BUCHAREST: Across Eastern Europe throughout this year, people have celebrated their peaceful, victorious revolutions against communism. In Romania, however, there was nothing “velvet” about communism's end. Ten years ago this December the center of Bucharest was ravaged by tank and sniper fire, leaving many people dead, as the part of the Romanian army that sided with those who wanted liberation fought street by street with loyalists of Ceausescu's Securitate.

Today, our so-called revolution is still viewed differently than those that took place in other former communist countries. Elsewhere, people know that a real revolution took place; they have been building truly new societies. Our revolution of 1989 now seems more like a coup, with one part of the communist elite simply replacing that part which had become utterly discredited. As a member of the “Group for Social Dialogue” that sought to give direction to the forces of change during the fighting that December, I can say that we were never certain as to what forces were fighting with us and against us, nor for what reasons.

The National Salvation Front that ruled Romania's first half-decade of transition, headed by Ion Iliescu, simply emerged triumphant from the bloodshed of 1989 as a fait accompli. It never really declared communism over, merely that the Ceausescu dictatorship was finished. Indeed, the only thing that I know for certain about those days is a strange curiosity: that Ceausescu endured his kangaroo court trial and execution with far more dignity than I would ever have imagined.

Uncertainty about our “revolution” still has debilitating effects today. As then, people remain passive and uncommitted. Market-oriented reforms, long postponed by the Iliescu government, appear to have failed to raise living standards. As in Russia, they failed to bring about a legal free-market economy. On the contrary, the share of the black market economy has been increasing by such a speed that, according to some economists, the real economy (composed of both the "white" and the "black" economy) actually grew over the last two years, notwithstanding an official decline in GDP.

Nevertheless, people complain that they are far worse off now than ten years ago. In November, several unions organized rallies where demonstrators cursed the ruling centre-right government and invoked the Ceausescu era as one relatively good and secure. Yet, as workers and unions step up their protests against privatization, market reforms, inflation, corruption or unemployment they seem to forget the taxes they withhold daily from state or local councils. They ask their government to provide viable jobs for them, to control crime and inflation, and to care for their health, while at the same time they do all they can to evade the taxes needed to pay for these things. In Romania, the gap between what people say and what people do remains a chasm.

Private hypocrisy breeds public hypocrisy and crime. The less money the state has, the lower the salaries of civil servants and the value of pensions. So, in order to feed their families, many teachers, judges or policemen will quite naturally accept bribes. Because of lousy salaries in the state administration, many young and gifted people avoid government service, preferring to look for better-paid jobs in the private sector, or to emigrate. Those in business try to shrink their declared income to the smallest amount possible, or not declare any income at all. Thus the black market grows ever bigger and the state's ability to carry out its most basic services continues to diminish.

As the state plunges into chronic weakness, a growing number of people yearn for it to be made stronger, even if our new liberties need to be sacrificed here and there. They want the state to provide for their welfare, to tackle crime, unemployment and inflation and to fight corruption, all of which the state is less and less capable of doing. Because most people confuse strength with efficiency, they believe that the state must again acquire sufficient power to enforce its will.

The result of this vicious circle is obvious: an ever growing dissatisfaction with the democratic (even if imperfect) state founded in the aftermath of Ceausescu's fall. What Romania (and some other East-European countries, like Ukraine, Russia, Albania) is experiencing is not merely an economic or a political crisis; rather, it is a crisis of alienation. The gap between the rulers and the ruled widens everyday. Not only does each mistrust the other, but each tries to deceive each other as much as they can. Ten years ago our revolution was mere sleight of hand; now our politics is simply deception, too.

This week, President Constantinescu sacked the prime minister, who in turn refused to leave office. Chaos, once again, seems at hand. Romania, indeed, seems almost ripe for any bold demagogue to offer to replace this so-called "weak and rotten state" with a "strong and sound" dictatorship. The only thing that seems to be holding us back from the brink is that dictatorships are out of fashion nowadays in Europe. But in deceiving ourselves into thinking that it is a moral imperative that the state impose order, we are joining the fashionable madmen, which is when the thin whine of hysteria can be heard. When that happens, a country is in trouble, and I think Romania already is there.