ABSTRACT
Romania is a European Union (EU) Member State situated in southeast Europe. It contains a vast swath of the Carpathian Mountains and is bordered to the south and east by the Danube and the Black Sea. Its Latin origins are strongly reflected in the Romance language and a culture that is closer in nature to other Latin-based cultures than to neighboring Slav and Hungarian cultures. Yet, having been over time in the path of many migrating populations, alternately pressed between the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian powers, and at a crossroads between Catholicism and Orthodoxism, Romania developed a culture with many flavors, occasionally struggling to reaffirm its identity against assumptions based on its location and its inclusion in the former Eastern communist bloc. This struggle perhaps explains the occasional occurrence of nationalism (Livezeanu, 2000). However, Romanians were eager to join the EU in 2007, and contemporary Romanians are inclined to emphasize a European rather than a national identity.
