A Tale of Two Villages
Coerced Modernization in the East European Countryside
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi,
Chair of Democracy Studies at the Hertie School of Governance
in Berlin. She is a board member of the International
Forum of Democracy Studies and the Journal of Democracy
of the National Endowment for Democracy. She is the
editor of the Romanian Journal of Political Science
and member of the editorial board of the Journal Südosteuropa
of Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. She is also
a writer and journalist.
Translated by Angela Jianu
This dramatic story of land and power from twentieth-century
Eastern Europe is set in two extraordinary villages:
a rebel village, where peasants fought the advent of
Communism and became its first martyrs, and a model
village turned forcibly into a town, Dictator Ceauşescu’s
birthplace. The two villages capture among themselves
nearly a century of dramatic transformation and social
engineering, ending up with their charged heritage in
the present European Union.
"One of Romania’s foremost social critics,
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi offers a valuable look at several
decades of policy that marginalized that country’s
rural population, from the 1918 land reform to the post-1989
property restitution. Illustrating her arguments with
a close comparison of two contrasting villages, she
describes the actions of a long series of “predatory
elites,” from feudal landowners through the Communist
Party through post-communist leaders, all of whom maintained
the rural population’s dependency. A forceful
concluding chapter shows that its prospects for improvement
are scarcely better within the EU. Romania’s villagers
have an eminent and spirited advocate in the author.”
Katherine Verdery, Distinguished Professor, Department
of Anthropology, City University of New York
Contents
List of Tables; Acknowledgements;
Chapter 1 The Argument: Chapter
2 Two Villages: Chapter 3
The Construction and Deconstruction of Rural Property;
Chapter 4 The Invention of Social Conflict;
Chapter 5 The Destruction and Replacement
of the Elite; Chapter 6 The Manipulation
of Lifestyles; Chapter 7 From the Dependent
Peasant to the Citizen-Peasant: The Bases of a Rural
Political Culture; Chapter 8 Between
the Past and the Future; References; Appendices;
Index
The Economist chose A Tale of Two Villages
Book
of the Week on 29th May 2010. "A dramatic,
thought-provoking and sometimes savagely funny account
of one of the toughest problems in Europe: the ingrained
poverty of the Romanian countryside."
2010
230 pages
ISBN 978-963-9776-78-4 cloth $45.00 / €33.00 /
£30.00
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