The small Central European powers, (re)born in the aftermath of World War I on the basis of a forty-eighter nationalist discourse of freedom of peoples to self-determination, but with a political personal marked by the conservative and business-minded nationalism of Bismarckian Realpolitik and an intellectual world already sensitive to a modernizing ideological mix of nationalist mobilization, hygienist social engineering and aggressive ethnic preference. Therefore, these countries appear much more than mere objects, victims of the two totalitarian regimes that frame their space geographically and their fate chronologically during the "century of extremes". As such, Romania is iconic, having massively generated between the two world wars the home-grown politicians of right-wing extremism with a strong fascist trend capable of integrating imperialist and genocidal Nazis projects. Then, after a period of imposed Stalinism, it has developed a model of national-communism mixing productivist Stalinist voluntarism, ultranationalist mobilization recycling old fascist ideologues conveniently out of prisons, state interference into the innermost social life and a heterodox diplomatic model able to attract Western partners. Finally, after 1989, democratization and transition in a difficult economic context favored the continuation of populism in many shapes, including with explicit references to fascism and national-communism - sometimes with the same staff - despite the adoption of rules and institutions necessary for integration of very poorly demanding euro-Atlantic structures.
Geopolitical changes and political radicalism in Romania in a Central European context during the twentieth century