Towards a Romanian Silicon Valley? - Local Development in Post-Socialist Europe

The Romanian transformation regime (p. 44)

In order to grasp the specificity of Timisoara, it is necessary to understand the emergence of the Romanian transformation regime and the way it functions. Understanding the logic of the central state is not only important as a term of comparison for Timisoara, but also because it is the instance that defines the framework for processes of political and economic development in Timisoara, and it mediates the city’s interactions with external actors.

The description and analysis of the Romanian transformation regime is based on a series of theoretical assumptions. The first assumption refers to historical development, which is conceptualised as path-dependent in the sense of Braudel’s longue durée (Braudel 1992). Braudel’s theory assumes that present actions are shaped by a historical infrastructure that sets the constraints and selects the opportunities for political action.

The influence of these structures can be analysed both on the level of social and economic macrostructures and on the level of socio-cultural microstructures like mentalities and behavioural patterns. The following chapter is divided into two subchapters, one of which focuses on macro, the other on micro dimensions of path-dependency. The first subchapter deals with both the pre-socialist and socialist legacies on the macro level. The second subchapter deals with the patterns of thinking and action that develop along with and in interaction with these macrostructural processes.

Historical patterns of political and economic development

In this subchapter the analysis concentrates on the issues of agrarianism and nationalism, which I regard as definitory for the Romanian devel- opment path. Romania’s modernisation was achieved as a top-to-bottom process, with elites controlling the central economic and cultural resources at that time: agrarian production and the nation. More so, agrarianism and nationalism not only had a major impact on inter-war Romania, but also they left their imprint on socialist Romania (Jowitt 1992). Agrarianism and collective ethnic nationalism, characteristic of peasant societies (Greenfeld 1996), further influenced the relationship between elites and the population, leading to the institutionalisation of clientelism.

Pre-socialist development
While Western and Central Europe witnessed the development of autonomous societal spheres for politics and religion, vassalage, new urban orders, and property rights in the Late Middle Ages, the Romanian path to modernity was altogether different. Before the Ottoman conquest, the Romanian principalities consisted of village communities making payments to an upper class of boyars who derived their income not from the agricultural exploitation of land, but mainly from control of international trade flows.

When the Ottoman conquerors took over control of the trade flows, the boyars were not able to raise their incomes through imposing serfdom, due to low population density and opportunities for peasants to escape by fleeing to mountainous regions. The necessity to pay tribute to the Ottoman rulers, however, made the boyars eager to control the agricultural production of the village communities. Still, ownership theoretically remained with the central ruler, who invested the boyars only with the right to collect tithes and labour service from the village communities.

In the 19th century, after the integration of the principalities into the world cereal trade, labour service requirements imposed on peasants intensified.