Is Romania a real country or a case of plagiarism?

"For this you are famous in the East ― You sad, joking country." George Bacovia, 1930

The President of Hungary and the German defence minister both resigned as a result of plagiarism allegations but it does not look as if the Romanian Prime Minister is likely to follow their example. He is more likely to get away with it like Vladimir Putin and, going back some time, Joe Biden (though Biden only plagiarised a passage from a speech which does not seem serious compared to plagiarising a large part of a thesis)

The British grande dame of scientific journals, Nature, has said that the Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta plagiarised his doctoral thesis. Victor Ponta, in an interview given to El Pais a week ago, promised to resign were he found to have plagiarised his thesis. Romania's National Council for Certification of Titles, Diplomas and University Certificates (CNATDCU) said on Friday that 85 pages of Prime Minister Victor Ponta's thesis were copied, without naming any source. No fair minded observer doubts that this is proven. "I found nothing but plagiarism of a copy-paste type," said Marius Andruh, the highly respected president of the CNATDCU's general council. "The council wanted to remove the title of doctor." 


The decision of the Council was unanimous but they were only thirteen strong and therefore one short of a quorum. In any case they were also too late. An hour before the Council reached its judgment, the acting Education Minister (Victor Ponta's two previous nominees as Education Minister had had to stand down after accusations of plagiarism) changed the constitution of the Council to increase its size from twenty to forty-five members. The Ministry of Education has also said that the plagiarism is a not a matter for the CNATDCU at all, but the University of Bucharest's ethics committee. Other academic panjandrums have weighed in with other ideas about which committee has jurisdiction.


Nobody in Bucharest, in politics, in the press or in the street expects Mr. Ponta to resign. They are not in the least surprised (it is hard to surprise Bucuresteni) about the plagiarism though they are very scornful (Bucuresteni are very scornful a lot of the time, about a great many things). His supervisor, while he wrote his thesis, was the then Prime Minister, Adrian Nastase, who, coincidentally, started a prison sentence this week for corruption. That did surprise everybody - not the corruption, but the prison sentence. It was reported that Mr. Nastase tried to take his own life when the police arrived to take him to prison. Now the doctors who attended him after he is said to have shot himself are themselves the defendants in proceedings  in which they are accused of having staged the whole thing. It seems the suicide attempt may have been another case of plagiarism. 


The outside world has made up its mind about the plagiarism and so have the other EU leaders at the summit, at which Ponta insisted on representing Romania, in defiance of the Constitutional Court's ruling that it was for President Basescu to attend. But Victor Ponta does not care about world opinion and world opinion does not spend much time thinking about him. He may however care about investor confidence - Moody's lowered Romania's credit rating from stable to negative from fear the crisis in the Eurozone may affect Romania. We shall see whether Ponta's party the PSD or his ally the National Liberal Party will stick with him till the parliamentary elections

On rare occasions, as now, Romanian politics seems fascinating, but then move the prism a fraction and it seems the opposite of fascinating. Though they belong to a nation of rugby players, Romanian politicians have a habit of fumbling the ball which makes politics unpredictable but ultimately tiring to watch.


One day, perhaps soon, I shall write about a question which has long interested me - the question of whether Romania is a real country or has for a long time been an example of plagiarism on a vast scale, since the time when she ceased to be two backward Ottoman protectorates and became a country with a constitution modelled on Belgium's and a capital known (like several other cities in the world) as the Paris of the East.