https://doi.org/10.47743/RRISXX.2025-3-10
Issue: 3/2025
Pages: 203-236
Language: English
Author: Elena DRAGOMIR
Author affiliation: Valahia University of Târgoviște, Romania
Abstract: This historiographical overview presents a brief yet comprehensive and critical
summary of the historiographical approaches to Cold War Romania’s foreign policy. It
tentatively identifies three historiographical schools of thought: the orthodox, the
revisionist and the new school. The first developed during the Cold War in the West,
entered Romania in the 1990s and survived as the dominant paradigm of interpretation
to this day. Initiated in the 1980s and settled in the 1990s, the second was the first to
challenge, albeit timidly, the postulates of the orthodox school and its inadequate
methodologies. The third approach emerged in the 2000s and took momentum in the
2010s, under the influence of the ‘new Cold War history’. Although source-oriented and
deeply re-evaluative, it has focused on concrete topics. While its findings disproved
orthodox postulates, it has yet to address Cold War Romania’s foreign policy as a whole.
Thus, arguing that ‘we still don’t know’ what kind of foreign policy Romania employed
during the Cold War era and why, the article discusses three main interrelated issues:
what is wrong with what we think we know so far, why previous knowledge has not
been yet critically revised against available sources and what we can do about it.
Keywords: Romania, historiography, foreign policy, communism, Cold War