course of European enlargement is of little concern for the former. Both the Church and the mainstream intellectuals are engaged now in an operation that should have defined them long before the fall of state socialism: to boost intellectual non-conformity with respect to the political dominant discourse as a way of refusing the debate by taking it seriously. And they do it by means of the same narrative device that kept them silent under communism: they tell the story of the prevalence of culture and the spiritual over everything political.

European spirit, European integration, intellectuals, Church, post-secularism

The political regime change that occurred in Romania, along with the dismissal of communism, elicited a process of emergence of new political elites and of new patterns in the functioning of the country’s political institutions. But new political elites do not emerge ex nihilo and institutional changes are slower in practice than the ambition of change. Given the extensive absence of decision-making or technical expertise among the political actors, the new parties in government conducted a policy of cooption of personnel instituting new patterns of selection. The paper will emphasize the fact that, in the Romanian case, the process of professionalization of governmental personnel took the form of a long process, and that the protocols of the reconfiguration implied divergent strategies in what concerns the governments’ ministers and the secretaries of state. It will be shown that although the ministerial careers suggest the institutionalization of recruitment procedures similar to other European parliamentary democracies, the junior ministers’ level remained dominated by forms of cooption from outside the political realm.

Governmental elites, political recruitment, professionalisation, nomenklatura, postcommunism

Aiming at filling a gap in the existing literature, this paper advances the analysis of available alternatives to party representation, namely independent candidatures. For that reason, we consider the context of Eastern Europe, and particularly the last decade when a considerable number of independent candidatures have been advanced. Particularly, the Romanian political system provides one viable example for the examination of independent candidacies, with numerous independents running in the national and local elections which were held after 1989. Therefore, the focal objectives of this text are to identify the peculiarities of this particular breed of politicians, what stimulates them to run independently in elections, and also why certain parts of the electorate choose to vote for independent candidates.