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Romania The CSCE Meeting in Vienna
The Ceausescu regime's conduct at the Conference on
Security
and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Vienna, which
concluded in
January 1989, reinforced Romania's poor reputation on the
issue of
human rights. After a twenty-six-month review, an
East-West
consensus emerged, but Romania announced it was not bound
by the
agreement. From the start of the negotiations, Romania had
attempted to dilute the draft text prepared by the
nonaligned
states. During the final negotiations, it submitted
seventeen
amendments to remove human rights provisions from the
final
document, in part because the Ceausescu regime realized
that the
agreement would facilitate emigration and create a serious
brain
drain. Other delegations, including some from Warsaw Pact
states,
rejected these efforts. Romania's refusal to abide by the
agreement
drew universal condemnation from the other delegations and
represented another step toward the international
isolation of
Ceausescu's Romania. It appeared unlikely, however, that
the
defiant regime in Bucharest would be greatly swayed by
international objections to its human rights policies.
* * *
Among the most important studies of the Romanian
political
system are Mary Ellen Fischer's examinations of the
Ceausescu
regime: "Participatory Reforms and Political Development
in
Romania," in Political Development in Eastern
Europe, edited
by Jan F. Triska and Paul M. Cocks; "Political Leadership
and
Personnel Policy in Romania: Continuity and Change,
1965-1976," in
World Communism at the Crossroads, edited by Steven
Rosefielde; and "The Romanian Communist Party and Its
Central
Committee: Patterns of Growth and Change," in
Southeastern
Europe. Other excellent sources of information and
analysis
include Michael Shafir's Romania: Politics, Economics,
and
Society ; Daniel N. Nelson's Romania in the
1980s; and
William E. Crowther's The Political Economy of Romanian
Socialism. Foreign policy issues are reviewed and
analyzed in
Aurel Braun's Romanian Foreign Policy Since 1965: The
Political
and Military Limits of Autonomy; Ronald H. Linden's
"Romanian
Foreign Policy in the 1980s: Domestic-Foreign Policy
Linkages," in
Foreign and Domestic Policy in Eastern Europe in the
1980s:
Trends and Prospects:, edited by Michael J. Sodaro and
Sharon
L. Wolchik; George Schöpflin's "Romanian Nationalism,"
published in
Survey; and Robert Weiner's Romania's Foreign
Policy and
the United Nations. (For additional information and
complete
citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of July 1989
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