Owen Bennett-Jones

‘Same brothel, different whores’: the words chosen by Valentin Gabrielescu of the re-created National Peasants’ Party to express his opinion of Romania’s provisional government, the National Salvation Front. And he’s by no means alone in distrusting Romania’s new rulers. From the lunch tables of the elegantly-appointed restaurant in the Writers’ Union to the raucous student meetings all over Bucharest, the Front, as it calls itself, attracts puzzled enquiry, suspicion and, as often as not, angry derision. The Front’s detractors believe that the revolution has been stolen by Ceausescu’s apparatchiks from its rightful owners: the students who fought for it and the country’s handful of uncompromised dissidents. The Front’s problem is that it has attracted too much support. Police chiefs and factory managers all over the country simply declared themselves to be in favour of the new government and have stayed in place demanding that the same old forms be filled and the same hours worked. So the Front is increasingly perceived as a body that will reform the Communist system rather than overthrow it. In fact, it’s too early to say what ideology it has.

Romania’s attempt to establish democracy lasted almost exactly six months. After the December revolution, Romanians did begin to use their new passports to travel abroad, they were able to buy and sell goods for the most part without fear of reprisals from the state, and for the first time in over forty years, they could freely speak their mind.

The thrice-weekly flights of Romania’s national airline Tarom from Bucharest to London have an atmosphere all their own. In the bleak waiting-room, most of the passengers stand and settle in for the inevitable delay. The room contains a few Romanians excited to be on their way to Western Europe and many more West Europeans delighted to be on their way back to civilisation as they know it. Most of the West Europeans came to Romania filled with good intentions. Aid workers, nurses, theatre groups, sports teams arrived keen to discover more about a country that has been effectively off limits for the past two decades. But by the time they leave much of the good will has been worn out and many feel angry, depressed and insulted.

People who work at night are obsessed by their inability to sleep in the day. Night-shifts are incomplete without a desultory conversation about the best way to order one’s hours. ‘Desultory’ because the conversation has taken place countless times before. Should you stay up for a couple of hours alter the night shift so as to achieve near-terminal exhaustion before sleeping? Or maybe it’s best to sleep immediately for two hours, go for a swim and then sleep again for the rest of the day. Then again, you could go to the Bush House dormitory for an hour or two in the night and try to sleep amid the snores and coughs of, among others, Bulgar, Burmese and Bangladeshi colleagues. The permutations are endless but as we all know, the net results are the same: people who regularly work nights are pale, bad-tempered and die of coronaries in their fifties.

For forty years after the Second World War, the Swiss had every reason to believe that theirs was the optimal form of government. There was political and social stability, full employment, virtually no crime and, for a time, the highest per capita income in the world. Switzerland’s system of government with its many celebrated peculiarities was not only unique but uniquely successful. Which helps explain why the country’s fall from grace has been so hard to bear. Not only is Switzerland now widely reviled as having been the fence for stolen Nazi loot: it is facing its first serious economic depression in living memory, with unemployment at 6 per cent and rising. Industries which once led the world face ever tougher foreign competition. Many Swiss are beginning to wonder what they have to do to stay on top: do their traditional institutions need reforming?