Business Ethics in Third World Countries. A Romanian Representative Case: Roşia Montană

Abstract

Roşia Montană case became representative by its complexity, considering the interaction of the economic with other social sectors on one hand, and on the other hand, considering the context of a economy on the globalization edge in a South-eastern European country 'rebuilt' after 1989 and in a permanent 'reform' of 20 years, representative by the way the economics dictates to the politics, sealing the road to sustainable disaster in an "era of sustainable development”. Edifying symbol of the times that we live at the beginning of the XXIst century, maintaing the focus on the Romanian opened wound Roşia Montană is equivalent to a live lesson about the survival or the collapse of the (human) ecosystem. About the morality as a reality of another order than that of biological life and as a sine qua non condition of the humanity preservation.

Note: The aggregate term Third World was challenged as misleading starting with the Cold War period, because it got various meanings depending on different points of view: 1. it was used to define during the Cold War the countries that remained non-aligned or not moving at all with either capitalism and NATO (which along with its allies represented the First World) or communism and the Soviet Union (which along with its allies represented the Second World); 2. it has also a completely different definition according to human development index – the term Third World, when used today generally denotes countries that have not "developed" to the same levels as OECD countries, and which are thus in the process of "developing"; 3. in the 1980s, economist Peter Bauer offered a competing definition for the term Third World, claiming that the attachment of Third World status to a particular country was not based on any stable economic or political criteria, and was a mostly arbitrary process. The large diversity of countries that were considered to be part of the Third World, from Indonesia to Afghanistan, ranged widely from economically primitive to economically advanced and from politically non-aligned to Soviet- or Western-leaning. The only characteristic that Bauer found common in all Third World countries was that their governments "demand and receive Western aid" (the giving of which he strongly opposed). So I must mention that in this paper I use the term Third World  with its generally second and third meaning from the above definition.