How far is Romania from being a "failed state"?

Vasile Puşcaş, member of the Editorial Council of FP Romania, comments on the position of our country within Foreign Policy of failed states index.

How do you appreciated the fact that the worst score of Romania inside FP top of failed states, published in the current edition of the magazine refers to the “delegitimization of the state”? What are the risks here? Is Romania in danger of becoming a “failed state”?

Vasile Puşcaş: The Notion of failed state is much disputed. Used in particular by political commentators and journalists, the concept was launched at the beginning of the 1990s. The term in danger of becoming a failed state mustn’t be confused with failed state.

In the first case, the state, even if vulnerable, works, while in the second case the state loses all its empirical attributions of being a sovereign state. The concept of failed state can be interpretable: this is the social order where the state is an institution that exercises its authority on the resident population in a limited territory.

As a consequence, we could say the decrease, the decline of the state’s capacity of implementing its rules, collecting the tax and own the monopoly of the control on violence, the lack of these capabilities would mean the “state’s failure”.