‘Can you imagine anything worse,’ a Hungarian once said to me, ‘than a Slav who thinks he’s Latin?’ He was referring to the Romanians, of course. There is a certain degree of tension in Romania between the ethnic Romanians, who run the place, and the ethnic Hungarians, who feel that they have been press-ganged into a chaotic and useless country and, worse, forced to learn a stupid language. The Hungarians hole up in the beautiful wilderness of Transylvania, yearning for the old empire and metaphorically spitting upon their political masters. But the enmity dissolves entirely when a third racial group is brought into the equation: the gypsies.
There are many competing hatreds down there, where the Black Sea meets Transcarpathia, but in this entertaining hierarchy of spite, everyone seems to be agreed that the gyppos are right at the bottom. It is likely to be the gypsies, and not the ethnic Romanians or the various brands of Hungarian who come over to see us next January, when our doors swing open and Professor Mary Beard hosts a vast welcoming party on the cabbage fields of Lincolnshire, with festive finger food and mindless platitudes.
I don’t think Romania, any of it, will shed much of a tear. We were enjoined by the Romanians to believe that our fears of being ‘flooded’ or ‘swamped’, or whatever emotive term you wish to use, were greatly overstated, and that the citizens of Romania would prefer to travel to places with which the home country had historic links. Such as, for example, Germany.
But that simply isn’t going to happen, is it? The Germans won’t let it happen. This week the new German minister of the interior, Hans-Peter Friedrich, said that his country would veto attempts by either Romania or Bulgaria to join the Schengen Agreement, which polices who can travel into and out of that large tranche of the EU which is signed up to the treaty.
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