“Deep roots” helped democracy spring up from underground

By Juan Miguel Pedraza
Democracy in Romania may have been sparked deep under the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania, a place more noted as the home of Bram Stoker’s literary invention, Dracula, than as a fountainhead of political reform.

There’s nothing fictional, however, about University of North Dakota political scientist Dr. Paul Sum’s research interest in spelunking groups that formed over there in the early days of post-war Romania.

“The principal focus of my research agenda is democratization in post-communist societies, including China, Cuba, Iraq, Lebanon, and especially Eastern Europe,” said Sum, who spent part of the summer in Romania on his research.

“I am doing a lot of work in Romania, where I lived from 1995 through 1998, teaching at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, a city of about 340,000 people in central Romania,” Sum said.  “I was there working on a U.S. Information Agency grant to start a political science department at that university.

“During those three years of teaching, I did lots of collaborative research with colleagues, mostly on how political culture influences democratization,” Sum said.

“The question is about general political orientation, whether that political culture contributes to or erodes the vitality of democratic institutions.  Romania often is cited as having a weak political culture — that is, democracy would be a challenge to establish there.”

“My goal was to see if there was a basis for the political culture argument,” he said.  “Then I started getting interested in the not-for-profit (NFP) sector — what were they contributing toward democratization, and how NFP individuals shaped, and continue to shape, their organizations in terms of those political culture mechanisms.”

Sum’s research encompasses a broad question — one vital in the global community as it deals with societies, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, experiencing the upheaval of transition to democracy — about how and where the social impetus and skills for democratization evolve.

“The big question for me,” Sum said, “was how do these organizations mobilize for political action?  What are they contributing to the policy-making process in a democratic way?  For example, what do social service organizations do for democratization?  What is their stake in the political outcomes?  How much money is available to them?”
The big $1 million question, according to Sum, is “How do they get involved?”

“This past summer, I focused specifically on speological NFPs,” Sum notes.  “There are large cave systems under the Carpathian Mountains.  Speology clubs after 1990 formed a core part of the environmental movement in Romania.”
 
Sum wanted to know what sort of organizational infrastructure existed among these speological groups prior to the 1990 revolution.  “What was their relationship to the state and to the communist party, and what was their level of cooperation with other organizations?” he asked.  “Was it an underground movement, or only ‘underground’ in the sense of being in the caves?”

It is a core fact of democracy that social networks are vital to the health of the system: democracy demands that people participate, at some level or other, in their own governance.

“I observed that these associations, these speological clubs, became social networks of people who shared an interest,” Sum said.  “They went into the caves to escape the doldrums of daily life under the communists.  Now they are legal nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), contributing to policy formation.”

But there’s a lot more to Romania’s romance with democracy and its relatively recent arrival in the international community of countries that have dumped dictatorships in favor of more popular rule.  Romania, Sum notes, had one of the most repressive regimes of the communist eastern bloc.  As a result, Romanians were very isolated.  The central government — the Ceauçescu regime — was in total control of the population and controlled freedom of association.

“Yes, it was very rigidly controlled by Ceauçescu apparatchiks,” Sum notes.  “Romanians are very effective at doing that.  They have a weak political culture, some would say, because the country is more rural-agrarian in nature, and thus, the argument goes, it’s easier to control the population.”

“For me, in this research project, finding caving associations was special,” Sum said.  “The regime was in total control, and it made such groups fill out lots of paperwork.  But once it was approved, once they were in the caves, back in the mountains, the group was free to talk about what they wanted.”

One of the bigger challenges in that society was that one out of five people was part of the network of spies and informants operated by the Securitate, or State Security Department, Romania’s dreaded secret police.  This included a concerted Ceauçescu-inspired policy of having children spying on their parents and other relatives.  However, Sum notes, by the end of the 1990s the Romanian communist ideology was bankrupt, as was the country’s economy, “and everyone knew it.”

In Romania, the communists had undertaken a social revolution, led eventually by Ceauçescu and his cronies.
“Romania was very labor-intensive when the communists took over, and the new regime after World War II imposed a Stalinist (i.e., a communist dictatorship) government style and way of thinking about the region,” Sum said.

And now, he said, it’s tough to separate out what the communists were responsible for and what would have happened anyway to an agrarian society submitted to forced modernization, industrialization, and the mechanization of agriculture.

“Industrialization and mechanization have a very unsettling effect on any society under any form of government, whether totalitarian or democratic,” Sum explained, and this effect was particularly evident in Romania.

No one ever argued that transitioning to democracy was or should be easy, Sum observed.

“No matter how you look at it, this is difficult terrain to navigate, and those are the kinds of issues that have to be tackled as you move into a democracy,” Sum said.  “These speological groups were at the forefront of democratization because they were already organized, they knew about caves, the terrain around the caves, the flora and fauna.  In other words, they understood the environmental context; they understood, for example, the need for clean water.”
So, he points out, those organizations were the first to interface with the new democratically elected government after the revolution of 1990, when the Ceauçescu regime collapsed.  “They were, in effect, interacting with the government as a special interest group,” Sum observed.

Tackling a complex research problem in a different culture requires some familiarity with the local language.  Sum said it was no different for him; having learned the language through “strict immersion,” he now readily navigates the nation’s media and can carry on a conversation in Romanian.

Among the global extensions of his research is Sum’s active participation in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a Vienna-based international group created as an East-West forum during the Cold War era.  The 56-member OSCE — which includes the United States and most of Europe — is an international organization that aims to secure democratic stability based on sound governance.  It has about 3,500 employees, most working in postings around the world; their primary concerns are early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management, and post-conflict rehabilitation.

“The OSCE was created out of the 1975 Helsinki Accord.  It is a basic human rights agreement, and I do a lot of election monitoring for them, especially in Albania,” Sum notes.  “I’m also doing the same thing for the Council of Europe in Bulgaria, Romania, and Macedonia.”

Democratization in Romania — and its impact of organizations on individual members — should offer some vital lessons for future political scientists, social researchers, and others engaged in the political arena of change, Sum avers.

“Theory says that such organizations, even in totalitarian states such as Ceauçescu’s Romania, create democrats,” he said.  “Alternatively, another hypothesis is that good democrats are socialized in other ways and that they congregate in organizations (such as the Carpathian caving groups).”

There’s a U.S. foreign policy reason for understanding this democracy-supporting mechanism, Sum observes.

“For example, American foreign aid that goes to the region often focuses on the NGOs themselves, so the money pours in and says ‘let’s create non-profits.’”

But Sum’s research indicates that what’s actually good for democracy may be the people who start or join these groups.

“So we might want, instead, to support the individuals who are involved,” he said.