Inbetween Worlds – The Ambiguous Dissent of Post-Socialist Transylvania

After 1989 Central and Eastern Europe has generally been viewed as a passive receiver of capitalist rules. My research is an attempt to find illustrations of dissent in the case of Rosia Montana, a semi-urban village in Transylvania where one of the largest open-cast gold mining projects in Europe is being pushed as the only alternative for development. Starting with 2000, local opposition has triggered one of the largest and most durable social movements in post-communist Romania. The difficulties faced by this movement in the new political and economic context is producing a tornado of feelings, the partitioning of which is contentious. Based on my PhD field-research, this paper examines the ambiguous nature of resistance to capital development in a post-socialist context and addresses the similarities between the two power regimes with regard to their impact on ‘subaltern’ classes. Ambiguously seduced by various (past and present) ideologies, Rosieni often say that life under Ceausescu was more peaceful and simple: the state was seen as protecting its citizens from insecurities of social welfare. Nowadays, the state itself is an object of ambivalence: resentment for the current abandoning of its subjects is entangled with a desire for consideration. A common saying in Rosia is that ‘capitalists will finish what the communist started’, a contentious expression about the state which can no longer be extricated from the market logic. The ‘new Europe’ of Rosia Montana seems to be less about developing the practice of democracy and more about gaining the formal consent to produce a desired economic order. In analyzing post-socialist dissent, this article will address the relevance of the socialist experiment: understanding it as another cultural ‘otherness’ of the West is crucial for any imagining of alternative politics.