LETTER FROM ROMANIA: When you come from where I come from, kerbstones brightly painted in three colours to mark out the territory are really nothing to write home about, writes Enda O'Doherty.
Yet the residents of Derry's Bogside or Fountain might still find their jaws dropping should they ever visit the Romanian city of Cluj. Red, yellow and blue are the colours here - the colours of the Romanian flag - and they are displayed not just on kerbstones but on every single park bench, traffic bollard and rubbish bin in the city, just as the national flag itself can be seen flying from poles posted every 20 metres along every street.
This riot of patriotic gaiety comes courtesy of Cluj's mayor, Gheorghe Funar, and is designed, like all such displays, not so much to reassure "ourselves" as to annoy the others, the others in this case being the city's 20-something per cent Hungarian minority.
The province of Transylvania, in which Cluj is situated, might be described as Romania's fourth green field, long held by a foreign power but "returned" to the motherland when Hungary was deprived of two-thirds of its former territory as punishment for being on the wrong side in the first World War.
The "Greater Romania" which emerged in the 1920s was no more disposed to be sensitive to the rights of the new Hungarian minority it had swallowed up than Hungarians had previously been to the rights of Romanians. The programme of enforced "romanisation", implemented through the school system, offers an interesting case study of a cultural policy which might well have appealed to some in Ireland had our own national aim of unification been achieved at the same time.
Mayor Funar is widely perceived as something of a clown, and his "we're the masters now" assaults on minority sensitivities could be written off as mere populist buffoonery. The Greater Romania Party (PRM) of which he is a member, however, is a significant national force, whose crude scapegoating of Hungarians, Jews and Roma cheapens political discourse, a cheapening which an impoverished country shakily emerging into democracy and pluralism can ill afford.
Just a few hours' drive south of Cluj lies the beautiful city of Sibiu, a perfect architectural gem bequeathed intact to modern Romania by its former German immigrant population, most of whom returned "home" (after 800 years) in the early 1990s. Yet far from painting the old Saxon stronghold red-yellow-blue in joy, the citizens of Sibiu elected as their mayor in 2000 a member of the now tiny minority, Klaus Johannis of the German Democratic Forum. Mr Johannis, a former physics teacher in his mid-40s who is married to an ethnic Romanian, understandably does not overplay the racial card, save perhaps in his pitch to foreign investors, where he boasts of his city's "prosperity and harmony ... \ roots in a capitalistic tradition influenced by a long-standing German work ethic". Whatever it is he has being doing in his term of office, Sibiu certainly looks well on it.
One should not load this little tale of two mayors with more significance than it can bear, but it does in its way illustrate two possible paths for Romania, one of noisy and brutish xenophobia leading to stagnation, the other of quiet, slow, practical work leading perhaps to greater prosperity and a place in the expanding new Europe.
Sadly, in spite of the good work and enterprise of Mr Johannis and others like him, we must still emphasise that word perhaps. Romania clearly needs enterprise, but enterprise which is transparent and lawful. Dr Johnson's famous remark that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making money is a nice epigram, but has never been more than quarter-true.
Romania's greatest problem today - greater even than its dreadful roads, crumbling health service, antiquated industrial plants and soured community relations - is corruption. The country is not unique in central and eastern Europe in seeing the survival of a strong political party built on top of old communist structures. But while in Poland or Hungary these formations are properly called post-communist, many would prefer the term neo-communist for Romania's ruling social democrats (PSD). It is true that President Iliescu's party is prepared to fight, win and even lose democratic elections, true also that we have recently seen the phenomenon of the semi-corrupt "party-state" in Italy, Spain, even Ireland.
But Romania, desperate for foreign capital, cannot afford a dirty image, cannot afford the widely held perception that just as some in the inner party circle enrich themselves on the proceeds of factory privatisations, those below them and under their protection easily subvert the law through bribery to run drugs and prostitutes and procure women and children for sexual slavery.
It is all too easy for Romanian politicians to respond to such allegations by blank denials or an exploitation of the people's xenophobia and sense of victimhood - never too far below the surface. When the US ambassador to Bucharest, Michael Guest, recently delivered a hard-hitting speech on the damage corruption was doing to inward investment, the Prime Minister, Adrian Nastase, replied angrily: "I will say it now and I will say it to anyone who continues to make allegations of corruption. Give us the specific names of these guilty people so we can shoot them in a stadium and have done with it."
Just possibly this is a fine example of robust Romanian humour. Or it could be that Romania's Prime Minister still can't really get his head around this democracy thing.