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This article aims to critically discuss the foreign policy of communist Romania, especially towards Western Europe and the socialist bloc. It does this firstly by reviewing Elena Dragomir's recent ample analyses of communist Romania's foreign policy. Its second section consists in a critical problematization of the allegedly "pragmatic" and "adaptative" nature of communist Romania's dealings with its Western and Eastern partners, as established both by Dragomir's recent contributions, as well as the traditional scholarship. The paper ends with some more general methodological and conceptual reflections on the role, weight, and meaning of "pragmatism," "realism," "context" and "ideology" in historiographical reconstructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article aims to review some milestones which, when taken as a whole, offer a picture of the failure of post-December 1989 Romania, manifested through a massive exodus of its population; to highlight certain mechanisms that motivate the transposition of the migratory experience into literature; and to reveal the turning points of a difficult path, that of integration over there, as reflected in the social novel Male a Est. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]