Agrarian reforms and modernization in twentieth century Romania. a case study - The Bordei Verde commune in Braila County

Abstract

The modern Romania was formed in 1866 through the union of two principalities sharing a common language and culture: Moldavia and Wallachia. For the progressive Romanian elites this was a dream which came true and a chance to shape the future development of the country according to the Western European model. Yet, less than a half of century later, in 1907, the country was shaken by a peasant revolt which was suppressed with the price of thousands of victims. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was a clear for everybody that despite the modernization attempts the cleavage between elites and the rural masses representing the overwhelming majority of population was actually getting deeper. From 1917 on no less than four important agrarian reforms tried to solve the problem of backwardness of the countryside: land granting in 1919/1921 and 1945, collectivization during the fifties and decollectiviztion in 1991. Despite them the Romanian agriculture remained the most backward part of society and economy and was a delicate subject during the negotiations for the EU accession.

The reforms as answers to the problem of backwardness and the way in which they really affected a studied area in Brăila county, in South-Eastern part of Romania, are the topic of this dissertation. With this purpose in mind I will analyse three distinct actors directly implicated in agricultural policy: the national elites, who formulated the general policy programmes, the administration, whose task is to implement the elites’ projects and the peasants, who are directly affected by the measures put in place. The case study is the central element of investigation, but the strong point of this dissertation is, in my opinion, the attempt to determine the real effects that development programs had on the rural area, which in turn would give insights on how the modernization process really operated in the case of Romania. This will be explored from a multidisciplinary perspective, focused on three levels of analysis: the village level, the modernization programs drawn by the national elites (the country level) and the administration as an intermediate structure between the two of them.

Introduction

At the end of the twentieth century nearly half of the Romanian population was living in the countryside and around one third was making a living out of agriculture. This was after half century of extensive urbanization and industrialization during the communist period. Regarded from a historical perspective, during the twentieth century Romania was mostly a rural country, and the proportion of the urban population exceeded the rural one only at the end of the seventies. Therefore, the study of the rural area is particularly important for Romania’s social history.

The agriculture as an economic sector and the rural part of the Romanian society were two of the most important subjects during the negotiations for Romania’s accession to the European Union. For both partners agriculture was a sensitive problem. The Common Agricultural Policy promoted by the EU was the most important instrument of financial intervention and a key element of European supranational policy. In Romania, the countryside was traditionally regarded as the least modernised part of society, retaining strong elements of backwardness. The process of accession transformed the underdevelopment of the Romanian countryside from a local problem to a European one, since from the EU perspective there was the risk that the agricultural sectors of Romania and other Eastern European states would absorb important financial resources from the EU budget, without any real gains in terms of economic profits or development.

As the problem of backwardness in the rural area gained importance during the last two decades, the subject of this thesis is the transformation of the rural area according to the attempts of modernization promoted over the last century. As the underdevelopment in the countryside had been acknowledged since the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of development programs specifically addressed this problem. During the twentieth century, Romania knew no less than four agrarian reforms which aimed at transforming radically the rural space: the agrarian reforms in 1919/1921 and 1945, the collectivization of agriculture between 1949 and 1962, and the decollectivization in 1991. Nevertheless, the underdevelopment of this sector has remained an issue until nowadays. Therefore, this thesis covers the period between 1917, when the constitution was modified to allow the 1919/1921 reform, and 2007, the year in which Romania became a member of the EU, in an attempt to investigate the transformation of the rural space and the reasons why the modernization took place at such a slow pace.

Methodology

There are two main strategies one could use in touching upon the problem of modernization: a quantitative perspective, through the use of statistical data to generate models to investigate the main features of the process, and a qualitative one, with the aid of case studies or examinations of key phenomena. This work makes use of both of them, in an attempt to connect the transformation of a commune in the eastern part of Romania with the projects implemented for modernization of the rural area at the country level. The case study is the central element of investigation, but the strong point of this thesis is the attempt to determine the real effects that development programs had on the rural area, which in turn would give insights on how the modernization process really operated in the case of Romania. This will be explored from a multidisciplinary perspective, focused on three levels of analysis: the village level, the modernization programs drawn by the national elites (the country level) and the administration as an intermediate structure between the two of them.

The village level is especially relevant for the problems of modernization since due to the limited amount of available sources, very little is in fact known about the social transformation that took place in the villages during the twentieth century. Indeed, because of the low rate of literacy during the first half of the century, the rural population was mostly unable to articulate its own attitude regarding modernization, and during the communist period it was difficult to express opinions incompatible with the official ideology. Yet, this shortcoming might be partially overcome by the use of an anthropological perspective, relying on information obtained through field interviews.

The perspective that I propose is that of cultural materialism promoted by the American anthropologist Marvin Harris. The main features of his theory that I will use are the distinction emic/etic and a materialist approach toward the investigation of culture. The distinction emic/etic is relevant for the different ways of interpreting reality employed by the researcher and the social actors of a specific social process. The emic perspective is that of interviewed persons (informants) who interpret reality according to their own cultural perception. The etic one represents the culturally neutral outlook of the researcher, in terms that can be applied to other cultures. The distinction emic/etic is also relevant for the materialist perspective on culture, according to which etic behavioural conditions and processes directly influence the emic ones. Therefore, particularly relevant for understanding culture are the relations of society with the environment (etic aspect of culture), which Harris defines as “cultural infrastructure”, compromising the modes of production and reproduction. They are the foundation of the social structure, consisting of domestic and political economies of a society, on top of which one can find the superstructure, represented by behavioural and mental aspects of culture.