Over the past three decades, Romania has undergone profound social, economic, and political transformations. This report explores the country’s transition from a totalitarian dictatorship to a pluralistic—albeit imperfect—democracy. Yet, as recent developments at the close of 2024 reveal, this progress is far from guaranteed and could easily be reversed. The report seeks to assess the role of civil society in driving these long-term changes and, crucially, its capacity to prevent Romania from sliding back into a softer form of autocracy. Ultimately, it aims to offer initial recommendations for bolstering civil society to safeguard democratic progress.
Read the full report here.
The report focuses on Romania’s progress toward liberal democracy, as defined above, and the role of civil society in achieving and preserving it. This clarification is critical, given the significant challenges liberal democracy has faced globally over the past 15 years, and particularly in Romania in the last four to five years. In the early 1990s, it was widely assumed that the ultimate goal of post-communist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe was to establish liberal democracies modeled on their Western counterparts. However, successive crises—most notably the global financial crisis of 2007-08 and geopolitical upheavals post-2014—have challenged the notion of liberal democracy’s inevitability. Romania, increasingly integrated into European and global frameworks, has not been immune to these trends.
Romania’s recent experience underscores a vital lesson: liberal democracy, in its fullest sense, requires broad societal buy-in—something that cannot be taken for granted, even when the transition seems complete. Democratic progress involves more than majoritarian electoral outcomes; it depends on safeguarding individual rights, ensuring institutional integrity, maintaining checks and balances, and creating a level playing field for political competition. The role of civil society in this process cannot be overestimated: in established democracies, a vibrant, diverse civil society holds politicians accountable, proposes alternative policy solutions, ensures the consideration of the interests and preferences of broad strata of society. In this sense, a question that needs to be addressed is how donors, both domestic and foreign, can collaborate and complement each others to ensure the sustainability of a diverse civil society able to fulfill these functions.
At the time of finishing this report, after a decade-long decline, liberal democracy is now under unprecedented threat across the globe. The US signals it will relinquish its 80-year old global stewardship of the liberal democratic world, taking down along with it the international rule-based order built since the end of World War II. The new US administration increasingly aligns with dictators and Western extremists, increasingly pushes for a long-abandoned vision of might makes right on the global arena, and its footprint abroad risks turning into – and being perceived as – malign foreign interference in all its former allies from the Western world, on a par with Russia or China. Liberal democracy is fragile, but so far it has proven itself the only form of organizing human societies conducive to prosperity, security, and justice. To save it, all its supporters will have to rally around the flag and rush to fill in the void left behind by the withdrawal of the US, before others do so. Liberal democracy is now endangered even in mature democracies such as US itself or EU states where extremists gained solid political results over the past years. For young, imperfect liberal democracies such as Romania the challenge is double, as it also loses external anchors in the West.
In the report, the sections on civil society assistance from foreign donors build primarily on two seminal pieces on the topic: “Assessing Democracy Assistance: the Case of Romania” by Thomas Carothers, 1996, Carnegie Endowment; and “Importing Democracy from Abroad: International Assistance for Civil Society in Romania”, by Marius Tatar, 2006, Central European University / Oradea University. These discuss the major questions, dilemmas, donor approaches, controversies concerning effectiveness of foreign aid during the 1990s and early 2000s; as of 2025, the development of the Romanian civil society and impact of foreign aid can be put in a longer time perspective. The research has been complemented and updated with interviews with civil society experts and donors active in the past three decades in Romania.
This report originated with a request from a foreign donor, the Democracy Foundation Basel, respectively its predecessor Swiss Democracy Foundation, to evaluate the successes and failures of democracy promotion in Central Eastern Europe, starting with Romania, and make recommendations for the future as well as an inventory of the available financing for the civil society in this field.