ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Romania has struggled with a Balkan identity in a century of independence that has been full of turbulence and indeed tragedy. It focuses on its present transition from a closed political system to one engaged with the West, in a region that itself has suffered from being a zone of transition in a violent world. The chapter examines the historical influences that have given the Balkans its unenviable reputation in the rest of the world. The geographical position of the Balkans as a crossroads between Europe and western Asia made it a land of shifting frontiers where different civilizations collided. For the first fifty or so years of independence, a tenable case could be made for claiming that Romanians had transcended the problems that were making the Balkans a byword for misrule. Iliescu zigzagged between authoritarian practices and acceptance of the inevitability of democracy in the first half of the 1990s.
