Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
European Commission accepted that Romania
fulfilled the political criteria of the 1992
Copenhagen conference for EU membership
(Phinnemore, 2001). The 1999 Helsinki meet-
ing of the European Council agreed to begin
accession negotiations with Romania and, in
December 2002, the European Council sug-
gested 2007 as a possible accession date. In
October 2004, Romania finally achieved the full
conditions for membership when the European
Commission's annual report declared Romania
to be a functioning market economy. The coun-
try was scheduled to join the EU on 1 January
2007.
of high-quality promotional materials by the
Ministry of Tourism with the assistance of Western
consultants. A new brand for Romanian tourism
was also launched under the slogan 'Come as
a tourist, leave as a friend'. A second PHARE
project in May 1995 allocated a further 300,000
ECU for the production of brochures and other
promotional materials (Anon, 1995). These
materials, produced within a context where
Romania was seeking to engage with the EU,
were intended to ameliorate Romania's image
in the Western imagination and ultimately to
ease progress towards accession by presenting
Romania as a plausible candidate for member-
ship. The following section presents an analysis
of these promotional materials, produced dur-
ing the mid- and late 1990s for the Western
European market. The discussion is not con-
cerned so much with the nature of the brand
that Romania was seeking to develop, but
instead examines the ideological agenda that
underpinned tourist promotional materials dur-
ing this period.
Tourism promotion and the
re-branding of Romania
During the mid-1990s, as Romania sought to
engage with the European Union, tourism
promotion was one component of a strategy to
present and legitimize the country as a potential
future member. The use of tourism promotion
in this way to project the country's national
identity was nothing new. Throughout the
socialist period Romania's external tourist pro-
motion - particularly the monthly magazine
Holidays in Romania , published in various for-
eign languages - had stressed the achievements
of socialist Romania, exalting the contribution
of Nicolae Ceau s escu and presenting overtly
nationalist accounts of Romania's history. After
1989, Holidays in Romania sought to present
Romania's new face to the West (for example,
the first issue in 1990 included a lengthy
account of the Revolution). However, tourism
promotion was hit by lack of funding and the
magazine was published less frequently (and in
some years seems not to have appeared at all).
Along with a reduced budget was a lack of
expertise in marketing and promotion among a
team trained for 'external propaganda' during
the socialist period. As a result, Romania's tour-
ism promotion was ill-equipped for the role of
presenting a post-socialist identity to the wider
world.
In this context, a PHARE project (worth
4.5m ECU) was launched in 1993 to address
the problems of restructuring the tourism indus-
try in Romania (Florian, 1994). One compo-
nent was the production (in 1994) of a new set
Romania as a 'new'country
While after 1989 the exact nature of Romania's
post-socialist identity and orientation was con-
tested within the country, there was almost
unanimous rejection of Ceau s escu's extreme
form of Stalinism. As such, the 1989 revolution
has come to represent the 'foundation myth' for
a new Romania (Boia, 2001) and the country
has been eager to present itself as 'reborn' after
more than four decades of totalitarian rule. As
Morgan and Pritchard (1998) observe, such
themes of new beginnings and rebirth have
underpinned the redefining of national identi-
ties throughout the former socialist countries
of Central and Eastern Europe. Yet for all
the efforts to present itself as a new country,
Romania remained inextricably linked with
Ceau s escu in the Western popular imagination
(Gallagher, 1995). The presence of the former
nomenklatura in government, the reluctance
to embrace economic reform and the persis-
tence of nationalist rhetoric directed against
Romania's minorities further reinforced the
belief in the West that Romania had not fully
broken with the Ceau s escu era.
Consequently, Romania's tourist promo-
tion sought to assert that Romania was a new
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