On not getting on - Romania and Hungary

A Romanian film won the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival. Something's happening in our neighbour's cultural life which has attracted the whole of Europe's attention. But what do we know of this in Hungary? Why do we still have prejudices about Romania? Something is missing from our picture. And the same goes for Romanians' views of Hungary. hvg.hu spoke to Boroka Paraszka, editor of a newspaper in Marosvasarhely (Targa Mures) in Romania.

Boroka Paraszka © Stiller Ákos

Boroka Paraszka: Partly, they are forced to. Romania's image is not very good, even if it has changed recently. The old, post-communist inheritance - the saddest of all the barracks - all this has to be overcome. And now there is the new conflict with Europe over the Romanian diaspora, the migrants and the guest workers.

Has this got worse with EU accession or did things get easier?

B. P.: Europe still doesn't recognise that it shares some of the responsibility for the social misery in the East, for the fact that there is a crowd pushing in at the gates that wants work and bread.

But it wouldn't hurt for some parts of Romanian society to accept that there is a problem before they start provoking pogroms against themselves in Milan, Madrid or anywhere else. That's why Romania has started an intensive programme of cultural diplomacy. There's another, internal reason. While Hungary's cultural elite was a loser of the regime change, becoming divided and insecure, in Romania, they found their way into the political elite. They built up their political connections very tactically, managing to make cultural life a kind of strategic industry.

Didn't this lead to corruption?

B. P.: There were compromises, but they were of a different nature. The fundamental strategy was to create a new elite for Romanian society. A young elite. This wasn't about their age, but about the process of creating an unprecedented way of thinking. A clean slate was needed.

And so the new cultural elite couldn't easily be corrupted. Their defence is that they belong nowhere, that they produce work of the highest quality. That they are truly an elite. There is training for the cultural elite. There are elite publishers, there is an elite culture - and they have links to the West.

Is the money flowing to Romania as well?

B. P.: I have indirect knowledge of Romania's cultural foundations via the foundation that supports the Marosvasarhely weekly A Het [The Week], but it seems to me that the funds have a huge amount of money. As far as the promotion of literature is concerned, it's not just the fact that they give bursaries to some writers. There is a translation industry. The aim is to make sure our writers appear in as many languages as possible, in the best places and at the highest quality.

So the money flows into culture, and it's not the politicians and the paymasters who say what should happen?

B. P.: Plenty of money must be spent irresponsibly in Romania as well. I can't really see what the Romanian Cultural Institute in Hungary is doing. It's possible that this is because Romania is looking more towards the West. But there are attaches and institutes and people in charge in Szeged and Pest. They are appointed and they have a budget.

But if all the money is spent, there is still enough. Because, as I said, culture is of strategic importance in Romania. And Romania has borrowed a lot from Hungary in the way it runs its cultural institutions. Romania's cultural fund was modelled on Hungary's - it has the same activities and structure. And as the fight against corruption is a big issue in Romania at the moment, monitoring has become very strict. There is personal responsibility, accountability and both institutions and people monitor each other.

These efforts have borne fruit. Romanian culture is fashionable in Europe. Contemporary music, film and plastic arts from Romania are successful exports.

B. P.: Perhaps excessively so. Romania's film lobby is too effective and the films are not that good. They repeat themselves. The international hits of the moment would have been more timely 10 years ago. But the great success of cultural diplomacy has been to introduce slightly tired old films into the European consciousness, and it is managing to sell them.

Is Hungarian-language culture in Romania also benefiting?

B. P.: I don't know if thjere is such a thing as contemporary Transylvanian Hungarian culture. Hungary's cultural policy has a big role to play in this. In the first period, after the regime change, it was all about preserving our culture in Transylvania, about surviving and sustaining old traditions. Afterwards it was about creating a universal, cross-border Hungarian culture - not distinguishing Hungarian culture in Transylvania and in Hungary itself. That's over now, but nobody has really thought about the fact that we live in different countries. We should be taking part in cultural exchanges, and if there is such a thing as Transylvanian Hungarian culture, then perhaps we should be thinking abuot integrating it into an eastern European network. Things are different in Slovakia, and it would be interesting to establish why. It's also true that Romanians aren't discovering Hungarian culture. They've been translating the same three or four authors for 20 years. There is little knowledge of it. This is an area where Hungarian-Romanian institutions cuold make a difference. But where are they? In 2007, Sibiu was the cultural capital of Europe. Hungary's offering was very weak, and contemporary culture was almost wholly absent. These are major failings. And the reason for them is the assumption that we live in different worlds and have nothing to offer each other.