A Tale of Two Villages: Coerced Modernization in the East European Countryside

Alina Mungiu

janv. 2010 · Central European University Press

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This dramatic story of land and power from twentieth-century Eastern Europe is set in two extraordinary villages: a rebel village, where peasants fought the advent of Communism and became its first martyrs, and a model village turned forcibly into a town, Dictator Ceau?escu?s birthplace. The two villages capture among themselves nearly a century of dramatic transformation and social engineering, ending up with their charged heritage in the present European Union. "One of Romania?s foremost social critics, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi offers a valuable look at several decades of policy that marginalized that country?s rural population, from the 1918 land reform to the post-1989 property restitution. Illustrating her arguments with a close comparison of two contrasting villages, she describes the actions of a long series of ?predatory elites,? from feudal landowners through the Communist Party through post-communist leaders, all of whom maintained the rural population?s dependency. A forceful concluding chapter shows that its prospects for improvement are scarcely better within the EU. Romania?s villagers have an eminent and spirited advocate in the author.?

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Katherine Verdery, Distinguished Professor, Department of Anthropology, City University of New York
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is a Romanian writer and social scientist. She teaches democratization at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and chairs the Romanian Academic Society, a policy institute in Bucharest. She was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford, Harvard, the European University Institute and St. Antony's College of Oxford University, among others. She is a board member of the International Forum of Democracy Studies and the Journal of Democracy. She has consulted for Freedom House, the European Commission, UNDP and the World Bank on issues of state building in the Balkans and former Soviet Union. Her main books are Nationalism after Communism (2004, in cooperation), Subjective Transylvania (1999), and Ottomans into Europeans (2010)