Presentations by Streams

This panel brings together scholars from different disciplines to discuss the range of paradoxes of Romania's communist and post-communist history from a transregional and global perspective. The panel explores topics related to the domestic politics of the communist regime, positioning towards various international crises, and the consequences of the transition that led to the emergence of nostalgia and the explosion of populism.
In her paper, Mara Margineanu analyzes the nutrition regulations between the 1960s and 1980s in Romania, with a focus on the state's effort to convey knowledge into organizational structures and actions, and articulate social hierarchies and normalizing everyday taxonomies. Mioara Anton proposes a particular topic focused on the Chilean crisis and the way in which the humanitarian crisis was used by Ceausescu to increase his image capital both at the international level and within the communist bloc.
Using archival research and oral interviews, Luciana Jinga shows that after 1989, Romanians felt deeply humiliated when the westerners simply ignored Romania`s tradition as the initiator for humanitarian aid. In an interesting twist of the post-socialist memory, even the massive humanitarian aid received by Romania in the 1970s’ was left out. Daniel ?andru will explain how the presence of populism in Romanian society, on different dimensions, has affected, over time, the development and consolidation of the democratic political system.