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that the label obscures important details and exaggerates to some extent political developments
in Romania and Croatia.
Changes in Romania’s International Relations since 2000 and Ultranationalist Adaptation
Vadim Tudor and PRM have historically maintained a rather ambiguous stance towards
integration into Western institutions, and extracted considerable mileage by positing endless
conspiratorial diagnoses of external threats to Romania’s territorial and political integrity from
numerous sources, most notably states (and their respective secret services), international
financial institutions (intergovernmental as well as private), and transnational secret societies
(e.g., the Francmasons). Major developments in Romania’s international relations have both
significantly undercut ultranationalist arguments based on external threats and potentially sapped
a part of its voting strength as well.
Romania’s admission into NATO at the Prague summit of November 2002 has in one
stroke eased, if not completely eliminated, popular fears of the threat from Hungary and Russia
on the one hand, and of remaining outside any US sphere of influence. Vadim Tudor no longer
has the ability to complain about the threat from Hungary as a NATO insider, even in the rather
dim prospect that Hungary might somehow have maneuvered the other (previously) sixteen
NATO states into supporting territorial surgery and border revisions against an outsider. That is
not to say that nationalist fears about “creeping” autonomy in various proposed forms in districts
with substantial Hungarian populations have dissipated, but that NATO accession has made the
tactic of exaggerating international conspiracies against Romania’s territorial integrity
considerably more difficult to sustain as a substantive or emotional argument. Moreover, the
extension of the NATO shield to Romania as a full-fledged ally means that all but the most
Convention