Liberty Leading the People

after Eugène Delacroix

A generation has passed since the century of humanity’s greatest achievements and its worst violence – and rationally, the age of major conflicts should be over. Liberty, we assume, will lead us toward peace, understanding, and the simple pleasures of life. But history does not move in straight lines. The revolutionary fervor and imperial ambitions of the 19th century can resurface without warning, anywhere, at any moment. It takes remarkably little to stir up resentment, to ignite conflicts that serve no purpose and make no sense. The target is predictable: the outsider. The foreigner poses no real threat, yet difference alone – being other, being foreign – is enough to spark a crisis. Once hostility takes hold, stepping in becomes risky. Some look away; others stand by, indifferent or powerless.

A certain hostility toward foreigners can be observed in Romania as far back as the 19th century, when outsiders settled in the Romanian Principalities and came to occupy primarily urban trades and professions. This attitude, combined with a deep-seated inferiority complex, inevitably strained relations with foreigners and gave rise to an increasingly pronounced nationalist and xenophobic current. Such tendencies became entrenched and persisted over a long period, becoming a reality from which the country has not fully freed itself even today. Xenophobia was openly displayed during the communist years; there is no reason to believe that Romanian society, as a whole, has shed this sentiment. On the contrary, the recent period – against the backdrop of an alarming rise in sovereign-ism and extremism – has been marked by aggressive manifestations of xenophobia, with irresponsible rhetoric from certain politicians only feeding the phenomenon.

Large-scale conflicts are being waged in the name of liberty and democracy, devastating millions of defenseless lives, claiming countless victims, and leaving ruins in their wake. The evidence is all around us: a pointless war in Ukraine, another unleashed in the Middle East, and the chain of crises they have set in motion. In parts of Africa, inter-ethnic violence of unimaginable brutality unfolds alongside a wave of coups. In Latin America, military juntas and cartels wage open war against the state. In the Far East, tensions simmer – China and Taiwan, North Korea and the rest of the world. And looming over it all, the standoff between Russia and the West. That such events remain possible defies rational explanation. It is as though we have circled back to the early 20th century: the same hunger for domination, the same impulse to reshape humanity by force, the same ambition to upend the global order.