Mesaje pe calea undelor.Elemente de hermeneutica in discursurile regelui Mihai catre romani (1948-1989)

Abstract

After having left the throne, which almost coincided with the beginning of the Cold War, the only way to communicate with King Michael, under the circumstances of the media embargo, was that of the messages uttered on the FM broadcast band radios. BBC, Radio Free Europe and America’s Voice almost consistently broadcasted, generally at the end of each year, the words of the Romanian sovereign. The discourses approached multiple issues: among the first preoccupations that delimited the King’s speeches, we shall focus on the repudiation of the illegal, "null and void" action, on the two main directions of the messages between 1948-1989, that is the internal situation and the its relation to the international system, as well as on the references to the situation of the Romanian exile. The royal messages interpret and transmit statements on the situation in Europe, mentioning the anticommunist Revolution in Hungary (1956), the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia (1968), the 1968 movements, as well as the agitations at the end of the ‘80s. What we discover, in the present writing, in most of King Michael’s appeals, is the fluency of the political discourse, the continuity, the preservation of the same main features. Even if the language suffered important modifications, natural ones, as other political values were focused on, the spirit of truth and justice remained the same. Michael, as a political character, who preserved his attributes sanctioned by the 1923 Constitution, preferring to parenthesise this communist half a century than the Fundamental Law, did not revise his stand. His thought, mainly delimited on two fundamental concepts – that of truth and that of continuity – demonstrates a form of intelligence of the olden times, when the aim was honour and virtue and not success at any price.
King Michael’s messages to the Romanians, during the Cold War period, represent an interesting perspective for the interpretation of the political opposition, for making a deeper analysis of the western powers’ positioning and of the international situation in relation to the democratic forces in exile, despotically overthrown, as well as for the assessment of a possible synthesis of the Romanian political thought in exile.