Nădlac, Speenhamland: Modalities of Closure in a Small Diaspora

2015–2016

ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research Diasporas, nation states and mainstream societies in Central and Eastern Europe

Nădlac, Speenhamland: Modalities of Closure in a Small Diaspora Florin Faje

Final Paper – ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research Florin Faje Lecturer, PhD Department of Sociology Babeş-Bolyai University Nădlac, Speenhamland: Modalities of Closure in a Small Diaspora Abstract Drawing on ethnographic evidence from the town of Nădlac, home of the largest Slovak community in Romania and the biggest road border-crossing between Hungary and Romania, the paper debates the impact of the newly built A1 highway upon the local community of nădlăcani.

It argues that the historical attachment of this peasant community to its land, the post-1989 crossborder trafficking, a lack of local work opportunities and the recent construction of the highway, have produced a social and economic situation akin to some of the nineteenth century postSpeenhamland cases analyzed by Karl Polanyi. In line with Polanyi’s arguments, I show the modalities of closure that have entrapped the community and the vocal local reactions to this process. Overall, the paper exposes the intricate social, political and economic relations between local Slovaks, the Romanian state and the EU, on which the development of the community of Nădlac largely depends.

Introduction In August 2013, the Director of the Association of Nădlac Farmers (ANF) petitioned the Chair of the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development of the European Parliament seeking help to amend the project of the highway bypassing the town of Nădlac. His emailed letter read: The Association of Nădlac Farmers, which represents interests of the farmers of the city of Nădlac in Romania, would like to kindly ask you for your assistance in supporting our demand to build a road crossing over the planned highway A1 connecting Nădlac and Arad (between kilometres 0 and 7) that would be suitable for agricultural machinery. The highway is part of the Pan-European Corridor IV and is connecting with the Hungarian motorway network in Nădlac. The highway is co-financed by European funds.

Nădlac is located in the western part of Romania and borders with Hungary. The agricultural land of Nădlac farmers totals approximately 12,500 hectares. The construction of the highway as planned would split the agricultural land into two parts. The first part, representing 40% of the area with low and medium fertility soils, would be accessible to farmers directly from the city of Nădlac; the second part (60%), however, with highly fertile soils would not be easily accessible (see the attached map). In order for the farmers to be able to effectively conduct activities on the land, they need a suitable access road for their agricultural machinery, such as tractors, harvesters or cultivators.

Long-distance hauling of heavy equipment to the fields is not only difficult, but primarily economically and environmentally inefficient and undesirable, reducing the farmer’s competitiveness on local and foreign markets.

Although Nădlac is predominantly a farming-dependent community, it is surprising that the current plan does not envisage any road crossing for farmers' machinery. The only planned crossing, according to the current construction plan, is on the county road DN 709J, to which agricultural machinery does actually not have access. We would like to note that the initial plan envisaged a crossing under the highway on the county road DN 709J. However, later this crossing was changed to a crossing over the highway and was redesigned to have an S-shape, which makes the crossing impassable for large and heavy machinery.

The construction of the highway without a suitable crossing will have a significant negative impact on Nădlac farmers and the overall community. The highway will block farmers' access to 60% of their land, thus seriously affecting the local economy, resulting in higher operating (transportation) costs, and potentially causing a decline in

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Final Paper – ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research livelihood of the community, which is likely to lead to a decline in agricultural activity and hence employment. It is important to note that the main economic activity of the majority of Nădlac population (around 8000 inhabitants) is farming.

This correspondence was the culmination of a frantic petitioning and protest activity in Nădlac once it became known that the highway will gravely disrupt the town’s agricultural activity.

Indeed, during one of the protests in December 2012, the farmers carried to the grave the coffin of “local agriculture” to show that their land and work has been murdered by the construction of the highway1. By the time of my fieldwork there in May and June 2015, a resolution had been reached between the farmers, the developers and the Romanian government that revised the project to include two underpasses providing access to the agricultural land severed in the initial design of the highway. While not entirely satisfactory, since they are not wide enough to allow the commute of all types of equipment and are prone to flooding due to the swampy nature of the terrain, the underpasses do make possible the continuation of agriculture in the fields north of the highway. The case in Nădlac is yet another instantiation of the disruptive character of modern infrastructure developments on livelihoods and nature. Dams, railroads, airports, highways, or irrigation systems are often notorious for the disruption of space they entail (Dalakoglou, 2010, Harvey, 2005, Goswami, 2004, Löfgren, 2004) – as well as of time, knowledge and social relations – usually predicated in the name of order, with an imperative of connectivity and mobility.

In this paper, I document and explore the impact of the construction of the A1 highway on the town of Nădlac, with a special reference to the community of Slovak-Romanian nădlăcani. I do so in dialogue with Karl Polanyi’s famous analysis of the Speenhamland law, that prohibited for some four odd decades (from the 1790s to the 1830s) the emergence of a fully-fledged labour market in England. By taking up Polanyi’s understanding of the modern relations between work, land and social life this conversation across time and scales could help illuminate the processes that shape life in contemporary Nădlac. Moreover, Polanyi’s resolutely historical and substantial orientation to analysis makes way for a comparative conversation across times and scales that helps illuminate the processes that shape and strain life in contemporary Nădlac. This discussion would bring fresh impetus to the ongoing debates regarding the operation of labor markets in economic anthropology (Gudeman, 2008; Hann and Hart, 2009), most notably in the anthropology of labor (Kasmir and Carbonella, 2014) and of class (Carrier and Kalb, 2015); regarding the possibilities of struggle and resistance in political anthropology (Narotzky and Smith, 2006; Smith, 2011); to the discussions of post-socialist development in Central and Eastern Europe (Ban, 2014; Bohle and Greskovits, 2012, Petrovici, 2015) and of the forces shaping migration from the region (Stan and Erne, 2014; Troc, 2012).

According to Polanyi, by making the provision of poor relief a duty of the state, Speenhamland legally consecrated every person’s right to live. However, since the law entitled every man and his codependents to the bare minimum, its economic effect was so depressive that the entire English society and its way of life came under threat. Polanyi convincingly shows that this was so due to the fact that Speenhamland operated both to depress wages below the minimum requirement of social reproduction and to drive down productivity levels so that the whole economy was endangered. The employers, pursuing profit, had every reason to reduce the wages knowing that relief is in order to compensate for the needs of their employees. In this

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See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUOlm8XHVp4.

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Final Paper – ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research arrangement, the productivity of the workers collapsed, since their lives were mostly spent on the threshold of survival.

In most general terms, for Polanyi, Speenhamland was a legal and cultural configuration that created a precarious social arrangement through a few distinctive modalities of closure. For one, the wage-relief conundrum ensured the closure of opportunities, blocking the development of individuals and their communities according to their established customs. For another, the commodification of land, its treatment as a fictive commodity to be exchanged on the market, was the culmination of the enclosures that marked the English countryside and famously “liberated” work from the land. Nonetheless, disclosures have consistently followed closures and enclosures in the form of reform movements, protests, or revolts, that sought to alleviate the condition of the working classes. In my analysis, the moment of disclosure is most relevant in that it makes visible the resources that a tiny diaspora can and did mobilize when endangered by forces well beyond its reach.

Modalities of closure From a polanyian standpoint, any society is brought into existence by the interplay of forces that determine, by either restricting or advancing, the possibilities of social reproduction.

The ways in which people, their communities and cultures, emerge, develop and disappear are deeply affected by the resources available to them at any one time. Diasporas make no exception.

These forces are made manifest in legal arrangements, political institutions, religious orders and the like, each with their own patterns of growth and durability. Here, resources are to be understood in the broadest sense of the term, the array of material, ideational and symbolic entities that can be mobilized to secure and advance the reproduction of locally embedded ways of life. For Polanyi, nineteenth century English society was brought into being by the strive to implement and make operational the mechanisms of the self-regulating market. This market variety was the purportedly universal and impersonal mechanism of taming human passions and of effecting a just distribution of resources. The amendment of the Poor Law in Speenhamland was a crucial protective lever, in that it briefly postponed the universalization of the market mechanisms. Without a competitive labour market, one where work (read life) is freely bought and sold at a price determined by nothing else than the scarcity of productive human energy, the nascent economy of the nineteenth century driven by profit-making, could not be made operational. In short, by hanging to the principle of the right to exist the law of Speenhamland simultaneously secured the modicum of resources that sustain the reproduction of social life and by doing so in an economy that was already profit-oriented it set English society on course to disaster.

Having been restricted in terms of mobility, property rights and with a limited access to information, the rural post-Speenhamland English society was now closed by the great mechanism of the self-regulating market. Polanyi is adamant that the liberation from working the land, from the constraints of the village community, from the obligations of intergenerational help, was not a plunge into unrestricted and unbounded “liberty,” as classical liberalism would have it. The imperative to sell one’s labour, indeed the imperative to win your existence, was the guiding principle of an altogether different type of closure that operated at broader scales and was apparently untainted by human whims. By radically reconfiguring the fields of possibilities where life and nature could thrive, as well as the strategies of doing so, the market-based closure did create a whole new set of opportunities to realize lives. However, the newly available 3

Final Paper – ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research openings were now cast under the aegis of uncertainty. Surely, some classes, groups or communities were better positioned than others to take advantage of the new situation, better positioned to control and to reduce the degrees of uncertainty affecting themselves and their counterparts.

For the large majority of the English public, the process of reducing uncertainty or of fencing off outright destitution meant mobilizing whatever resources at their disposal to stem the tide that threatened to uproot them with each market contraction or expansion. Local forms of closure thus emerged to provide some security and comfort within the globally rapacious market dominated system. Many of these protection mechanism were patterned on the old. The church and the parish, extended families and networks of kin, associations of all sorts, sprung to preserve and assure locally-based, personal, intimate, ways of biological, social and cultural reproduction. It is in these closures within the closure that forms of belonging – ethnicities, religious affiliations, class solidarities, political commitments – would eventually come to pass as the foci of politics as well as economic obstructions in the way of the self-regulating market.

The corollary is that modern ethnic groups, religions, unions, parties, or Diasporas, got defined and developed in relation to the efforts for closure involved in establishing free market mechanisms. The implication for analysis is to document, understand and explain the myriad ways in which global and local forms of closure operate to advance or restrict the social reproduction of specific people and their ways of life.

In one of the classical ethnographies of ecology and ethnicity, John Cole and Eric Wolf, took to the South Tyrol to show how local ecological factors, land ownership, political arrangements and shifts in local, regional and continental political economy have coalesced in time to produce distinct forms and practices of ethnic attachement and belonging. Their general argument regarding the interplay between local and global forces in the making of ethnic communites strongly resonates with Polanyi’s ideas regarding historical transformation and closure: Underlying any process toward adaptation and congruence are causal impulses that flow from the requirements of the physical environment, on the one hand, and from the forces at work in the larger world, on the other. In complex societies, these larger, “external” forces often dominate and reshape the forces at work in creating the local ecology.

What one sees in the local community, then, is the outcome of two sets of forces, ecological on the one hand, economic, political, and ideological on the other. The resulting interplay at the local level influences not only what goes on “on the ground”; it also influences the nature and capacity of the larger system in the “outside” world.

The characteristics and capabilities of such a system depend directly upon the successful or unsuccessful outcomes of these local interplays. In this view, neither the local system nor the larger world can be understood as if each constituted a closed system, connected to the other only by some mechanical umbilical cord. They are products of the shifting relations obtaining between them, and hence cannot be understood without an attempt to understand these relations. (Cole and Wolf, 1999, 21)

My discussion thus far makes apparent that I am rehearsing Polanyi’s notion of “the double movement.” The notion was his way of synthesizing the inherent inequality of the modern predicament premised on endless accumulation organized through self-regulating markets. Cast differently, “the double movement” addresses the modalities of closure that impact accumulation and reproduction. While market-based closure constantly undermines the efforts of social reproduction in a quest for economic reproduction, humanly-based closures work to undermine the efforts of towards the latter, while advancing the former. I will take the modalities of closure and the workings of the double movement to the history and contemporary realities of Nădlac. I will succinctly present three forms of closure that have affected the emergence, the 4

Final Paper – ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research historical reproduction and the current predicament of the nădlăcani. The story of the community’s emergence is one of closure in relation to religious persecution in the late eighteenth century. The historical reproduction of the community appears to have been deeply impacted by the Slovak’s propensity to acquire land, where a closure centered on land peaked during the interwar. In the current situation we witness a closure in relation to the construction of the A1 highway. Locally, the highway is widely perceived as highly disruptive for local economic activities. My descriptions and arguments in this section build on my conversations with members of the Democratic Union of the Slovaks and Czechs in Romania (DUSCR), of ANF, local elected representatives, a local priest and a local historian and professor of history.

Closures are reactions of individuals and communities faced with forces that threaten the disruption of established patterns of livelihood. Real or imagined, material or symbolic, such reactions are but attempts of securing food, shelter, language, values, or usually a combination of some or all of those. As we have already discussed, the ways in which boundaries are drawn, the paths leading to their implementation and the success or failure of facing and fencing danger, have a lot to do with prior experiences, practices, ideas and knowledges. These locally and historically embedded forms of protection account for the tremendous variability of outcomes among communities coming under similar pressures. Families, networks of kin, villages, ethnic groups, coreligionists, or nations stay in place or flee, learn to perform new activities, renounce or fight for their political or religious attachments. In short, some form of dislocation is always involved in stemming the tides of societal transformation. These dislocations and closures are the substance of the narratives that go into the formation of identities and organizations. The Nădlăcan Slovaks, a tiny minority that has successfully navigated the twists and turns of Central and Eastern European history, are deeply aware of the pressures and reactions that held them together to this day. The pillar of their endurance appears to have their evangelical church. The local story goes that the forebears of the contemporary nădlăcani moved eastwards in search of places where they could follow their creed when the Roman Catholic Church attempted to beef up its domination in the Hapsburg empire in the turmoil that followed the French Revolution.

The Slovak diaspora in Nădlac and the new highway Two years after the English poor were granted relief by the judges of Speenhamland, in 1797, several dozen families of Slovak speaking, Lutheran peasants and their priest, made it to the swampy lands of the lower Mureş/Maros river. Sympathetic nobles allowed them to settle in the area and entitled them to work whatever lands they could drain. The rapid building and inauguration of an evangelical church in 1803, that dominates the town’s central square to this day, is cited as proof of the settlers’ attachment to their faith. The local historian and the members of DUSCR proudly talk about the role of the church in developing and securing the community. Some are quick to note their personal involvement and activity as laic representatives in the parish council. They all emphasize the decisive part played by generations of priests as embodiments and gatekeepers of local culture and ways of life. It is often stressed that ever since the founding of the community the evangelical priests were active agents of enlightenment and reform in the peasant community. Several of them had an impressive educational record in German universities. By the late nineteenth century they were appointed through contests organized by the parish, where they had to prove their knowledge and commitment. These contests might well be an indication of the community’s prosperity and of

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Final Paper – ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research the church’s influence within it. In the words of the local historian, that devoted most of his career in tracing the past of his community: FF: Which was the role of the Evangelic church in preserving the community?

K: The priests were the only truly European intellectuals, they had studied in Germany, in Austria. At that time [19th century] the studies would last six, eight, even ten years. Two semesters in medicine, four in law, two in letters, one in philosophy. Towards the end, some would think: I’ll do theology because it’s more profitable [laughs]. After twelve years they would come over and know it all: he would be a notary, a jurist and a priest. At the same time, the protestants were the carriers of humanism in Central Europe, of humanist and progressive ideas. Moreover, the protestant church is a self-governing institution. The presbyters meet and decide about all of the community’s problems. There’s no orders from bishops, or anyone else, unlike the Catholics, that were controlled by the Hungarian church. Since the bishops were Hungarian, they had to execute their orders. That’s why among the Catholics, there are also Catholics among the Slovaks, you would get Hungarian priests. The bishops would impose them. They could not do that among us, in our church the priest was appointed through a competition. Three would come and the presbyters would decide: we want this one. They had to sing, to preach, to show their competences, letters of recommendation, references. We had priests... We could write a novel about each and every one of them.

Each had his own politics, in literature, in economic life, each left his mark upon the community.

FF: Was this autonomy felt inside the community?

K: It strongly came to the fore after the First World War, in relation to the Romanian authorities, that nationalized the schools and imposed teaching in Romanian. The Slovaks would protest: we just got rid of the Hungarians, now we have to learn Romanian... Nonetheless, it was only normal, you had to know the state’s language. The teachers revolted and by 1924 we were confronted with an ultimatum: you either come to Bucharest for six months to study Romanian, so that you’re able to teach, or we close the schools. In 1921 there had been the “opt-out law:” you’re welcomed to leave... you speak Hungarian. In this context, they said: Ok... We’ll go... Afterwards, the state took up all the burden, and at their meetings after some ten years you could hear them say that it’s good: we don’t have to spend for the upkeep of the schools, we don’t have to pay the salaries of the teachers, we are left with more money for the church, and the waters calmed down.

The church is presented as the central institution of the community during imperial times, as well as thereafter. Its decisive interventions are mentioned in relation to the establishment of a pioneering agricultural association in mid-nineteenth century, very early even by continental standards; in providing elementary schooling, for both boys and girls (!!!), already prior to the turn of the century, and of establishing a credit cooperative under its auspices during the same period. By the advent of the Great War and the subsequent dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the local evangelical church was the central authority that organized and regulated the key features of life in Nădlac. When presenting the history of their church, contemporaries note that the community that developed around it was conscious of the need to organize in order to protect its religious and ethnic specificity and that doing so required an ethos of constant hard work. Beyond that, this local history is immediately relevant not just for reinforcing the position of the church in local life, but also for its material prominence. The historical centrality of the church and its initiatives means that the institution remains the key player in relation to local real estate. The Slovakian school and high-school, buildings of the local administration, several other properties are still owned and maintained by the church. Through its vicariousness, educational endeavors and management of material resources the local evangelical church shaped the contours of this provincial urban community for more than two centuries. It is important to note that it did so among a population of peasants that often found their belonging and comfort tied to their church. The members of DUSCR repeatedly stressed the church/school nexus in safeguarding the community. The vice-mayor of Nadlac, concomitantly the elected leader of the local DUSCR branch, noted that:

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Final Paper – ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research We have kept our language, our traditions and our way of life because of our school and church. When the Slovaks came to Nadlac in 1802-03, they’ve brought their own teacher and priest. The first school functioned as soon as they arrived in Nadlac, in a rented building, since they didn’t have their own, so that children could attend school. Back then it was the church and the school that kept our traditions and our language. During the communist period it was mostly the school that did so, the church too, but less... It was so... After 1990 the church returns, it does so slowly, but it’s coming back. However, for now the school still carries the heaviest burden.

Unsurprisingly, land has been the backbone of the Slovak Evangelical community’s formation and evolution. I have already mentioned the initial stage of making land available for agriculture through land drain. The particular geographical characteristics of the area determined the amount of land available, its quality as well as the patterns of its use. Combined with the political vicissitudes of the region, these geographical particularities defined the forms in which the community positioned itself around land. We shall see that the current development of the A1 highway is but a moment of nature’s transformation in a much larger history. Placed on the right bank of the river Mureş, the town of Nădlac grew partly disconnected from the agricultural fields that supported the livelihoods of its inhabitants. The lands that were gradually made available for agriculture were relatively remote and lacking easy access. To this day, the most productive lands are more than twenty kilometers away from town. These are precisely the lands cut-off by the new highway. For this reason, the problem of access to the fields was crucial for the local community. Again, the local historian, presented to me the ways in which the land was preserved and passed from one generation to the next: In this plain area the man is attached to his land, because it represents his only source of existence and it is also an investment. The land would always grow. Afterwards, the depersonalization during communism, then in the 1990s, slowly, slowly, that feeling of possession, of value came back...

FF: I’ve heard this interesting story that in the interwar period many of the land acquisitions where made by migrants, including some returning from the United States, and that this created a huge drama at the time of the cooperatives...

K: I know the story of my grandfather. My grandfather had 7 hectares of land. Three brothers, my grand-grandfather drank a bit of the land – he was a bit of a lunatic – 21 hectares were left, thus seven, seven, seven for each. My grandfather had seven children: one hectare, one hectare, one hectare... So I inherited one hectare of land. In the 1950s, I know that my folks took into care a distant relative, an old lady, that had some 11 or 14 hectares of land.

After the lady died she left her will to my grandmother or grandfather. He went to the Popular Council and gave up this land. The communists were already causing havoc: the kulaks to the Canal! The kulaks to Baragan! I don’t need land! He would say. I would think for myself: why didn’t you take it? Why? You should have at least put it on your name and then give it to the cooperative. It would have come handy now.

FF: But the fragmentation of land was a general dynamic...

K: Yes, but some would also gather. In the middle of the 19th century there was a very cruel custom. I’ve first heard about it among the Japanese, later among my co-citizens. From example, the Ambrus family, when it came in 1803, it got a possession of 24 hectares, and later ended having dozens and dozens of hectares. The son, the only son, once he had a child – back then the people did not know how to protect themselves – simply moved to a different room, the woman in another room, good bye! to sexual life. The man was thus punished and raised only one son. That one married a rich woman, those were already 48 hectares... Thus, the wealth would grow. In the next generation, where it so happened that there were two sons, the younger one had no right to marry. You don’t marry, you don’t have children, not to spread the wealth. This is minutely documented. A colleague of mine, a descendent of the Ambrus, wrote a book about this modality of transmission. When the First War came, one of the Ambruses died on the front.

Then the grandfather said: son, you’ll marry your sister-in-law and make sure not to have children, so that it all stays in the family.

FF: This means that the father had enough influence upon his sons...

K: That was the patriarchal family. It existed for a long time and this mentality endured.

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Final Paper – ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research The remoteness of the agricultural fields also accounts for the specific productive arrangement that was in place for more than a century in Nădlac. The sălaş (shelter) was a compound surrounded by shade creating orchards in a family’s fields. From spring to autumn harvest most of the peasant family members would spend their lives at the sălaş, where they could take shelter from their work in the fields. In this arrangement, the town functioned as a marketplace for agricultural produce, with a peak of trading activity in late autumn. All my informants highly praise the institution of the sălaş, perceiving it as an ingenious work and family arrangement that assured the prosperity of the community and hardened its attachment to land. As one of them half-jokingly put it given the disruption brought by the highway: “Maybe it’s time to revive the sălaş! To go back and live in the fields.”

Indeed, the nădlăcani do seem to be in search of a shelter that would ascertain the future of their community. The partial severance of their agricultural lands is the last externally induced closure that threatens to entrap the town of Nădlac. Political, geographical and infrastructural processes have created a configuration that effectively boxes the town. To the west, the Romanian-Hungarian state border limits any further expansion of productive activities; to the south, the river Mureş presents a natural frontier; to the east, the town of Pecica appears to have been much better positioned over to last years in rescaling itself as a locally important center of production. With high-profile representatives in Parliament and government, Pecica attacted investments, saw the construction of a bridge over the Mureş (which embittered local councilors in Nădlac, claim was their project), and secured for itself the locally available labour force by coopting many of the surrounding villages in a Group for Local Action (GAL). Tellingly, the coordination center for the development of the highway was also established in Pecica.

Moreover, the proximity of the regionally important urban and administrative center of Arad further eastwards, closes many of the economic opportunities available for Nădlac. The mayor of Nadlac noted that: Nadlac is geographically limited by the river Mures, which flows in the south, which prevents as from attracting any extra labor force. To the West there’s the border with Hungary and, recently, we have the highway to the North. We have tried to make a connection with the neighboring places. For example, with Csanadpalota we have a connecting road. The road to Seitin got modernized, but we are still very isolated. This showed at the time when the GAL’s were created.

One of the local farmers, co-president of the Association of Nadlac farmers, used even stronger terms to describe the town’s isolation: We’re a dead-end. We had no chance in the competition with Pecica, because Pecica has many villages all around it.

Although, to be honest, Nadlac was made a town at the call of the boots. In 1968. It was the gateway to Romania and it could not be a village. Although, Nadlac was already a town in the 1900. Back then it had over 14000 people, including the salase. The structure of the place was different: many children and few old people. Exactly the paradox that we see today. Ok! There was a massive out-going from Nadlac following the Second World War. People left to the Czech, to Slovakia, even in Argentina. At the time, it was allowed to exchange populations, so those who wanted to leave, left. Many left fearing communism, only to find the same over there... We had no chance with the GAL, Pecica had: Semlac, Seitin, Peregu, Turnu. They had all the conditions. Now we’ve joined the Southern Mures GAL, but it’s gonna be much harder now. It will be much harder to access something. The big bulk is gone.

The soon to be inaugurated highway and border-crossing north of the town, thus completes the process of encirclement of the most numerous Slovak community in Romania.

This is the last move in a series of developments that both enabled and debilitated its 8

Final Paper – ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research development. The first two decades after the fall of the Romanian socialist regime, up to the country’s 2007 accession to the EU, are locally perceived as a period characterized by an overflow of money and goods. The restitution of lands and border traffic assured a local prosperity boom. Everyone, from the mayor to the garbage collector, notes the exceptionality of this period when anyone could make easy money by trafficking cigarettes and alcohol.

Retrospectively, they all note the debilitating effect that the abundance of cheap money had on the community. Similar to the English communities post-Speenhamland, with the major caveat of an abundance, not a scarcity of money, the nădlăcani shared the dream of an easily acquired prosperity, that for a while looked quasi-indefinite. Pace the caveat, a local situation obtained that neatly replicates the ones that captured Polanyi’s attention. A collapse of productivity and entrepreneurial activity ensued that threatened to shatter the social fabric as soon as the time of plenty was over. The mayor of Nadlac, already in office at the time of Romania’s accession to the EU in 2007, presented its impact upon the locality in the following terms: We could talk about the disbanding of the customs, from January 1st 2007, when we entered the European Union.

More than 150 workplaces were lost, workplaces typical of a border area. On top of that, 24 million lei were lost to the local budget and we plunged into a crisis that we never thought possible. In July 2007 we were in the impossibility to pay salaries to our employees, not to mention the utilities that we have to offer to the inhabitants. I was already a mayor back then and I know what it means to go through a crisis, unfortunately we are confronted with the same thing this year. But this is due to the effort of the Romanian state to balance local budgets. [...] Can I also tell you about the activities that were also going on? [up to 2007] Instead of going to work for the minimum wage, they preferred to go to Hungary for an hour, and the problem of work for the day got solved.

Indeed, the nădlăcani that I have discussed with, now point to Pecica to the east or Sânnicolau Mare to the south as examples of durable prosperity acquired through smart initiatives backed by political influence to attract capital. Sânnicolau Mare is a particularly interesting point of contrast, where a border-crossing was opened only after productive investments were made, thus safe-guarding the community there from the dangers of temporary trafficking. The director of one of the two small-scale businesses set up in Nădlac in the early 2000s remembers how acquaintances did not fail to point out that they make much more money than him from trafficking, when attempting to recruit people in the early stages of the business.

In the current context, fingers keep being pointed at the local administration for having failed to attract investments in town. Some intimate that their corruptibility is to blame, expecting high personal benefits from any potential investor. Others blame the apathy created by trafficking, where local representatives had little incentive beyond appropriating their share of the pot. The elected representatives stress the difficulty to compete for investments with a labour force completely drawn to the black market and a hyper-centralized state that constantly reduced the levels of budget allocations, while increasing the burden of services to be locally managed and funded. It is again the mayor that succinctly compared the developments in Nadlac to those south of the Mures in Sannicolau: For example, when the firm Zoppas came [tp Sannicolau Mare], I know since I had the privilege to work in this sector, I’ve worked with Zoppas. They came soon after 1990. At that time there was no border crossing in the area around Sannicolau. I know how an investor gets settled. First, they calculate their labor force needs, they test their profit, no one comes just for the sake of investment. At the same time, there was not much labor force available in Nadlac. As I said, some 150 people were busy in activities of the customs. I won’t even mention the other activities that went undocumented.

One of the local farmers also placed this comparison into perspective: 9

Final Paper – ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research

There [in Sannicolau Mare] is beyond their powers, they no longer have any labor force left. In this area, beyond the river Mures, is the Banat, you have Igirs, Periam, Sanpetru sarbesc, Sanpetru german, this whole area to Sannicolau, that’s where they get the labor force from and also from Serbia. They bring workers from Serbia, since here there aren’t any left. Timisul has minus employment.

FF: Sure, people were blaming trafficking...

G: It was toxic for the change of mentality. Indeed, they would take diesel on the other side. They would unload one hundred-one hundred and fifty liters, they would take the money, they would buy cigarettes and would come back.

They would make 300 lei in an hour. They would say: where else would I earn 300 lei? I’m not going to work. In practice, it was voluntary unemployment. This lasted for 15-18 years and it affected the people’s mentality.

Everyone was a trickster, everyone would make do. Once it passed, most didn’t know how to invest the money they’ve made. On the other hand, the villas, the people working in the customs, it shows...

On top of that, the agriculturalists are upset. Their communication routes were cut. There is an asphalted road to Csanadpalota, the closest locality, eight kilometers away, we have common European projects, but we’ve made them for nothing, since there’s no Schengen we can’t cross. It seems people will re-invest in the so-called salase.

The places where you deposit your grains and your tools.

The building of the highway gives material substance to an ongoing process of neglect of local communities fueled by the perceived necessity of rescaling the points of capital accumulation on the part of the Romanian state. In all likelihood, most of the economic activity now taking place in the town on the way to the border-crossing (shops, exchange offices, a few places of accommodation and restaurants, gas stations) will be soon gone. Many locals perceive this process as the closing of the even the few remaining opportunities of making a living in the community. Nădlac is already deeply affected by both national and international migration, and most of the people I have met do contemplate leaving. Their bilingualism, cosmopolitanism and sense of community position them well in starting a life in migration. However, this is widely seen as a betrayal of the deeply rooted, religiously sanctioned, ways of confronting difficulties through hard work and staying in place. At best, in yet another indication of displacement, the highway promises an easier commute to the industrial area in Arad, where several multinationals offer employment. One of the local farmers briefly presented the problems confronting the community thus: Calculate it like this: in 2007, when we entered the EU, Nadlac had 8500 inhabitants, now there are 7700 left, in a few years we’ve lost a tenth of the population. 7700, but many don’t work, don’t live in Nadlac, they were just declared by others. They are gone to all sorts of seasonal works in Italy, Germany or Austria. It’s true that many have also died. There was an aging population. However, those that are still able left to Arad, to Timisoara, or abroad. There are very few farmers under the age of 30. The youth that were not able to make a living here have left.

Many even in Slovakia or the Czech Republic. I think that losing 1% of your population every year is a lot. This was the rhythm that Nadlac lost since accession... In eight years. There used to be many workplaces, but they are all gone. Now that the highway comes it will destroy at least one hundred more, at least ten other families will leave.

One of his fellow farmers described the way in which the project of the highway led to protests: We’ve tried all sorts of public debates with parliamentarians, deputies, people we knew, political people, but none of them was in for it. Any MP, no matter how strong he is on the market, could not have demonstrated what we’ve collectively shown. In fact, this was a struggle of the whole community, not just a struggle of the agriculturalists. To make it clear: there are many owners of land, but not all of them work the land, they lease it. So, for example, I can’t give you 1000 lei for the lease, if don’t make those 1000. Thus, the people – the smart ones among them – realized that the impact [of the highway] will be much tougher and long-term. Practically, irreversible. I don’t see how changes could be made. There were other companies, with other projects, like Nabucco, the pipe that was meant to pass through here – that gas pipe from Uzbekistan, or something, I don’t know, to Vienna, but they’ve at least done an impact study. A firm from Cluj came to ask the people: which? How? What do you think? How do you see the

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Final Paper – ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research conditions? But for the highway nothing was done, except for a billboard at the Mayor’s office. The project was on display there, but nothing was clear.

In this context, the petition that I have started with, supported by more than one thousand signatories, and the association that was formed during the protest activity, was in many ways a historically grounded local reaction on the part of the nădlăcani towards an untrustworthy and often despised Romanian state and a call regarding the precariousness of their situation. The protests and the ongoing efforts to work their lands mark a local attempt of securing a future for the community, when faced with the infrastructural closure promoted by the Romanian developmental state. Given its history of discrimination, opposition and effort the Slovak community in Nădlac was best positioned to take a stance towards this highly disruptive project.

The previous closures centered around the church and around the land make their way in the current attempt to shelter the community under the weight of the new highway.

Discussion The paper started by revisiting Polanyi’s famous analysis of the Speenhamland law, that marked the development of the English countryside in the first half of the nineteenth century and set the English society on course for creating a full-fledged capitalist labor market. The key point taken from this analysis was that Speenhamland, by consecrating the right to live, set in motion a series of process that shattered rural livelihoods and utterly depressed the economy writ-large. I argued that these processes could be understood as so many modalities of closure: limits in having access to land, impediments in using one’s labor according to established customs, pressures on institutions to provide relief, incentives for firms to reduce wages. Notably, Polanyi showed that closures were followed local reactions that sought to adapt and ameliorate the effects of the legislation. In their classical account of post-Speenhamland England, Hobsbawn and Rudé have documented the myriad ways in which communities protected themselves and protested against the in-roads of the modern state and capitalist market (1975). The subsequent transformations of the English society and economy obtained from the interplay between local mobilization and larger forces, which could have hardly been anticipated.

The situation in the town of Nădlac, over the last decades, provides a contemporary Eastern European instance of modalities of closure and reactions to it in the making of a locality and its community. The Slovakian and Romanian nădlăcani were confronted with the collapse of state-socialism, that did away with the humble local industry, almost two decades of frantic cross-border trafficking of fuel and cigarettes, Romania’s accession to the EU, which led to another round of job losses with the downsizing of customs activity, and, recently, the construction of a highway that gravely disrupted their access to land. Simplifying, economic, political and geographical closures marked the recent history of this community. The ethnographic material shows the ways in which local representatives, intellectuals and farmers have attempted to mitigate these closures and to seek new opportunities.

By mobilizing and using the connections and frameworks available through the Democratic Union of Slovaks and Czechs in Romania, the local Evangelic Church, the Association of Nădlac Farmers, the nădlăcani mobilized to show that the disruption to agriculture, brought about by the completion of the highway, threatens their possibilities of making a living. Tellingly, they did so without recourse to their ethnic identity, opting to press their arguments in the more inclusive framework of class. Their protests were emphatically not about Slovaks being affected by the highway, but about peasants attempting to make a living off 11

Final Paper – ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research their land. However, in doing so the Slovakian nădlăcani revived and used political strategies that put a premium on autonomy, democratic deliberation and solidarity between members, in keeping with the traditions of their Evangelic church. Their partial success in safeguarding access to land and of keeping the community together, in spite of the pressures towards fragmentation working against it, has a lot to do with these strategies.

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