Disrupted Landscapes. State, Peasants and the Politics of Land in Postsocialist Romania

Environmental studies are a notoriously interdisciplinary field of expertise, involving philosophers, economists, biologists, agronomists, historians, and political scientists. In this complex field, the postsocialist states of Eastern and Southeastern Europe pose additional challenges for any interested researcher. Each of these states has witnessed at least four substantial land reforms, implying massive changes in the national economy, societal cohesion and political representation due to the pivotal role of the village in all aspects of the nation state and its modernisation. The mid-19^th century abolition of serfdom was followed by a redistribution of land after the First World War. The two more recent reforms, however, were more radical in their objectives and consequences, intended to create a new man and new societies—communist reform around 1950 and the return to a market economy around 1990. As Stefan Dorondel rightly argues in the introduction to Disrupted Landscapes, the individual historical trajectories, socio-economic structures and reform strategies differ widely from one postsocialist country to the next. The author reveals part of his agenda in writing this book by identifying not only the communist nationalisation of all arable land in the late 1940s and 1950s as a ‘utopian project of social engineering’ (3), but also the no less daunting tasks of dismantling rural communist structures in the economy and restituting property rights to society half a century later. On an equally unorthodox note, the author draws attention to the analogy between postcolonial studies and postsocialist studies, making it his agenda to fill postsocialist area studies with conceptual meaning, like postcolonial studies have done before (5).

Despite the book’s interdisciplinary ambitions, Stefan Dorondel reveals to be a trained anthropologist of Eastern Europe, with a substantial track record in Germany and Romania. At least for Romania, most recent pioneering research in environmental and rural studies has been undertaken by anthropologists, sociologists, or political scientists, such as Katherine Verdery, Gail Kligman, and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi. As is becoming for an anthropologist, Dorondel has selected two villages in the province of Argeş for his fieldwork of interviews and participant observation, with extensive fieldtrips from 2004 until 2010, and additional archival research. The mountain village of Dragova had escaped collectivisation, unlike the second case study of Dragomireşti. Again, the impact of human actions shaping the environment is by no means understudied, but Dorondel added a reverse relation, the environment influencing society and politics, to create a circular system. In the same vein, his outlook is beyond determining economic interests and strategies. Instead, indebted to James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, he sets out to reveal the imposition of new meanings of property and a dominant neoliberal logic. The postsocialist state endeavoured to implement its high-modernist project of simplification to the detriment of local heterogeneity and to imbue a system of private land ownership to the detriment of intricate and traditional commons, a fashionable term in economic critique today. Like Scott, Dorondel studies unintended consequences of these utopian projects on the local level. Unlike Scott’s famous single-mindedness in proving that these projects were against rather than forthe (rural) populace (42), Dorondel’s study is open-minded and subtle in its analysis.

The first postsocialist government in Romania, dominated by the National Salvation Front, hesitated to initiate a radical neoliberal shock therapy. Eventually, ‘advice’ by Western agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the electoral victory of the prowestern Democratic Convention in 1996 marked a breakthrough. Dorondel explicitly underlines that these neoliberal objectives were not simply imposed on a passive populace. Instead, villagers demanded restitution and thus became themselves part of the project (57). He also notes that some postsocialist governments were hesitant at best and that new national parks and environmental laws were created, de facto limiting private property rights. The added value of this book’s local perspective and anthropological view can hardly be overestimated. The above developments on the national level are well known, but become way more intricate and colourful on the village level. Decollectivisation and deforestation caused by privatisation or illegal logging have been linked to changes in the social and political situation of the village and its local hierarchies. As Dorondel promises in the introduction, this is indeed a two-way street littered with unintended consequences. At last, the victims and perpetrators become humans with a face, interests and beliefs instead of systemic tendencies and structural developments.

In sum, Disrupted Landscapes is a thought-provoking and colourful book well written. The author knows how to portray village life as a backdrop to economic and societal developments, without basing his narrative on anecdotal evidence. Conversely, in the background relevant archival and statistical sources are referred to and conceptual literature has clearly informed the analysis, without diminishing the readability of the book in any way. The only major wish left unfulfilled by this book may be an unfair one. Apart from the reminder that the interaction between humans and their environment under both socialism and postsocialism differs substantially from country to country and even from one village to the next, Dorondel has little to say on transnational comparisons and the representativeness of his case studies. On the other hand, if he had, he would have written a far less innovative and colourful book. Arguably, as the excellent conclusions underline, Dorondel is less normative and milder than Scott because of the fact that he studies two consecutive utopian projects of high modernity (191). Whereas Scott could claim that these (in his case often totalitarian) projects were bound to fail, Dorondel proves that undoing one utopia is bound to produce a new utopia with similar dynamics and dire consequences for the village and the environment.