In a new article in the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, Adrian Grama asks what role anti-communism played in distributional struggles between capital and labor in Romania in the 20th century.
Grama makes the case that anti-communism “has so far been reduced to an eminently post-socialist mood, reaching back in search of useful genealogies to claim parentage in various strains of liberalism, conservatism, or socialism, all assembled under the banner of twentieth-century anti-totalitarian thought.” This article takes a different tack.
The article argues that one shouldn’t understand anti-communism as a body of ideas, but as a sovereignty framework, “at once direction to law-making and prop to law-enforcement, and ultimate ground for the exercise of legitimate violence.”
In other words, anti-communism was essential to state-making in two different historical contexts at opposite ends of the century. “Not simply the paper trail of various intellectual debates but legal texts, I suggest, should provide us with the raw materials for assessing the trajectory of anti-communism in the 20th century and beyond,” Grama writes.
Anti-communism shaped the writing of labor laws in interwar Romania. After 1918, Grama explains, “the state that emerged” adopted the “mold of anticommunism.” This was true of foreign policy as well as domestic affairs.
As Grama writes, “Bessarabia was also a testing ground in the diplomacy of anti-communism for it was far from clear how the principles of Wilsonism, made public just as Romanian troops crossed its borders, could have justified territorial expansion, particularly in a context in which many local elites still placed their hopes in empire. … It was again anti-communism that cemented land-grabbing, once a new government under Béla Kun drew in Romanian troops on the Tisza in April 1919, later to advance on Budapest over the summer and help bring down the Hungarian Soviet Republic.”)
And after 1989, “anti-communism shepherded the disentanglement of the patrimony of the state from the people, in a process commonly called transitional justice focused on property restitution.” The common thread here, per Grama, were business-friendly states (then authoritarian, now democratic).
But Grama also explores how anti-communism undercut itself, concluding: “Twice indeed was the state that anti-communism shaped the victim of its own good intentions: the first time as the tragedy of a minority of industrial workers in interwar Romania, put under patrol by a repressive state for the sake of social peace and lasting borders; the second time as the farce of a minority of former property owners in post-socialist Romania, promised public resources for the sake of transitional justice.”
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