When foreigners “love” your home country
and why I can’t just be happy about it
The other day, one of my closest friends sent me an article on Romania she had come across in Der Spiegel. Title: Wie ich es schaffte, Bukarest in mein Herz zu schließen, or, literally, How I managed to take Bucharest into my heart.
The premise of this genre of articles is something I’m very familiar with by now: author struggles in Godforsaken country. It is ugly. It is dangerous. It is dirty. People eat “lamb’s brain” here! But through sheer will power, the author ends up tolerating it — then, lo-and-behold, even ends up liking it.
The article ends with a (rather reluctant) recommendation to visit Bucharest, although I’m not sure who in their right mind would visit a city after reading said author’s experience of finding the police in her AirBnB (if anyone knows what went on there… I’d love to know).
Of course this particular experience is extreme, but the overall conclusion of the piece is arguably positive. It comes with a good intention. So why can’t I just be happy with a positive overall recommendation from a foreigner encouraging other travellers to visit my country? Reader, the answer is obvious. These kinds of articles deal in backhanded compliments, finding oblique ways of saying, “my GOD, this place is awful!” and “despite it all, I found some good in it!”
You might be thinking, “Oh, come on: there was no bad intention here,” “It’s gonzo journalism!” “Isn’t any publicity good publicity?!”
But if you’re coming from pretty much anywhere that is not western Europe, odds are you will know exactly how this feels.
Romania: A History of Disastrous PR
Let’s call it what it is. If there were ever an awards show for worst soft power national representations, Romania would be leading the way, with its long history of messed up PR. It wasn’t enough that the country barely survived four decades of communist dictatorship which burned right through its culture and heritage, ravaged the intellectual ranks, and indirectly killed tens of thousands of women through illegal abortions.
No, after 1989 Romania was resurfacing in the Western media’s attention as the ultimate scapegoat for a number of key themes that included the Roma, petty theft, human-trafficking, stealing jobs, and, of course, swan cuisine.
The pervasive negative Western European media focused on Romanians, the Roma and Bulgarians has been studied at length in the academic sphere (list of recommended reads below for those of you interested) — the explanation is, as always, textbook socio-politico-economic: a result of European Romaphobia, a resistance to Balkanism, a form of Orientalism, and, in the early 2000s, a reaction against the overwhelming migration movement that resulted from the EU’s largest round of country accessions in 2004 called the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union. Be careful what you wish for?
The “freedom of movement” of EU migration meant that the West could no longer hold on to the prerogative of observing the East “from afar and, so to speak, from above” (the one, the only, Edward Said). The old EU member states were suddenly grappling with having underestimated the numbers of labour migrants coming in waves from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria and gradually started implementing what is referred to as “securitization” tactics in the media.
Without getting into too much detail, securitization of migration is a classic technique that reframes migration as a threat to the existing status quo; it’s a process not only of other’ization, but of portraying immigrants as agents of social instability. You don’t need me to tell you that these tactics are traditionally employed by populist and/or wide-circulation broadsheets such as BILD, Sun, Telegraph, La Repubblica, La Razón, etc.
But here’s the thing. There’s something crucial about how social representation is enacted in media, in social and political discourse alike, anthropologically speaking. There’s two processes that come together, one of objectification — simplifying information which allows you, the reader/ listener/consumer, to engage with an otherwise intangible concept; and one that has been referred to as anchoring: classifying the unfamiliar within a system of familiar categories to make it more “palatable”.
Of course conservative, right leaning publications will use straight forwardly negative objectification and anchoring techniques — but what’s interesting is noticing the more nuanced, indirect social representation in center/center-left media and messaging: the anchoring is still subtly in the familiar categories of perception when it comes to Eastern Europe, Romania more specifically (poverty; backward; dirty; dangerous) but the objectification swings the opposite way (“It’s actually great!”)
“BUT WHAT ABOUT CONSTANTIN BRÂNCUȘI! TRISTAN TZARA! NADIA COMĂNECI! PALME D’OR FOR OUR CINEMA!” Romanians would shout, desperately trying to cling on to the few externally validated sources of pride and fame for Romania.
The truth is that all this is too little, too late, with almost no voices truly representing Romania’s cultural treasures on the outside. In the unspoken hierarchy of Eastern European countries, Romania is certainly far from the top — Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia or the Baltic countries, all fare higher in national brand perception.
Where was I? Romania’s post-1989 generation
Born just in time for the 1989 Revolution and the infamous transition from communism to capitalism, the “tragedy” of my generation was that we were brought up with peak western pop culture on TV: MTV, VH1, Seinfeld and M.A.S.H.
Before moving to the capital city, Bucharest, where I started school, I lived like a literal Romanian Heidi in a small mountain side town called Sinaia. There was no cable TV during that time — the TV would only be switched on by my granddad to watch the evening news and I couldn’t think of anything more boring than watching TV. When I moved to the city I was stunned — TV was amazing: Cartoon Network! Animal Planet! Sailor Moon! And a daytime retrospective on the national channel on Alfred Hitchcock that in hindsight left me with a debilitating fear of crows.
My generation grew up consuming, romanticizing, and idealising the West. The West was MTV, it was the Spice Girls, it was Steve Irwin and it was Polly Pocket. It was Nouvelle Vague, Radiohead, Converse All Stars and Twin Peaks. It was popstar culture, consumerism, and opportunity.
So when we rocked up at the gates of the West, in our own minds fully ready to become an integral part of the culture we had so devotedly absorbed, we realised that no amount of western pop culture embodiment could, or would, hide the fact that we were not westerners. To our great surprise, we realised we were the Other. Imagine our stark disillusionment — what do you mean, “Do we have TVs back home?”
During my first years abroad as a student, I found myself expressing gratitude for backhanded compliments about Romania. It’s not a particularly good feeling. It’s one of those cognitive dissonance moments, when it can feel nauseating, smiling and waving; when you sense you’re agreeing and validating something that doesn’t feel fully right with you.
Who’s the hypocrite here?
Of course, we’re all guilty of this “backhand compliment” in some way, myself included. I have no doubt that at some point I have sounded utterly annoying talking about my trip to North India with my besties (one happens to be Indian, ok). No doubt someone listening to me will have thought, “Here’s this privileged white girl, rambling on about how much she loved traveling across India with her privileged friends” — and, the pièce de résistance, “Here she is, talking about that special mix of poverty, beauty and kindness”.
I remember when I started traveling to Southeast Asia with my parents, kids at my school bullied me about it. “Don’t you have money to travel to the West?” “Why would you go to Asia?” they’d shout. All to show that, in Romania, as much as elsewhere, the same rules of ethnocentrism, xenophobia and downright racism apply.
In the same vein when it comes to social representation in media and beyond, Romanians objectify and anchor those “unfamiliar” further eastern entities not far from how Romanians themselves are categorized in Western Europe: as undesirable.
In Romania, the Westerner (“expat”) is accommodated to, welcomed and even lowkey adored. The Easterner (“immigrant”) is tolerated, blamed, and closely observed. In fact, the “securitization of migration” is activated in full speed in Romanian press as we speak, against the wave of Asian workers that moved to Romania in record numbers over the past years to work in industries short of labour force. And, of course, the focal point of Romanian racism and discrimination enacted throughout centuries and with no end in sight: the Roma community.
The flywheel spins Eastwards. Eastern Europeans will never experience the entitlement that naturally comes from having been born in a ruling power nation — because they are not one to the West. Yet they will, unintentionally or totally intentionally, jump at the chance to exercise power over those that are “Eastern” to them.
But in this flywheel of ethnocentrism and backhanded compliments, I would argue that being a visitor from the East means you get better at listening, even though that’s sometimes just a byproduct of not being given the space to speak — but still. When you listen, you’re more likely to learn more, and then more likely to love more. And that is, in my books, the whole point of traveling to foreign lands.
Listen, I get it — writing about foreign countries is hard. But an article like the one just published in Der Spiegel belongs to a different time and age, and I’m not sure I can find much of an excuse for it being published in today’s climate. I feel we’ve come so far with woke culture, we’ve learned about exercising curiosity and empathy. It’s time to implement.
Is Bucharest a gorgeous city? For the sake of the comedic twist, I should have said, Hell no! But you know what? On its good days — it kind of is gorgeous. Are parts of it dirty? For sure, but have you ever been to Whitechapel, or to Neukölln, or to Marseille as a whole?
People talk about Bucharest in terms of nostalgia, and I’m not sure this is the right word for it — nostalgia for what? For the lost opportunities? For the lost desirability? The lost artists and great thinkers that could have given Romania more of a name?
If anything, Bucharest is a survivor. This city is the embodiment of all the crazy events that have slowly ripped it to parts over four decades of communism, and another three decades of headless capitalism. It is made up of contrasts and contradictions, between old and new, bourgeois and tacky, rich and poor, ugly and beautiful. These all make Bucharest, and Romania, what it is.
Have I managed to give my own country a non-backhanded compliment?
***
Some reads:
Todorova, M., (2009) Imagining the Balkans. Oxford University Press.
Wolff, L. (1994) Inventing Eastern Europe: the map of civilization on the mind of the enlightenment, Stanford University Press.
Van Baar, H., (2011) Europe's Romaphobia: problematization, securitization, nomadization. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29(2): 203-212.
Van der Dussen, J. and Wilson, K. eds., 1995 (2005). The history of the idea of Europe. Routledge.
Wodak, R. and M. Reisigl, (1999) Discourse and Racism: European perspectives. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28: 175–99.
Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. eds., (2009) Methods for critical discourse analysis. Sage.
van Dijk, T.A. (1984) Prejudice in Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins
Tileagă, C. (2006). Representing the ‘Other’: A discursive analysis of prejudice and moral exclusion in talk about Romanies. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 16, 19–41.
Wodak, R. & Matouschek, B. (1993). ‘We are Dealing with People Whose Origins One can Clearly Tell Just by Looking': Critical Discourse Analysis and the Study of Neo-Racism in Contemporary Austria. Discourse & Society - DISCOURSE SOCIETY.
von Rosen, J. (2019). The Securitization of Migration as a Threat to Liberal, Democratic Societies. Sicherheit Und Frieden (S+F) / Security and Peace, 37(1), 35–40.
Bello, V. (2020). The spiralling of the securitisation of migration in the EU: from the management of a ‘crisis’ to a governance of human mobility? Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48(6), 1327–1344.
A more fitting title for the article in Der Spiegel would have been, “What Eating Lamb’s Ear in Eastern Europe Taught Me About Resilience”
This was so interesting to read and reflect on, Ana. Keep it coming! :)