SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITIES COMMUNITIES
influential in research, introducing a triumphalist narrative that portrayed the fall of communism as an external evil that was defeated – but not as a complex social system that had to be understood through research. This anti-communist perspective (hegemonic in historical writing) had numerous consequences for the social sciences as well, not least of all the legitimation, under the catch-term “mentalities”, of a pseudo-scientific approach that found an explanation for the present in the mechanical causality of the communist past. This high emphasis on “mentalities” was also possible because of the methodological nationalism prevailing in the Romanian social sciences. Once the “nation” became the unit of analysis, it was almost natural to invoke ahistorical essential features pertaining to it as a collective homogenous entity, either positively or negatively. Obviously this tradition pre-dated socialism itself, having first emerged in the 19th century efforts of nation-building and, concomitantly, of science-building that assisted and reflected upon this process at the same time. During socialism, this approach gained different momentum, spurred by the political interests of the Party, and generated the ill-fated intellectual phenomena of protochronism – in short, an attempt to identify Romanian precursors in many fields of natural and social sciences in order to demonstrate unequivocally the genius of the Romanian people. Such ideas managed to permeate almost all forms of scholarship and continued to retain an important hold in many areas well after 1989, in the post-Soviet process of “nation-building”. But by the turn of the millennia, global capitalist forces shaped the Romanian social sciences more than these internal legacies. In this text, I would like to present some of these changes, many of them fully contemporary. I will do this primarily by referring to some of the key changes in the Romanian society during the past two decades, exploring their impact on the social scientific and academic field. A DOUBLE BIND: POLICY AND MARKET The first decade of post-communism was marked, like in many countries of the former Eastern Bloc, by a process of accumulation and dispossession, entailing the transfer of property and assets from
the state into private hands. This process presupposed not only a brutal dismemberment of socialist industry but also led to increased social polarizations, pushing large segments of population previously employed in the industrial sector downward and outward. People at the wrong end of this process were pressured into securing other forms of livelihood, either by going back to agricultural work or through migration (sometimes both). After 2000, an estimated three million people migrated from Romania for work, mainly as unskilled or care laborers. Concomitantly, the process of privatization coupled with deindustrialization significantly altered the bases of the economy, requiring a new emphasis on services, trade and finance, that, in turn, required a different type of labor force. These local processes were nonetheless highly entangled with global processes of capitalist accumulation and were ushered in by the same ideology of neoliberal economics that have been transforming the core of the capitalist system since the 1970s. As such, far from being simple “natural” transformations pertaining to the postsocialist transition, these changes reflected trends that were global in scope. All these dynamics spurred a significant series of social effects, not least in the academic and scientific field. Just like in many other sectors, the state significantly retreated from funding education, including research. As a result, universities and research institutes became increasingly dependent on attracting funds from private sources. This downsizing entailed opening up the gates of the universities through the lowering of admission criteria and simultaneously increasing tuition fees. This not only significantly dented the principle of universal access to education, but also steered the universities into simply providing students with the skills required for swift integration into the job market. This process was further accelerated by the implementation of the Bologna process, whose full range of effects cannot be properly addressed here. Dependent on a student’s funding and private actors, the universities had to steer away from research or at least to adapt their research topics to the new environment. In sociology, this response entailed a palpable shift towards market-oriented research, including surveys for marketing purposes, demographic analysis, samplings, interviews and a turn toward “media studies”. At the
same time, a large number of sociologists and political scientists (exponents of a discipline that specifically emerged after 1989 as a means to create new cadres for the new regime, therefore principally geared toward public policy rather than scientific research) organized their research and expertize for the benefit of political parties and government. Some entered politics more or less openly and helped with electoral campaigns, political programs and voting strategies. Others provided a type of research backed by the halo of science that was clearly a politically charged policy (pension cuts, for example). This brings to fore another central feature of the contemporary Romanian scientific community, the generally uncritical relationship to power (political or financial). This form of dependency severely limited the options for a real critical stance of the scientific community, thus presenting yet another level of continuity with the state-socialist period. NEW TOPICS AND THE EU Nonetheless, the dependency on the market for funding had its positive ramifications, pushing research into socially relevant areas. In particular, I refer here to a large series of studies on migration that made a significant contribution in mapping this large-scale social process mentioned above. This work was complemented by an equally important effort, this time by anthropologists who followed migrants back and forth as they moved between their new and old worlds, exploring their life struggles and trajectories. Roma studies deserves a serious word of mention as well, since it represents one of the most important topics of research in the local social sciences, a fact underlined by a newly established PhD program. To be sure, all these topics were spurred as much by the concerns of the European Union, which offered most of the funding, as by genuine, local scientific interests. In fairness, since it was not entirely market-oriented, these areas of research offered a wider degree of scientific autonomy in which researchers could articulate a series of critical views, including criticism of EU policies on ethnicity and gender, for example. Facing simultaneous downward pressure from the global academic market and its hegemonic and colonial effects in the peripheries like Romania, expressed through publication patterns 75