\"Romania\" (Encyclopedia entry)

The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty Romania

Contributors: Mehmet Odekon Book Title: The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty Chapter Title: "Romania" Pub. Date: 2015 Access Date: November 06, 2015 Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc City: Thousand Oaks Print ISBN: 9781483345703 Online ISBN: 9781483345727 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483345727.n694 Print pages: 1334-1335 ©2015 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483345727.n694

Romania Romania is one of the poorest countries in the European Union. Although poverty in Romania has deep historic roots, the country’s present socioeconomic situation bears the marks of its socialist experience of nearly half a century (from 1947 to 1989), whose legacy still affects contemporary Romania. The shortage economy of the socialist regime entered into chronic crisis during the 1980s, when the lines formed in front of food stores for basic products became a constant feature of Romanians’ everyday lives. The bloody revolution of 1989 did not significantly improve Romanians’ quality of life. Conversely, the post-Communist economy generated successive waves of inflation, unprecedented rates of unemployment (against the background of economic deindustrialization), general corruption, and, as a consequence, an impaired quality of life. In people’s perceptions, the political freedom inaugurated by the revolution came with an increasingly overwhelming burden of collective poverty. The shock of transition was felt most acutely in the first post-Communist decade, when Romanians witnessed an accelerated proliferation of poverty. The growing polarization of Romanian society, previously quasi-egalitarian in poverty, fueled the public’s perception of relative deprivation. Even when things started to turn less bleak, frustrations grew as an emergent category of transition entrepreneurs benefited from privatization at the expense of the common good. It is in this context that a popular collective nostalgia for the former Communist regime was felt by roughly half of the Romanian population. The painful difficulties of the transition from “state paternalism to individual responsibility” found their dramatic expression in the sequence of six mineriads (miners’ revolts) that violently shattered Romanian post-Communist society between 1990 and 1999. However, as Romania was leaving behind its Communist past, things started to improve. Romania was accepted to the European Union in 2007, a moment described by numerous analysts as symbolizing the end of Romanian transition toward liberal democracy. The gross domestic product (GDP) per capita rose to $8,910 in 2013, while life expectancy continuously improved, reaching 70.7 years for men and 77.9 for women in 2012. Child mortality declined gradually to a rate of nine deaths per Page 3 of 6

The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty: Romania

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1,000 births. Notwithstanding the gradual improvements, Romania remains among the countries most affected by poverty in the European Union. According to Eurostat, in 2012, Romania, at 41.7 percent, was second only to Bulgaria (49.3 percent) regarding the percentage of people at risk of poverty and social exclusion.

History of Poverty Poverty in Romania had been and continues to be spatially distributed. Even after the aggressive policy of industrialization launched by socialist authorities, Romania remains a country half rooted in a rural economy. Almost half of the Romanian population lives in the countryside (45 percent in 2011), where most pockets of poverty are found. Historically, the political elite that built modern Romania chose to fulfill the national ideal of political unity and freedom at the expense of solving the nation’s pressing social and economic issues. The thorny issue of land reform and peasant property, addressed through the agrarian reform of 1864, was not resolved until 1921, after the great peasant revolt of 1907, considered to be the last European jacquerie. The collective fate of the peasants was shattered by the collectivization of agriculture initiated by socialist authorities from 1949 to 1962, a policy depriving them of owning the land they recently gained. The economic precariousness of the peasants’ situation persisted after 1989. Although peasants regained ownership of land following the dissolution of the agricultural production cooperatives (co-ops), this process was not accompanied by consistent agrarian state policies. The nonviable socialist co-ops broke down into self-sufficient, small household farms that were equally economically unviable, with farmers using rudimentary tools and production techniques, many of them living on subsistence farming. [p. 1334 ↓ ]

Roma Discrimination and Poverty Moreover, poverty in Romania has a strong ethnic dimension. The Roma community, the largest in Europe, continues to live under the threshold of poverty. Enslaved in the Page 4 of 6

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Danubian Principalities in the late 14th and 15th centuries, the discrimination and social exclusion historically faced by the Romanian Roma community reached its peak in the genocidal policies initiated by Marshal Ion Antonescu during World War II as part of the nationalistic upsurge of ethnic purification. While in the socialist period the status of Roma people witnessed some improvement —with the socialist regime making efforts to assimilate Roma people into the working class at the cost of jeopardizing their cultural identity—post-Communist authorities have adopted a structural ambivalence toward Roma. On the one hand, massive funds and resources, along with the necessary policy work, have been mobilized to address the salient issue of Roma poverty, without the expected success. On the other hand, postCommunism focused renewed attention on state discrimination against Roma. Pressing matters of concern are the policies of Roma ghettoization by some local authorities; in Baia Mare, for instance, the mayor raised a wall to contain the Roma community from the rest of the city, while in Cluj-Napoca, the municipality relocated a community of Roma people from their settlement in a relatively central area of the city owned by City Hall to the city rubbish dump. Mihai Stelian Rusu Babe#-Bolyai University See Also: Communism; Privatization; Rural Deprivation; Social Exclusion; Socialism.

Further Readings Achim, Viorel. The Roma in Romanian History. Budapest: Central University Press, 2004. European Commission. “Eurostat.” http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/ eurostat/home (Accessed May 2014). Popescu, Livia. East-European Social Policies Between State Paternalism and Individual Responsability. Cluj, Romania: Cluj University Press, 2004.

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Vincze, Eniko, ed. “Spatialization and Racialization of Social Exclusion: The Social and Cultural Formation of ‘Gypsy Ghettos’ in Romania in a European Context.” Studia Sociologia, v.58/2 (2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483345727.n694

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The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty: Romania