In the Romanian history there is a certain cyclicity when talking about the political discourse related to the “National interest”. The concept, by itself, has a very diluted framework and a relative content and structure of its meaning. Even under these circumstances, the concept of “National interest” was a benchmark for political ideologies in various phases of the modern and contemporary Romania. The reference epochs of our analysis are the transition of the Romanian semifeudal economy to the capitalism in the second half of the XIXth century and the beginning of the XXth century (1870-1926) and the contemporary epoch of the Romanian transition from the communist economy to a market economy (1990-1923).
Unlike the liberal discourse of the 1920s-“Romanian politics by ourselves”, the present concept of national interest is beginning to be related to a rather non-liberal ideology of national protectionism that goes towards a potential political extremism that is called in the Romanian mass media from 2022 on “The Sovereign Romania”.
The study I propose here is related to a sort of historic cyclicity in defining the Romanian national interest in the discourse of the Romanian political class that is founded on the idea of economic national protectionism.