Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

Can Democracy Work in Southeastern Europe?prehensive investigation of this topic goes beyond the scope of the presentpaper, I provide here only some elements in order to support my thesis that1981 was indeed a turning point in the creation of the Romanian nation. 25According to the 1930 census, Romania’s rural population made up78.9% of the total population, while the urban population made up only21.1%. 26 Between 1948 and 1981, the rural population decreased from76.6% to 49.9%, while the urban population increased from 23.4% to50.1%. 27 At the same time, the rapid industrialization of the countryresulted in the growth of population involved in industry, and a significantdecrease in the proportion of the population involved in agriculture.Between 1950 and 1981, the population employed in agriculturedecreased from 74.1% to 28.9%; conversely, during the same period, thepopulation employed in industry increased from 12.0% to 36.1%. 28 Thisprocess occurred in the conditions of a specific trend of socialist industrialization,that is, the concentration of large masses of workers in hugeplants, built nearby urban areas. Such a significant shift in the rural-urbandistribution of population, as well as the rapid increase of the populationinvolved in industry as compared with the population involved in agriculture,determined the exposure of large masses of peasants to urban lifeand city culture and therefore led to their integration into the “imaginedcommunity” of the Romanian nation.However, the integration of the rural regions could have not beenachieved without a sustained program of developing a network of pavedroads and, following the Leninist principle, of rural electrification. Ruralelectrification was accompanied by the spread of cheap radiophonicequipment that brought rural Romania out of its autarky. Interwar Romaniahad a deplorable network of paved roads. More than ten years afterthe communist takeover, in 1956, paved roads still made up only 4.8 % ofthe total network of 76,000 km, while in 1980 paved roads made up 20.0% of the total road network. In terms of electrification, the situation wasequally distressing: in 1945, only 535 villages from a total number of15,000 were connected to the national grid; in 1965 there were already3,034 electrified villages, while by 1970 their number rose to 10,591. 29From the point-of-view of the nation-building process, the spread ofeducation is intimately linked to industrialization and urbanization. It istrue that the rate of illiteracy substantially declined between 1918 and1948. However, the vast majority of the population did not have more thanfour years of primary school. The law of 1948 stated that, out of sevenyears of free education, four were compulsory; in 1955/1956 seven years ofschool became compulsory in urban areas, followed by a similar provisionin 1959/1960 for rural areas. In 1961/1962 compulsory education wasextended to eight years. 30 As a result of communist educational policy,281