We want a country like abroad

This expression appears in Romania with almost mathematical regularity. You hear it after every holiday, after every comparison with Austria, Germany or the Netherlands, after every photograph of an immaculate train station, a park without litter or a road where no one parks wherever it suits them.

“We want a country like abroad.”

Each time I ask myself what each of us understands by this phrase.

For some it means motorways.

For others, hospitals.

For others, digitised administration, trains that arrive on time or cities where children walk to school alone.

All of these are true. But I have the impression that, all too often, we look only at the result without noticing the mechanism that produces it.

One morning in Switzerland, I saw a worker climb down from his lorry simply to pick up a cardboard box that the wind had blown against a fence. It was not his street. It was not his company. No one was watching him. He picked it up, carried it a few metres to a skip and carried on his way. The gesture took less than a minute and, probably, no one remembers it.

I do.

Because in that minute I understood that the difference between “here” and “abroad” was not in the skip, nor in the lorry, nor in the man’s salary. The difference was something else: no one regarded compliance with a rule as a favour done to the state. It was, quite simply, the natural way in which the community operated.

We often discuss the law as though it were a tool of coercion. We ask what fines exist, who carries out checks, what risks we run if we fail to meet an obligation. It is an approach I encounter frequently even in companies. The first question is not “what is the correct conduct?” but “what happens if we do not do this?”.

The question seems legal.

In reality, it is a cultural one.

The societies we admire do not function because they have better laws than ours. Many of their rules are surprisingly similar to those in Romania. They function because the law is the last link in a chain that begins much earlier: with the education received at home, continues at school, is confirmed at the first place of work and is consolidated by the example of those around us.

The moment a rule becomes instinctive, the sanction loses its importance. Not because it disappears, but because it is invoked ever more rarely.

Perhaps that is why the expression “we want a country like abroad” strikes me, without our intending it, as incomplete.

A country does not become “like abroad” on the day it opens a motorway or completes a hospital. It reaches that point at the instant when people start to comply with the rule even when they are convinced that no one is watching them.

From that moment, the law ceases to be an instrument by which the state forces citizens to behave in a particular way and becomes what it should have been from the start: the expression of a tacit understanding that each person’s freedom exists only so long as it does not destroy that of another.