Andrei Alexandru Babadac

In a time when global power feels increasingly unmoored from treaties, territories, and even truth, it’s tempting to assume that small and medium-sized states are doomed to drift. But in a world reshaped by networks, not navies, and influence, not occupation, there is room to maneuver—if a country knows how to frame its strengths. And Romania, though often underestimated, is beginning to show what that looks like. It’s not a story of missiles or military bases. It’s one of servers, standards, and smart diplomacy. At the heart of this quiet transformation is Romania’s rising role in European cybersecurity. Hosting the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre (ECCC) in Bucharest is more than symbolic—it’s strategic. For the first time, an EU-level body focused on digital resilience and research coordination is headquartered not in a Western capital, but in an Eastern European country often dismissed as a consumer of security rather than a contributor to it. But the ECCC isn’t an isolated...

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but        people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction… no longer exists.” -  Hannah Arendt In the aftermath of World War II, authoritarian regimes from Eastern Europe to Latin America learned an important lesson:  you don’t need to crush dissent violently if you can dissolve it culturally . Control of the narrative—of symbols, media, memory—became the quiet cornerstone of their dominance. Romania’s own post-war history offers a precise case study. Beginning in the late 1940s, the communist regime under Gheorghiu-Dej—and especially under Ceaușescu—didn’t just govern through secret police and repression. It governed through  total narrative saturation . Radio, film, books, and especially television served one purpose: not merely to inform, but to drown out all competing versions of reality. The regime didn’t need to argue. It needed only to  r...