Area Handbook for Romania Part 6

About 7,600 miles were nationally maintained and included the greater portion--5,200 miles--of those in the modernized, improved category.

Only about 1,400 miles of the local roads were modernized, and less than one-half of them had hardened surfaces. According to government planning reports, the road network is considered adequate in size, and all that can be allocated to it will be applied to its modernization. Motor transport was nearly negligible until after World War II, but between 1950 and 1969 it a.s.sumed importance that rivaled the railroads in both cargo and pa.s.senger traffic.

Waterways

Nearly 1,500 miles of the rivers are considered navigable. All of the Danube--over 900 miles--that is within or along the southern border of the country is navigable and, in fact, connects the Black Sea and Romania with all points upstream--through Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Austria to Ulm in West Germany. The Prut, flowing along much of the eastern border with the Soviet Union, accounts for most of the remaining navigable mileage. Other streams are useful in some degree for timber rafting and for floating agricultural products downstream. Rapid currents in hilly sections, silting and meandering streambeds in the lowlands, and fog and ice in winter months, however, limit the commercial usefulness of the rivers. Ice stops traffic on the Danube River for an average of more than one month per year and on the other streams from two to three months.

The country's topography does not lend itself to the development of an extensive system of ca.n.a.ls. There are short ca.n.a.ls in the western lowlands. Two of them connect to the Tisza River in Yugoslavia but, as with this pair, further development of the waterways in this portion of the country would be economically advantageous only when they connected to points in Hungary or Yugoslavia. Most of the northern and central regions are hilly or mountainous.

Cargo shipped on rivers and ca.n.a.ls in 1969 was less than 1 percent of that carried by the other transport systems, but most of it was transported for relatively long distances along the Danube River.

Pa.s.sengers carried const.i.tuted an even more minute percentage of the total and, because the largest numbers of them rode river ferries, the relative pa.s.senger mileage percentage was even lower.

Airlines

Commercial aviation is altogether state owned and is operated by an office in the Department of Automotive, Maritime, and Air Transportation that, with the Department of Railroads, is part of the Ministry of Transportation. Romanian Air Transport--always referred to in common and in most official usage as TAROM, derived from Transporturi Aeriene Romane--serves a dozen or more cities in the country and contacts about twenty national capitals outside the country. These include Moscow, all of the capitals of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (Warsaw Pact) member nations, and about a dozen capitals in Western Europe and the Middle East. Service to nearly all of the external points consists of no more than one round trip flight weekly to each. Domestic service has expanded steadily since 1950 but varies throughout the year to provide more frequent trips during the holiday and tourist seasons.

The line carries some cargo but an insignificant amount when compared with other modes of transportation. It has, however, begun to carry a more significant number of pa.s.sengers. This traffic increased from less than 40,000 in 1950 to about 780,000 in 1969. Each year since 1965 it has carried approximately 100,000 more pa.s.sengers than in the year preceding.

Pipelines

Most liquid petroleum products and natural gas are moved via pipeline.

The largest network of liquid lines serves the large oilfield in the Ploiesti area and the smaller one in west-central Walachia. They connect the fields with refineries and transport the refined products to Danube River ports and to Constanta on the Black Sea coast. Lines also transfer crude oil from the Moldavian oilfield to its refineries, but there were no lines in 1970 to transport finished products from those refineries.

Natural gas is piped to all parts of Transylvania from sources in the center of the province, but the Carpathians are an obstacle to its distribution to other parts of the country. One major line crosses the Transylvanian Alps to serve the Bucharest area, and another crosses the Moldavian Carpathians through Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. It serves areas to the southeast as far as Galati, on the Danube River.

Merchant Marine

The country has a small, but growing, merchant marine. Although most of its ships are new, the more than 100 percent increase--to nearly 0.5 million deadweight tons--claimed to have been achieved between 1967 and 1969 was accounted for by less than a dozen ships, consisting of two tankers and some bulk cargo carriers that were built in j.a.pan. The government releases no official statistics on its merchant fleet, but fragmentary information indicates that before 1967 it consisted of about thirty-five ships. One of them was a 2,000-deadweight-ton pa.s.senger-cargo vessel, and there were a few tankers totaling something over 100,000 deadweight tons. The remainder were freighters, averaging about 5,000 deadweight tons each.

Statistics on goods transported by sea substantiate the size and growth of the merchant marine fleet. Until about 1960 it had relatively little importance, but by 1966 cargo carried was almost ten times that of 1960, and by 1969 it had again tripled. The impressive growth statistics notwithstanding, sea transport in 1969 accounted for only about 1.5 percent of the total cargo transported.

Constanta is the major port on the Black Sea, but some smaller seagoing vessels go up the Danube River to Galati and Braila. All of the larger river towns, and all of those on rail lines that cross it or terminate at the river, are considered river ports. Mangalia, on the Black Sea coast south of Constanta and about five miles from the Bulgarian border, is a secondary seaport but has the country's largest naval installation (see ch. 13).

CHAPTER 4

SOCIAL SYSTEM AND VALUES

Since the end of World War II Romanian society and its values have been in a state of flux. The aim of communist social and economic policies has been to destroy the old order and replace it with a new one that will reflect communist ideology. The resulting changes have been fundamental and far reaching, particularly in the structure of the society and the place occupied in it by particular individuals. The effect on values has been less easy to determine.

The extent and the pace of change have been slowing down since the early 1960s, and some aspects of the old social order were beginning to reemerge, although in different forms. The changes that were continuing to affect the society in the 1970s were more the result of economic growth than of conscious efforts to bring them about. This was particularly true of the changing role of the family, which has come about as a consequence of increased industrialization and urbanization as much as by government design.

Least affected by the social upheaval since 1945 have been the ethnic composition of the country and the relations between the various ethnic groups. Although the population has always been predominantly Romanian, Hungarians and Germans const.i.tute a majority in some areas of the country and remain a source of potential political and social problems.

The Hungarian minority in particular, making up more than 8 percent of the population in 1966, has always been very sensitive to what it considers Romanian domination and has at times harbored irredentist feelings.

ETHNIC COMPOSITION

The population of Romania is basically h.o.m.ogeneous, although it includes elements of almost every ethnic group in Central and Eastern Europe. At the time of the 1966 census, Romanians const.i.tuted 88 percent of the population. The largest single minority group were the Magyars, or Hungarians, const.i.tuting 8.4 percent of the population. They were followed by the Germans with 2 percent of the population. All other ethnic groups--Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Ukrainians, Russians, Czechs, Slovaks, Turks, Tatars, Bulgarians, Jews and Gypsies--were simply listed as "other" and together made up only 1.6 percent of the population.

The Const.i.tution of 1965 guarantees equal rights to all citizens regardless of nationality or race and stipulates legal sanctions against both discrimination and instigation of national or racial animosities.

National minorities are guaranteed the free use of their mother tongue in education, the communications media, and their dealings with government authorities and unrestricted perpetuation of their cultural traditions.

Romanians

The origins of the Romanians and their language have been the subject of differing interpretations and controversy. Romanians are related to the Vlachs, a pastoral people speaking a Latin-derived language who are found in the mountainous regions of northern Greece and southern Yugoslavia.

According to Romanian tradition, Romanians are the direct descendants of the Dacians, who inhabited the territory of modern Romania before the Christian Era. The Dacians were conquered by Roman legions under Emperor Trajan in A.D. 106 and became romanized during 165 years of Roman control. When Emperor Aurelian abandoned control of Dacia in 271, in the face of Gothic invasions, the romanized Dacians sought refuge in the rugged Carpathian Mountains, where they preserved their Latin language and culture until more settled conditions allowed them to return to the plains in the tenth century (see ch. 2).

The period of Roman rule of Dacia is well doc.u.mented, but the absence of any firm indication of the presence of a Latin-speaking population in the territory of contemporary Romania until the tenth century has given rise to another theory of the origin of Romanians, developed mostly by Hungarian historians. This theory maintains that the Dacians withdrew with the Roman legions south of the Danube. There they absorbed elements of Thracian and Slavic culture, in addition to that of their Roman rulers. Starting in the tenth century, a people speaking a Romance language moved northward across the Danube as far as Slovakia and settled in the area that later became Romania.

The Romanian theory of their origin stresses that a people speaking a Romance language continuously occupied the territory claimed by the Romanian state, thus rendering legitimacy to the claim. The other theory stresses the absence of a Romance-language-speaking people in Transylvania at the time of the Magyar immigrations into that region, thus giving legitimacy to the Hungarian claim to Transylvania.

Whatever their origin, Romanians have occupied the territory of their present state since the Middle Ages. In 1966 they numbered 16.8 million and formed the majority population in most of the country (see fig. 5).

Romanian, a Romance language, differs sharply from the languages of neighboring countries which, with the exception of Hungarian, are all Slavic tongues. The basis for Romanian seems to be the Vulgar Latin of ancient Rome. Long contact with Slavic-speaking peoples has left its mark on the vocabulary but has not affected grammar or syntax, which remain similar to those of other Romance languages. The vocabulary of literary Romanian is more purely of Latin origin than that of the spoken dialects. Frequently, parallel words of Latin and Slavic derivation exist for an object or concept and are used interchangeably. Turkish, Albanian, Hungarian, and German have also influenced the vocabulary of the spoken language in various parts of the country.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Source: Adapted from Ian M. Matley, Romania: A Profile, New York, 1970, p. 276.

_Figure 5. Romania, Distribution of Ethnic Groups, 1966._]

Hungarians

In the 1966 census Hungarians numbered 1.6 million, const.i.tuting 8.4 percent of the total population. Since 1947, when Romania acquired its present borders, the number of Hungarians within its borders has remained relatively stable, although their percentage in the total population has been declining.

Hungarians form the majority population in parts of Transylvania and in pockets along the Hungarian border. They form a significant minority of the population in the rest of Transylvania and in the Banat region. In 1952 the area of greatest Hungarian concentration in eastern Transylvania was designated the Hungarian Autonomous Region (Mures-Magyar) and was given considerable degree of self-government to deal with complaints of political and cultural oppression by Romanians.

The region was eliminated in the administrative reorganization of 1968 (see ch. 9).

In 1971 it was estimated that slightly more than half of Romania's Hungarian minority still lived in rural areas. Several Transylvanian cities--including Cluj, Oradea, Baia-Mare, and Tirgu Mures--also have a high percentage of Hungarian inhabitants.

Hungarians first moved into the territory occupied by modern Romania in the ninth century as part of the Magyar invasion of the central European plain. Their number grew through colonization during the period of Hungarian rule of Transylvania, which began with the conquest of the area in the eleventh century and ended in 1918. One group of colonists--the Szeklers, or Szekelys--were settled in the eastern borderlands of Transylvania in the first part of the twelfth century to protect the plains from invaders. The ethnic origin of the Szeklers is in dispute. Some authorities claim they are Magyars; others claim they are non-Magyars who absorbed Magyar culture over long years of contact.

During the Middle Ages, Szeklers were distinct from Magyars in political and social organization. Although the distinction between them and the Hungarians has disappeared in modern times and Romanian official statistics do not differentiate, Szekler culture is still considered more purely Magyar than that of other Hungarians who have absorbed influences from the West.

With the exception of some Szekler characteristics, the culture and language of the Hungarian minority in Romania are indistinguishable from those of their kinsmen in Hungary. They are, however, quite distinguishable from the Romanians. This distinction is accentuated by religious differences. Romanians are predominantly Orthodox, whereas more than half of the Hungarians in the country are Roman Catholic, most of the remainder are Calvinists, and some are Unitarians.

The culture and language of the Hungarian minority are being preserved and promoted through schools, newspapers, periodicals, books, theater, and other cultural activities. Members of the Hungarian minority, however, frequently complain that the number of schools, books, and other cultural material available to them in their own language is far short of the demand and not nearly proportionate to their numbers.

Germans

Approximately 380,000 Germans lived in Romania in 1966. The size of the German minority was greatly reduced through voluntary repatriation since the 1930s, when it numbered over 600,000. It has continued to decrease since 1966 through emigration to the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) supported by the West German government and permitted in varying volume by the Romanian authorities.