For more than 25 years, yes, I repeat, for more than 25 years, the rulers of Romania, be they from the Ceausescu or post-Ceausescu era, have been faced in international relations with a problem that directly affects the interests and public image of the Romanian state: the problem institutionalized children .
The common denominator for the persistence with which the international community refuses to remove this topic from the political and moral agenda is, above all, the still unsatisfactory situation of the living conditions of these children. Starting with the animal kingdom and ending with what we call a civilized human society, the way in which the mentioned communities relate to the protection of their own offspring is customarily constituted as the supreme criterion that delimits "normality" from the state of "degeneration".
Case Study
For reasons that are not exclusively of a financial-economic nature, and which should invite the Romanian intellectual elites to a serious reflection, the problem of institutionalized children and especially of international adoptions continues to be the subject of a political ping-pong in the country's international relations. A more careful analysis of the causes of this persistence can be, paradoxically, a real barometer of the general political strategy itself and especially of the foreign policy carried out by the current rulers. In this sense, the latest polemical "developments", on the edge of a barely disguised diplomatic conflict, between Bucharest and Washington represent an interesting "case study" intended to demonstrate the consistency of the above statement.
Before embarking on this foray, as one who has addressed this tragic topic several times both informally and in the mass media, I feel the need to specify from the very beginning that naturally "the place of institutionalized children was and it must be in Romania". The tradition of the Romanian people has always been that, regardless of the size of the resources, "parents should go out of their way to ensure their children maximum comfort and physical and mental well-being". How much was affected in the last 50 years the moral fiber of the Romanian to reach the situation where not the orphans, but the children abandoned by their own parents and including their relatives to "produce" today's amazing share of this category per the total number of institutionalized children, by the gravity of the social implications, it far exceeds the dimension of misery and poverty circulated as the only explanatory factor. Add to this situation the lack of social solidarity and the ignominy of the ruling political class and you will have in the mirror of 2004 a hideous image of the "actual state of the nation" in which the rulers continue to give priority, it is fair, peripheral, only to the effects and not to the causes what is proliferating this compromising phenomenon for the entire country. The great dilemma in terms of decision-making was and continues to be the critical threshold where, seriously considering the number one priority, namely "protecting the fundamental interest of the child", in the absence to a satisfactory national solution, one must resort to others, of higher quality, such as international adoptions.