Geopolitical imaginations of war preparations: visual representations of the Romanian armed forces’ military exercises

ABSTRACT

This article develops our knowledge of war preparations in Critical Military Studies (CMS) by studying visual representations of the Romanian armed forces’ military training. It draws on feminist and critical military geography to examine geopolitical imaginations that shape, and are shaped, by actors, places, and landscapes of military exercises. While arguing that war preparations are (geo)political practices of power that produce identity, space, and violence, this article opens two new directions in the CMS literature. Firstly, it explores the role of ethnicity in constituting militarized masculinity within military alliances. Specifically, this article shows that exercises envisage the Romanian military as an actor that blends ancient Dacian heroism with technological prowess. This image helps both the Romanian armed forces and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to present themselves as strong and credible military actors. Secondly, it develops our understanding of the spatial construction of militarization. Specifically, it shows that military preparedness animates discourses of Easternness and Westernness, whose coexistence constitutes Romania as a key NATO ally while erasing its past (Socialist) support for peace, anti-militarism, and anti-imperialism. The article contributes to our geographical knowledge of the intersections between militarism, postsocialism and postcolonialism in feminist and critical military studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Military exercises
• ethnicity
• Easternness
• Westernness
• Romania

Introduction

In 2019, a video showing tanks taking over a plot of agricultural land circulated in the Romanian mediascape. In the background one could hear a frightened male voice: ‘They are shooting at us!’ (Digi24 2019). Although suggesting otherwise, this was not a military invasion. U.S. tanks had crossed an agricultural field by mistake during NATO’s Sabre Guardian Multinational Exercise. Fearing the worst, the landowner called the national emergency number 112. A police patrol arrived in the area but told the landowner that they could not stop a NATO exercise. However, they could record a complaint about the damages incurred. The then Minister of Defence, Gabriel Leş, clarified that the incident was caused by bad weather conditions and gave reassurances that the landowner would be compensated for the crops destroyed (Digi24 2019).

Simultaneously comical and alarming, this video raises several questions, especially since civilians and military figures perceive exercises differently: What do visual representations of exercises disclose (and conceal) about military practices? Who participates at these exercises? Where do these exercises take place? What are their implications? To answer these questions, this article builds on feminist and critical military geography to examine the photo album ‘The Romanian Armed Forces – Exercises 2015’, which is available on the website of the Ministry of National Defence (MoND) (Ministry of National Defence n.d.).

Regardless of their format, images shape, and are shaped by, international politics. Roland Bleiker (2001) argues that images are not mimetic representations of international politics. Rather they are aesthetic representations that disclose an ‘inevitable gap between the represented and its representation’ which ultimately ‘is the very location of politics’ (Bleiker 2001, 510). Inspired by these insights, research regarding the ‘popular culture–world politics continuum’ (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009) has shown that films (Shepherd 2013), cartoons (Hansen 2011), videogames (Ciută 2015) or music videos (Åhäll 2019) enrich our knowledge of global affairs. In this respect, scholars have argued that Western and non-Western militaries use digital media (websites, blogs Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and/or Flickr) to shape public opinion, to build support for military campaigns and/or to recruit individuals (Kuntsman and Stein 2015; Crilley 2016). Others have shown that NATO relies on celebrity figures to constitute itself as a progressive military actor (Wright and Bergman Rosamond 2021) or to articulate the ‘remasculinization of the West’ given the increasing tension between Russia and the alliance in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Crimea (2014) (Hedling, Edenborg, and Strand 2022). In exchange, this article examines how a NATO member (Romania) uses digital representations of military training to constitute itself as a leading, trustworthy, alliance partner. It both deepens and broadens our knowledge of the intersection between digital media, military training and the imaginations that they produce, particularly regarding exercises organized on NATO’s Eastern Flank.

Although military exercises are generally defined as peacetime war preparations that equip the armed forces with tactical, strategic, and operational capabilities that enable them to complete their missions successfully, the literature on exercises distinguishes between three areas of research. Firstly, exercises are instruments of deterrence that raise strategic opportunities and risks, especially since they could be misinterpreted and lead to conflict (Blackwill and Legro 1989; Heuser 1993; Bernhardt and Sukin 2020). Secondly, they enhance socialization, cooperation and the formation of collective identity among allies (Hedlund, Börjesson, and Österberg 2015; Frazier and Hutto 2017). Thirdly, exercises project power, help states to (re)gain credibility, or to exert regional and global influence (Chau 2011; Depledge and Dodds 2012; Agius and Edenborg 2019). This article speaks to the latter body of literature yet departs from it both methodologically and empirically.

Methodologically, the article deepens feminist and critical military geographical analyses of war preparations by examining geopolitical imaginations that produce, and are produced by, visual representations of actors, landscapes, and places of exercises. Specifically, it combines Lene Hansen’s (2011) intervisual/ intertextual approach with thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) to study the content, production, (assumed) perceptions, and implications of the above-mentioned photo album. In so doing, this article broadens our knowledge of visual geopolitics.

Research has shown that TV, films, radio, magazines, cartoons, advertising, or digital media construct visual imaginations that shape foreign policy, support or question a particular course of action (Dodds 2004; Bialasiewicz et al. 2007; Hughes 2007). Although this scholarship is extremely useful for examining visual geopolitics, it remains too focused on war, spectacular violence, and the Orientalization of Middle Eastern and North African spaces (Schulzke 2017). The study of war preparations blurs the distinction between geopolitics of war and geopolitics of peacetime to broaden our understanding of the spatial and visual operation of military power in Central and Eastern Europe, and particularly in Romania.

Empirically, this article focuses on a military actor whose war preparations have been previously ignored. Existing literature focuses mostly on Northern, Western and Southern Eastern Europe (Schmidl 2018; Hedlund, Börjesson, and Österberg 2015; Agius and Edenborg 2019). The absence of Romanian exercises from the literature is even more surprising since the Russian invasion of Crimea (2014) determined NATO to ‘reinforc[e] its military readiness in general, and in the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania in particular’. (Petersson 2015, 115)

Given its methodological and empirical distinctiveness, this article develops the CMS scholarship in two directions. Firstly, it enhances the study of ethnicity within the literature on militarized masculinity. Cynthia Enloe’s (1988) central concept of ‘militarized masculinity’ prompted the development of a vast scholarship that explores the intersection between gender, race, class, ethnicity or nationality in constructing military identities (Sjoberg 2010; Chisholm 2014; Sasson-Levy 2017; Henry 2020). While most of this literature focuses on national actors, this article examines the role of ethnicity in constructing militarized masculinity within military alliances. It shows that digital representations of exercises construct the Romanian military as an actor that combines technological superiority with ancient Dacian prowess.¹ This image helps both NATO and the Romanian military to constitute themselves as credible, powerful actors, especially given the growing Russian assertiveness in the Black Sea region. Therefore, this article argues that NATO is not only an ‘institution of international hegemonic masculinity’ as Wright, Hurley and Ruiz (2019, 14) rightfully observe, but also an institution where different forms of masculinity are internationalised for public diplomacy purposes.

Secondly, this article argues that military preparedness animates discourses of Easternness and Westernness, whose coexistence constitutes Romania as a key NATO ally while erasing its past (Socialist) support for peace, anti-militarism, and anti-imperialism. In so doing, it develops the literature that examines the role of space, race, and gender in constituting militarism and militarization.² Particularly, this article shifts our attention from Western, larger powers towards smaller states, and especially those from the former Soviet sphere of influence (Henry and Natanel 2016; Basham 2016; McGarry 2021).

These two arguments challenge the Western centrism of the CMS literature. Although this scholarship has been open to postcolonial and decolonial critiques (Agathangelou 2017; Parashar 2018; Stavrianakis 2020), the exploration of Central and Eastern European military practices remains disproportionately understudied in critical and feminist military research (Eichler 2012; Grzebalska 2021). Relatedly, Catherine Baker (2018) has examined the embeddedness of the (post-conflict) Yugoslav region within global coloniality and argued that racial hierarchies are not limited to Western (former) imperial powers thus showing the added value of exploring intersections between postcolonialism and postsocialism. The study of war preparations, space, and visuality within the Romanian armed forces stimulates our geographical understanding of the intersections between militarism, postsocialism, and postcolonialism in the CMS literature.

This article contains four sections. The first one details the methodology of this research while the second one builds on feminist and critical military geography to show that exercises are (geo)political practices of power that produce identity, space, and violence. The third section examines how exercises constitute the Romanian military as a powerful actor that blends technological superiority with ancient Dacian prowess. This image supports both NATO’s and the Romanian military’s efforts to constitute themselves as credible actors, especially given the growing Russian assertiveness in the region. The fourth one shows that exercises animate spatial discourses of Easternness and Westernness, whose coexistence constitutes Romania as key NATO ally while erasing its Socialist support for peace, anti-militarism, and anti-imperialism. The conclusion suggests areas for further research on preparedness.

Methodology

Published by the MoND, the photo album is an official representation of military training. It is introduced by the then Minister of Defence, Mihnea Motoc, and the then Chief of Staff, Nicolae-Ionel Ciucă, who argue that the consolidation of the Romanian military’s capabilities is important for addressing contemporary security challenges (Ministry of National Defence n.d., 3–5). These remarks enhance the authoritative nature of this album.

The album is published in Romanian and English, albeit with some differences. While the Romanian version has 105 pages containing 98 photographs, the English one has 50 pages containing 47 photographs. All photographs found in the English version are available in the Romanian one as well.³ Although length differences suggest that the album speaks mainly to a Romanian audience, this article focuses less on assigning degrees of significance to audiences, and more on how this album speaks to different (assumed) audiences: Romanian civilians and military personnel; members of NATO’s Eastern Flank; other NATO members and partners; NATO as a collective actor; or Romania’s and NATO’s supposed rivals (e.g. Russia).

To study this album, I blended Lene Hansen’s (2011) intervisual/ intertextual approach with thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006). By building on Hansen’s approach, I examined the image content of this album, its immediate intertext and genre, the wider policy context within which this album was published, and other texts that assign meaning to it. Since Hansen does not offer a comprehensive roadmap for examining image content, thematic analysis filled in this gap. Specifically, a thematic analysis involves six phases: Familiarizing oneself with the data; generating categories of codes; generating candidate themes; reviewing data and themes; defining and naming themes; and writing-up the analysis.

During the first phase of examining the images published, I looked at the album several times and recorded ideas about anything that was interesting about it. The second phase involved generating categories of descriptive codes based on people and objects shown, their actions, and their location in space:

• Military professionals: Male and female figures.

• Equipment: Machine guns, artillery, grenades, planes, helicopters, ships, parachutes, critical infrastructure, computers, maps, road vehicles, tanks, and trains.

• Tasks (people): Walking, running, crawling, marching, climbing, sailing, flying, jumping, and giving/listening to orders.

• Tasks (equipment): Static, moving sailing, flying, shooting, landing/taking off.

• Background: Mountains, hills, fields, forests, rivers, valleys, seas, tents, classrooms, tables, chairs, flipcharts, computers, maps.

During the third phase, I generated candidate themes by collating categories of codes that share similar ideas. ‘Tasks (people)’ and ‘military professionals’ formed the gender theme, while ‘equipment’ and ‘tasks (equipment)’ formed military technology and weaponry. Codes within ‘background’ formed the theme of landscapes. I then reviewed the data coded within each theme and the candidate themes to make sure that they do not overlap (phase four).

Before defining and naming themes (phase five) and writing-up the analysis (phase six), I applied again the first four phases of thematic analysis to study the immediate intertext of these photos. The information provided about exercises (name, type, actors, and location) was used to generate the following categories of codes:

• Types of exercises: national, bilateral, multinational.

• Actors: Romania, U.S., Serbia, Portugal, Moldova, Ukraine, UK.

• Places: Romania (different training sites, including the Danube and the Black Sea), Germany, Turkey, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Serbia, Ukraine, the Mediterranean Sea.

• Names of exercises: Black Sea Rotational Force; Dacian Thunder; Dacian Warhawk; Sabre Junction; Işik; Platinum Lynx; Combined Resolve IV; Vlăsia (river); Platinum Lion, Platinum Eagle, Romanian Trident Poseidon, Sarmis; Arieş (river), Rousofex; Red Dragon; Adriatic Strike, Air Solution, Falcon Defence; Resolution Castle; Cibin (town), Cetatea (Fortress); Dimineaţă Senină (Sunny Morning); Sabre Guardian/ Rapid Trident; Thracian Star; Eurasian Partnership Dive; Sea Shield; Carpathian Summer; Histria; Someş (river); Ramstein Guard, Prutul (river); Justice Sword.

The analysis showed that places, actors, and types of exercises cluster around Westernness and Easternness, whereas codes within names of exercises cluster around prowess (guardian, Trident Poseidon, strike, shield) and nationality/ethnicity by referencing national mountains, rivers, localities, ancient communities (Dacians, Thracians), national symbols (eagle, lynx).⁴ The following candidate themes were generated: Gender (nationality/ethnicity and prowess); Westernness (training with Western partners and within Western Europe); and Easternness (training with Central and Eastern neighbours, and training within Central and Eastern Europe). Codes and candidate themes were then reviewed for consistency. I kept ‘Black Sea’ as a separate theme since it is presented as a training site, landscape, and name of military exercise.

During phase five, I drew arrows between all candidate themes and developed mind maps. While Easternness and Westernness were kept as identified above, gender was expanded to incorporate military figures, landscapes, ethnicity/nationality, and technology and weaponry. Since the final themes revolve around space, place, landscape, and gender, data was interpreted by drawing on feminist and critical military geography (phase six).

Returning to Hansen’s methodological model, the genre of this album recalls the militaries’ growing use of digital media as a public diplomacy tool. Given Romania’s membership to NATO, my analysis speaks to existing research on how NATO and its allies use digital media for public diplomacy purposes (Crilley 2016; Wright 2017; Hedling, Edenborg, and Strand 2022). However, it also takes into account that all armed forces draw on particular ideas about nation(hood), identity, and security, that illustrate how states see themselves in international politics (Woodward 2004).

Romania’s recent history accounts for the policy context within which this album was published. After the fall of Communism, Romania embarked on a process of transition (a problematic term nonetheless) and sought NATO and EU membership. During accession negotiations, Romania viewed the ‘systematic advice and guidance of the West’ as an opportunity to remove Communist influences and regain its place among Western states. Equally significant, Western elites believed that their support would prevent Romania from returning to authoritarianism (Gheciu 2017, 115). Therefore, Romania both welcomed and was offered external guidance in its quest to ‘return’ to Europe. Moreover, Romania had to develop new foreign and security policy partnerships that suited its political aims. This is particularly true for Ukraine and Moldova, given their shared history with Romania.⁵ Finally, yet significantly, the policy context is shaped by the growing tension between NATO and Russia due to Russia’s attack on Georgia (2008), Russia’s involvement in Western elections or its intervention in Crimea that took place a year before the exercises depicted in this album were supposedly organized (2014). A variety of other texts were examined to assign broader meaning to military exercises (official statements, national security and strategy papers, policy papers, and newspapers).

Visual geopolitics of military exercises

Rech et al. (2015, 57) argue that ‘critical military studies should be (…) about much more than war itself’. They should explore practices, institutions, and processes that produce, justify, and disguise its violence long after war has ended. In this regard, critical military geography examines how ‘military activities in nonconflict situations [including military exercises] exert control over space in ways and through means which frequently render this control invisible, in contrast to the more obvious controls exerted by military forces during and following armed conflicts.’ (Woodward 2004, 2) By refusing to prioritize spectacular violence, critical military geography does not regard military exercises as tactical and strategic practices. Rather, exercises project military power and shape spaces, landscapes, places, and actors, all while eroding the opposition between peace and war.

Since they are peacetime activities that simulate war for training purposes, exercises inform, and are informed by, the geopolitical imaginations of the actors that perform them. Geopolitical imaginations are narratives through which actors understand their role in international politics. These narratives include identity, myths, and symbols, threat perceptions, perceived allies and enemies, and purpose in international politics (Güney and Gökcan 2010, 23–24). Since geopolitical imaginations may be constructed through a variety of practices, including visual ones, they raise questions about their constitution, circulation, deployment, and implications (Atkinson 2013, 562). By building on these insights, images of exercises illustrate and produce geographical space that reflects how militaries understand their geopolitical role as security and defence actors.

Exercises take place in natural or human-built landscapes. Cultural and social geography, and more recently military geography, attach landscapes with meanings depending on how they are ‘read’, felt, and experienced in written, discursive, or visual formats (Tivers 1999; Woodward 2004; Kearns 2019). Thus, landscapes of exercises constitute both military and national identities. On the one hand, they are ‘spaces where military identities are produced, negotiated and articulated’, especially through the use and display of military technology and weaponry (Kearns 2019, 151). On the other, landscapes of exercises shape, and are shaped by, discourses of national identity. Since the nation state is premised on ‘t[ying] together control over subject bodies and over that territory’, military training represents one way to enhance collective national identification (Verdery 1996, 62). Therefore, landscapes of exercises, and their visual representation, only reinforce ‘the imagination of a nation’, and the geopolitical role and identity of a military actor (Jäger 2003, 117).

Places of exercises are equally significant in constituting geopolitical imaginations. Since place is both a geographical ‘site to be represented’ and site ‘from which that representation emanates’ (Duncan 1993, 39), places of exercises not only construct the identity of the armed forces but also illustrate their security concerns. Their visual representation contributes to ‘the transformation of space on the ground into place in the mind’ thus allowing viewers to link places of exercises with their understanding of what is being intimated in those pictures (Schwartz and Ryan 2003, 11). Although the anecdote that introduces this article shows that exercises produce fear and confusion, exercises also provoke excitement, desire, and interest, since their visual representations have a variety of purposes from information and recruitment to justifying military violence.

Even if digital representations develop an ‘everywhere war’ that perpetuates an ever-present sense of danger across time and space (Gregory 2011), geopolitical imaginations are not universal. Since exercises are organized in particular places, carry different geopolitical scopes, and rehearse different ways of warfare, everywhere war ‘is also always somewhere’ and against somebody (Sparke 2007, 117). This supports the idea that places of exercises shape, and are shaped by, geopolitical imaginations.

Edward Said’s (2003) work on Orientalism as a Western way of thinking that constitutes the Middle East and North Africa as poor, uncivilized, and backward spaces has informed most of the scholarship on geopolitical imaginations (Gregory 2004; Khalid 2011). However, scholars have increasingly examined the imaginations of Central and Eastern Europe, and the discourse of Easternness that (re-)emerged during the EU and NATO enlargements (Kuus 2007; Dumitrescu 2021). Echoing an Orientalizing discourse that mirrors Western views regarding non-Western parts of the world, Western intellectuals, writers, and travellers of Enlightenment imagined Eastern Europe somewhere ‘between [Western] Europe and Asia, between civilization and barbarism.’ (Wolff 1994, 15) Due to the geopolitical changes that shaped Eastern Europe during the following centuries, and more recently, the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent enlargements of NATO and the EU, the construction of Eastern Europe as a distinct geographical, intellectual, and political space that is ‘not “fully” or “truly” or “not yet” European’ prevails both among states that identify themselves as Eastern European and in the discourses and practices of Western elites towards those particular states (Kuus 2007, 37).

These geopolitical changes prompted conceptual discussions about intersections between postcolonialism and postsocialism. Postsocialism was developed by Western scholars, and accepted by Central and Eastern European scholars, to investigate lived experiences of Central and Eastern European communities after 1989, while postcolonialism is rooted in literary and cultural studies, and emerged in the aftermath of anti-colonial struggles to critique the present-day impact of colonialism (Cervinkova 2012). Examined together, they query legacies of colonialism and socialism and their interaction in shaping contemporary politics, especially since they share an interest in power, dependence, subjection, or resistance (Chari and Verdery 2009; Baker 2018).

Moreover, both concepts speak against practices of (self-)marginalization such as self-orientalization and ‘self-colonisation’ (Kiossev n.d.). Self-colonization represents a process through which Eastern European actors reject the former colonizer (USSR) while concomitantly ‘self-reinforc[ing] stereotypes of Eastness’ according to which they have yet to become ‘developed’ European states (Gubernat and Rammelt 2020, 248). Eastern European countries, including Romania, continue to self-identify as an Eastern state to assert uniqueness, to receive support from or to be accepted by their Western partners. They also project Easternness towards neighbours further to the East to demonstrate their Westernness.

By building on these insights, exercises are (geo)political practices of power that produce identity, space, and violence. Specifically, Romanian exercises are gendered, ethnic, and racializing practices that animate and produce discourses of Westernness and Easternness through which the military demonstrates credibility locally and internationally. The following section shows that digital representations of exercises constitute the Romanian military as an actor that combines ancient Dacian prowess with technological superiority. This image helps both the Romanian forces and NATO to constitute themselves as credible military actors, especially within the post-2014 Black Sea security landscape.

Romanian militarized masculinity: Dacian authenticity and technological superiority

Digital representations of military exercises constitute militarized masculinity by drawing on three symbolic references: rural and water landscapes, ethnic/national character, and military technology and weaponry. This image helps the Romanian military to assert uniqueness among its NATO allies, to attract potential recruits, and to obscure (future) military violence by eliciting patriotic feelings. Moreover, this image contributes to NATO’s self-representation as an actor that draws its strength from its individual allies. Thus, it reassures allies that all members states share the burden of collective defence while simultaneously cautioning NATO’s supposed rival (Russia) that an attack would be met with distinctive military capabilities.

Recalling the Dacian past

The countryside, the Black Sea, and the Danube dominate digital representations of military exercises thus showing the contribution of rural and water landscapes to constituting Romania’s gendered national and military identities. Although rurality is hardly a unique feature of the Romanian national identity, the countryside, and especially its association with peasantry, has played an important role in constructing Romanian nationhood. For instance, Dacians, the Romanians’ historical ancestors, have always been imagined as a community of farmers (Grumeza 2009).

Broadly speaking, the prevalence of hills, forests, fields, and valleys in visual representations of exercises illustrates the symbolic intersection between masculinity, military training, and the countryside (Woodward 1998). Romanian forces are shown jumping with a parachute (50), manoeuvring tanks (55), climbing mountains with a rope (27), or running through fields and forests (49) (Ministry of National Defence n.d.) The countryside emerges as a challenging environment to test and develop mental and physical traits such as courage, readiness, and strength (Woodward 1998, 287–91). A failure to develop these skills indicates inability to master and defend the homeland, and a lack of affective national commitment.

Water landscapes feature heavily in this album, which shows exercises taking place either on the Danube or at the Black Sea. Apart from signifying strategic military training sites, these water landmarks enhance the gendered identity of the Romanian military. Specifically, they echo the historical ancestry of the Romanian navy. According to its website, the present-day navy personnel embody the heroism of their Dacian ancestors. They had built dugout canoes to navigate the Danube and conquer the prosperous Greek colonies that used to be located at the Black Sea: Histria, Tomis (present-day Constanţa) and Callatis (present-day Mangalia) (Romanian Naval Forces n.d.).

The role of ethnicity in constituting Romanian militarized masculinity is reinforced by references to the ancient Dacian and Thracian⁶ populations within the names of military exercises: ‘Dacian Thunder’ (9–10), ‘Dacian Warhawk’ (13), or ‘Thracian Star 2015’ (71). Other exercises are named after ancient cities such as ‘Histria’ (82–6), which is the first Greek colony on the West of the Black Sea and the oldest town attested on Romanian territory or ‘Sarmis’ (42–3) which recalls Sarmizegetusa, the capital of Dacia before Roman conquest (Ministry of National Defence n.d.). These names invite the military, potential recruits, and citizens alike to identify with Romania’s heroic past, while simultaneously suggesting military strength to withstand future attacks.

Echoes to Dacian ancestry are found in other military self-representations thus signalling the important role that ethnicity plays in constituting Romanian military masculinity. For instance, one of the elite military structures, the 313^th Reconnaissance Battalion, is named after Burebista, the renowned Dacian king, who is assumed to be the first and most powerful king of Thrace (Anghel n.d.). Overall, references to Dacian mythology and its king, Burebista, whose bravery and strength are celebrated in Romanian history, illustrate the role of ethnicity in constituting the Romanian militarized masculinity.

However, Dacian references are important beyond Romania. Any reader who is familiar with the naming conventions of NATO’s exercises will recognize that ‘Dacian’ is a code name that stands for the Multinational Division South-East (MND-SE), the NATO headquarter located in Bucharest. Whenever added to a multinational exercise name, it suggests that Bucharest had organized the said exercise (NATO n.d. b). As such, references to Dacian ethnicity (and broadly, the entire album) contribute to NATO’s efforts to constitute itself as a powerful collective actor. Thus, the album speaks to NATO’s digital media campaign ‘#WeAreNATO’, which features contributions that individual allies/ military professionals make to the functioning of the alliance (NATO n.d. a). Therefore, the album reassures NATO allies and partners that the Romanian military is committed to the collective defence of the alliance, while simultaneously warning that a possible (Russian) attack will be met with distinctive military strength, which characterizes NATO individually and collectively alike.

Military technology and weaponry

Apart from showing overwhelmingly male military professionals performing daring activities, this album abounds of images with military technology and weaponry. It shows military personnel using machine guns (8), manoeuvring tanks (34), flying planes (39), commanding ships (22), protecting critical infrastructure (50), or participating at war simulations on computers (58) (Ministry of National Defence n.d.). By illustrating ‘aggressiveness, technical mastery of complex machinery, courage and autonomy’ (Barrett 1996, 134), these images create an emotionless and undefeatable Romanian military figure that can withstand any threat.

This gendered representation is important to constitute the Romanian (military) figure as a ‘self-confident, active, progressive [W]estern man’ that has left behind its Socialist past (Smith 2001, 222). The industrialization of Socialist Romania enhanced women’s participation to the workforce, thereby constituting the Communist Party as the ‘father of the nation’ while relegating Romanian men to the role of providers for the family. Their role was further challenged during the final years of Communism when state media constituted both men and women as grateful subjects that appreciated the Party’s guidance and protection (Kideckel 2004, 124).

Male figures that master military technology and weaponry signal that Romanians have left behind their problematic (read: feminized) Socialist masculinity and regained control over their destiny. In this respect, the representation of the Romanian armed forces as any other Western, technologically advanced military is a public diplomacy tool that serves not only its interests but also ‘cater[s] to Western needs, beliefs and expectations’ regarding Romania’s role in NATO, and particularly on its Eastern Flank (Jäger 2003, 118). Targeting both civilian and military audiences of NATO and its supposed rivals, this image reinforces the Romanian military’s readiness and commitment to defend the Western world against a possible (Russian) aggression.

Westernness and Easternness within Romania’s war preparations

Places and actors of military exercises are equally significant in examining geopolitical imaginations. By analysing where exercises take place and who participates at these exercises, this section argues that places and actors of Romanian military’s exercises expose a continuum between Westernness and Easternness within Romania’s geopolitical imaginations. This constitutes Romania as a key NATO military ally while simultaneously erasing its past (Socialist) commitment to peace, anti-militarism, anti-imperialism.

Projecting Western identity

The majority of the exercises presented in this album show the Romanian military participating to bilateral and multilateral exercises that involve Western allies or take place in Western Europe (Ministry of National Defence n.d.). Apart from training purposes, these exercises demonstrate Romania’s continuous commitment to NATO, which dates to early 1990s: Romania was the first post-Communist state to join NATO’s Partnership for Peace, contributed to NATO’s missions in the Balkans, and increased its presence in the Balkans after 9/11 to allow NATO allies to redeploy their troops in Afghanistan (Matei 2002, 186–96). Romania also sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan to support its allies.

Although these photos enforce Romania’s belonging to NATO, they are also important to demonstrate Romania’s overall ‘moral concern for order and security in the international system’ (Pugh 2004, 48). This representation enhances public support for overseas military deployment and disguises the inherent violence of military operations. This is relevant regarding a series of photos that show navy students training in the Mediterranean Sea, at a time when Europe faced the height of the refugee ‘crisis’ (Ministry of National Defence n.d., 66–69).

Their training ship is named after Mircea the Elder, a prince and national hero, whose victory against the Ottoman Empire (1395) is celebrated as a proof of Romania’s role in defending Christian values. This victory represents Romania’s perspective on the Antemurale myth (Antemurale Christianitatis) according to which European nations claim that they were the first line of defence against the Ottoman Empire (Todorova 2005, 75). Carrying racial undertones, this myth allows European nations (including Romania) to imagine themselves as defenders of the Western world from the ‘uncivilised other’. Nowadays, this myth informs regional attitudes towards refugees from the Middle East and North Africa.

Although less refugees travelled through Romania than through Serbia or Hungary, similar racialized discourses were found across these countries. The rejection of refugees demonstrates the ‘postcommunist racism’ of Eastern European countries, whose desire to become European and adopt Western values also involves embracing Eurocentric attitudes towards Asian, North African, and Middle Eastern people (Ţichindeleanu 2011, 5). Photos of smiling recruits that train in the Mediterranean Sea inspire reassurance that the Romanian navy can protect the nation (and Europe) against security threats, yet they conceal its contribution to the policing of European borders, all of which have dire consequences for refugees. The Romanian navy has been accused of illegally pushing boats with refugees back to Turkish waters while patrolling the Greek-Turkish border (Christides et al. 2020).

Projecting Easternness over Ukraine and Moldova

Digital representations of exercises with Moldova (93–94) and Ukraine (63–65) allow Romania to project Easternness onto its neighbours and to reinforce its self-representation as a Western actor that defends those that are more vulnerable than itself (Ministry of National Defence n.d.). On the one hand, these exercises are a consequence of Russia’s ‘threat to regional stability and the European path of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia’ in the aftermath of its invasion of Crimea (Presidential Administration 2015, 13). On the other, exercises with Ukrainian and Moldovan troops speak to the complexity of the relations between Romania and its neighbours.

Given the consequences of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the (re)unification debate has affected Romanian-Moldovan relations since early 1990s. Initially, Romania supported unification, but it quickly recognized that unification could undermine its ambitions to join the EU and NATO. Instead, Romania started promoting a deeper cooperation between the EU and Moldova, while regarding the latter as one of its key neighbours. Moreover, the Romanian public opinion has always had a positive attitude towards unification. LARICS, a Romanian think tank, has shown that between 2012–2021 support for unification varied between 57% and 87%. Although figures vary according to the institute that commissioned the opinion poll, and are influenced by both internal and external political factors, Romanians have generally expressed constant support for unification (Melnic 2021).

However, Moldova’s elites and public opinion have a mixed attitude towards unification. Unification has not been popular neither within pro-Russian governments nor among pro-European governments (Angelescu 2011, 130–33). This is particularly important since a possible unification had determined Transdniestria (a region which is largely populated by ethnic Russians and Ukrainians) to declare its independence from Moldova and to establish its own government in 1990. Since then, Transdniestria has used the supposed threat of unification to deepen its independence from Chisinău and to develop closer ties with Moscow (Angelescu 2011, 131). This complex political situation is reflected in opinion polls. Between 2015–2021, support for unification has increased from 20% to 41% (Public Policy Institute 2021) but numbers remain much lower than in Romania. Although reasons for this change in attitude includes a generational change, economic and political instability, and Romanian support for Moldova’s fight against Covid-19, polls are also influenced by ethnicity. For instance, Gagauzians (who obtained autonomy in 1995),⁷ or Russians or Ukrainians living either in Moldova or Transdniestria have always rejected unification (Marcu 2009, 416).

Furthermore, disagreements regarding the delimitation of borders and the rights of minority groups challenged relations between Romania and Ukraine. Moreover, a dispute between their maritime boundaries in relation to the Snake Island deepened existing tensions. In 2009, the dispute was settled by the International Court of Justice in Romania’s favour. However, the Russian aggressiveness in the region has somewhat eased the tension between Romania and Ukraine as they began organising joint military exercises. They also agreed to enhance their military technical cooperation, while Romania strengthened Ukraine’s cybersecurity capabilities (Pieńkowski 2021).

Despite their difficulties, Romania has regarded stable relations with Moldova and Ukraine as an opportunity to demonstrate credibility as a (future) NATO member (Angelescu 2011, 129). However, this inevitably involved transforming Ukraine and Moldova into Romania’s others. Since Romania is part and parcel of the Western security institutional architecture, while Moldova and Ukraine can only aspire to such a privileged position, exercises (and other forms of cooperation) reproduce ‘paternalistic discourses of vulnerability and rescue’ that constitute Romania as a masculine figure and feminize its neighbours (Massaro and Williams 2013, 567). This is particularly true regarding Romanian-Moldovan relations.

Even before Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Moldova was presented in paternalistic terms, especially during the presidency of Traian Băsescu (2004–14). He supported giving Moldovans dual-citizenship (which prompted the Russian-language media and the pro-Russian elites to caution against assimilation) and lobbied the EU to allow Moldovans to travel visa-free within the Schengen area (Dumitrescu 2021, 5). Băsescu insisted that unification and a subsequent EU integration would ‘pull out Moldova from a grey zone’ (quoted in Ziarul Financiar 2019). Similarly, exercises evoke Romania’s racialized thinking towards its neighbour. This discourse envisages Romania as a modern and superior country that supports the development of Moldova. This is a discourse that is meant to reduce Romania’s inferiority complex, and that has always informed its views towards its Eastern neighbours, especially during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Solonari 2016, 585–86). The contrast between this discourse and Romania’s approach towards refugees from the Middle East and North Africa makes obvious the role of whiteness in constituting hierarchies between who could or could not be helped. Romania’s (desired) Western identity implies that it can only help those that are assumed to share its cultural features: Christianity (Orthodoxy), whiteness, and supposed social and historical affinity.

Black Sea: Westernness and Easternness intertwined

Exercises that are named after or take place at the Black Sea indicate a more ambiguous discourse than exercises with Ukraine and Moldova do (Ministry of National Defence n.d., 7;11;40;73). They represent a simultaneous assertion of Romania’s contribution to NATO, and a reminder of its own vulnerability to a Russian attack. This discloses the intersection between Easternness, Westnerness, and militarization within Romania’s geopolitical imaginations.

Although Romania has always expressed interest in the Black Sea region, its NATO and EU membership ultimately determined it to constitute the Black Sea as a pivotal element of security cooperation (Angelescu 2011, 135). Romania launched the Black Sea Forum for Dialogue and Partnership (2006), supported the EU initiative on Black Sea Synergy (2007) and called for the launching of a Black Sea Flotilla (2016), all while warning against the Russian influence in the region. The current Russian military build-up around the Black Sea represents a national security threat, especially since the annexation and occupation of Crimea transformed the Romanian-Ukrainian maritime border (as it was settled in 2009) into a de facto Romanian-Russian border (Åtland 2021, 314).

Due to their limited success, Dumitrescu (2021) believes that the above-mentioned initiatives have reinforced the Easternness of Romania and its (self-) marginalization within the region. In contrast, this article argues that Romanian initiatives at the Black Sea, including military exercises, have a more ambiguous role insofar as they denote both prowess and vulnerability, thereby illustrating the operation of both Westernness and Easternness in Romania’s militarized national security. This ambiguity serves Romania’s interests in the region rather than undermining them. On the one hand, exercises project Romania’s masculinist fantasy of domination over the Black Sea and show its (desired) ability to intervene within the NATO-Russian competition for influence in the region. This is especially true since the Russian invasion of Crimea prompted both NATO and Russia to increase their presence in the Black Sea (Åtland 2021, 318).

On the other, exercises also remind NATO of Romania’s vulnerability to a possible Russian aggression. The National Security Strategy 2020–2024 identifies Russian exercises at the Black Sea as ‘a major provocation to Romanian national strategic interests in securing the EU and NATO borders’ (Presidential Administration 2020, 24). Thus, exercises at the Black Sea may also evoke Romania’s continuous dependence on its Western allies and its assumptions of inadequacy, which are central to discourses of self-colonization. Nevertheless, the failure to recognize that exercises hosted or organized by Romania may be equally perceived as threatening by Russia shows the contribution of war preparations to a permanent state of uncertainty, which affects all parties interested in the Black Sea, especially since they may lead to conflict escalation if misinterpreted.

Not only visual representations of exercises and their ‘particular locations elucidat[e] the processes of militarization that surround us’ but they also indicate the intersection between postsocialism, postcolonialism, and militarism (Rech et al. 2015, 51). Specifically, Romania’s geopolitical imaginations reinforce the legitimacy of the Western warfare in the name ‘“Us-Them” oppositions, and “West is Best” assumptions’, which has contributed to the enactment of Western colonial and neo-colonial violence (Sparke 2007, 118). By demonstrating Westernness, sometimes through the strategic use of Easternness, visual representations of exercises efface Romania’s somewhat (progressive) Socialist past, during which it questioned imperialism, capitalism, and militarism. For instance, Nicolae Ceauşescu believed that the policy of détente consolidated bipolarity, which could hinder Romania’s development as a self-reliant Socialist state. Thus, Romania began supporting a policy of neutrality that converged with the principles of the non-aligned movement. It also advocated for solidarity among the ‘Third World’ states to counter the influence of the U.S. and USSR in their internal affairs (Stanciu 2018).

Given its interests, Socialist Romania supported the ending of apartheid in South Africa and anti-colonial and liberation movements in Africa (Angola, Zambia, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Capo Verde, Burkina Faso) (Ţichindeleanu n.d.). During the 1970s, it also expressed concern about external influence in the Israel/Palestine conflict and supported the formation of an independent Palestinian state under the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (Stanciu 2021). More significantly, Romania opposed Soviet demands for increased military budgets and protested NATO’s placing of Pershing 2 nuclear missiles in Europe (Ţichindeleanu n.d.).

Although support for the ‘Third World’ states had both normative and economic rationales since Romania saw itself as ‘more developed’ than the states from the ‘Third World’ while the latter could serve as a potential lucrative market (Mavrodin 2021), the past critique of great powers stands in stark contrast with its contemporary desired identity. Exercises illustrate an explicit ‘pro-Western hegemonic discourse within the Romanian national identity’ that not only constitutes Romania as a key player in NATO’s growing militaristic policy in the region but also undermines its past commitment to a world order characterized by less foreign intervention into the internal affairs of a state (Gubernat and Rammelt 2020, 260). Therefore, this article argues that the juxtaposition between Romania’s contemporary (desired) Western militarized identity and its past Socialist identity adds to our understanding of the intimate connection between militarism, postsocialism, and postcolonialism in the CMS literature.

Conclusion

As the anecdote that introduced this article showed, the study of war-making should not be reduced to the enactment and the aftermath of spectacular violence. The examination of war preparations unsettles the distinction between what does and what does not constitute war to open two new directions in the CMS scholarship. Firstly, it explores the contribution of ethnicity to constituting militarized masculinity within military alliances. War preparations construct the Romanian soldier as a figure that embodies technological prowess, Romania’s territorial specificity and respectively, its autochthonous Dacian past. As a public diplomacy tool, this image is important both for NATO and the Romanian military alike, given the post-2014 Black Sea security environment. Moreover, the militarization of Romania through spatial discourses of Easternness and Westernness shows that the geopolitics of West and East are inherently entangled, thereby challenging the assumption that the Western warfare is a coherent way of war. Therefore, the study of Romania’s war preparations at the crossroads between postcolonialism, postsocialism, and militarism challenges the Western centrism of the CMS scholarship by insisting on the importance of analysing the intersection between gender, race, class, ethnicity, and nationality according to their geographical, socio-political, and historical context.

Further research on the gendered, racialized, ethnic, and nationalistic logics of war preparations would enrich work being done by Critical Security Studies scholars within the area of civil emergency preparedness, which investigates the Western states’ efforts to address domestic security crises such as floods, earthquakes, or terrorist attacks through simulations and imagined scenarios (Lakoff 2007; Aradau and van Munster 2012). However, this scholarship hardly pays attention to the role of gender, race, or ethnicity in preparedness. A cross-fertilization between these two scholarly fields would develop our knowledge of the exclusionary logics that operate within and through preparedness.

Visual representations of landscapes, places, and actors of exercises enhance our knowledge of the geopolitical imaginations that shape, and are shaped, by war preparations. As a process that depends on different visual, spatial, temporal, and socio-cultural contexts, war preparedness operates through a logic that produces violence, identity, and space. A comprehensive examination of war preparations, alongside what happens during, and in the aftermath of war, paves the way towards a more solid critique of war-making in critical and feminist military studies.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the editor of Critical Military Studies, Dr Victoria Basham, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their critical, thorough and supportive feedback and comments. I would also like to thank Jocelyn Mawdsley for providing insightful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy [PF20\100088].

Notes

1. The Dacian people are the historical ancestors of Romanians. Their kingdom, covering the territory of present-day Transylvania, was conquered by the Roman Empire during the first century AD.

2. Militarism is the belief that the use of military violence is necessary to defend a state, solve a conflict, and pursue national interests, while militarization is the incremental process through which military power is normalized in everyday life (Rech et al. 2016, 4).

3. Unless stated otherwise, the empirical material is drawn from the album published in Romanian.

4. Names (e.g. Sunny Morning) that did not provide a concrete reference were grouped together (‘Miscellaneous’ theme).

5. Historically, Moldova was included in the Romanian Moldovan Principality. In 1812, Moldova, which had become known as Bessarabia, was ceded to the Russian Empire. After the First World War, Moldova reunited with Romania. USSR contested this decision and formed the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR), which covered present-day Transdniestria and Balta region in Ukraine. Situated to the east of Bessarabia within the newly founded Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR), MASSR was meant to facilitate the return of Bessarabia under the Soviet influence. The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (1939) eventually forced Romania to hand over Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina to USSR. MASSR and most of Bessarabia become Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, while Southern Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region were included in the UkrSSR (Angelescu 2011, 130–31).

6. Thrace is a historical region that stretched from the Balkan Mountains (North), Aegean Sea (South) to the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara (East) and the mountains East of the Vardar River (West).

7. Having a long history in the region, Gagauzians are Christian ethnic Turks. Currently a pro-Russian autonomous territorial unit in Moldova, Gagauzia used to belong to the Kingdom of Romania during the early twentieth century.