Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article analyzes the Romanian transition to communism in the late 1940s. The cultural turn in political sociology shows that state building has a strongly symbolic and performative element. Less attention has been paid to the symbolic aspects of regime change, which involves the need to not just accrue power but also diminish that of others. This article starts with a processual understanding of the state, one where a regularity such as the state needs to be validated with reference to time and space. Preexisting understandings, however, are sticky and potentially path-dependent. Regime change is therefore not simply (or always) a matter of failing to validate old understandings – but also actively elaborating and promoting their replacement. To justify regime change, Romanian communists thus worked to elaborate new historical and contextual understandings of the state, engineering a turning point that effectively established a new version of the Romanian state. Without reifying institutions, we can nonetheless make space for process itself to accumulate and (momentarily, incompletely) stabilize, such that social change is a difficult though not impossible achievement.
Source: Social Science History
Author: Ioana Sendroiu
Institution: University of Hong Kong
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W7106531146
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