Central and South-Eastern Europe: Times are not good for progressive projects, but we need to preserve and increase our potential. There are always changes

Vladimir Mitev

Cosmin Cercel studied law in Paris and Bucharest. After defending his PhD in Comparative Law “cum laude” at the Sorbonne Law School, he moved to Nottingham as a postdoctoral researcher (2012) and later (2015) assistant professor and associate professor (2020), teaching Legal Theory and Comparative Law. From 2022, he moved to Lazarski University in Warsaw, devoting himself to research and collaborating with the New Europe College in Bucharest and the Romanian Academy in Cluj. In January 2023, he was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for EMERGE, a research project funded by the U. Ghent which aims to produce a comparative legal history of emergencies in Europe in the last century. In May 2023 he was appointed Professor at Ghent University. His research lies at the intersection of legal theory, comparative legal history and constitutional theory, with a focus on the ‘dark’ legacy of law in a continental context.

Hi Cosmin. I initiated this discussion because I find it precious to meet you in Bucharest. Nowadays there are not so many situations where I can see myself with people who actually read books systematically, for example. And not just any kind of books, but non-fiction, social theory, reflection on life, society and culture.

So far I’ve done two podcasts, two free discussions, with people from our countries who have expertise on social issues and social change – with David Bisset from Scotland and Codru Vrabie from Romania. The way I spoke to them in these talks is not popular in our area. I am looking for this kind of talks, because first of all I need to think on a deeper level and that sometimes requires a partner, including to study and bring out one’s own thoughts, to challenge oneself or the other. My experience from Bulgaria is that in various cases there is a tendency to be labeled and reduced to something less than what I think I am. And that’s why I perhaps unconsciously seek out people with whom I can freely exchange ideas.

I understand, Vladimir. It’s very difficult because everybody is in a hurry, everybody wants simple things, everybody wants things to be done now, possibly to be understood as easily as possible and by as many people as possible, and sometimes things become simplified. That’s the big problem.

Everybody makes them simpler and simpler. And all of a sudden, when we try to simplify things more, at some point they don’t have much to do with reality, do they? And that’s one of the big problems we have nowadays, with the internet, social media, all that.

It often leads to quite serious problems, in the sense that things have so little to do with reality that we wonder what kind of world we live in. And that seems to me to be the big problem, somewhere, beyond everything we have in everyday politics, beyond all the misfortunes and disasters we have been suffering lately, war in the world and so on, the climate crisis, I don’t know how many other crises, rising inflation, I don’t know what, so beyond all that, there is also a problem, in the end, the lack of reference points.

The lack of reference points stems from the fact that there are fewer and fewer people with a presence in the public space who try to present things in a way that is not simplified, not truncated. A lot of people have retreated into different areas, I’m talking about the academic space, the university space, where we are basically more and more cut off from everyday life. We are cut off, not because we want to be cut off from everyday life or not because we are withdrawing, but because very often lately, a very different language has developed more and more, whereby we are cut off from the possibility of getting closer and talking to people in general. Because most of the time, people don’t want to listen to us either. They don’t want to listen to us anymore because they find things uncomplicated and because there is an overproduction of things that are as simple as possible.

It’s an overproduction that’s more and more maintained by the media, and social networks.

Yes, and social networks, absolutely. Social networks play a role in the so-called democratization that the internet has produced, which has often come to destroy the media’s capacity and role to inform. We have seen this very well in pandemics – what this kind of democratization means, where all of a sudden the content editor practically disappears and all of a sudden all kinds of wonders appear on the internet, are considered to be the truth and are circulated left and right. I am not just talking about things that are intentionally done that way, but simply things that circulate.

That very often makes all of us in academia – people at one time or another broken and trapped in our own bubbles, in our own circles, in our own discussions, in our own debates – have less and less impact on public life. This rift between the academic and the public space is very painful, and it is felt painfully by everyone, and we don’t really know how to get past it. Maybe this moment of dialog can help us to get through it, to somehow manage to…

Media should be the middle space between all of us.

Absolutely, to unite us all somewhere in the ability to transmit certain things and to transmit a series of ideas that in one form or another are perhaps more advanced, not because, supposedly, people in academia are necessarily smarter, but because they are often paid precisely to think. Because if we look, if we open the newspapers or browse the front page and so on, we see that the university sector also has its problems, for example in Romania, in most of the Balkan countries, in Eastern Europe, there is terrible underfunding.

Similarly, I worked for a very long time in Great Britain and, at that time, funding was, let’s say, in good conditions, but at the moment, let’s say for about seven years, the system is approaching a generalized collapse due to the fact that for very different reasons, but mainly because universities started to function as businesses, they started to function as private companies that have to make a profit, suddenly with this logic, profit entered the university sphere and many things started to function worse and worse. If we want, we can talk about it, but I do not know how important and how interesting it is, but we can talk about it.

There are other places in Western Europe where things are still going relatively well for the time being, let’s say the Scandinavian countries as an example, but of course we say for the time being, because the logic of profit is starting to work more and more everywhere.

Perhaps with a limit, with the exception of a few extremely wealthy universities, such as, let’s say, American universities and in our European space, Cambridge and Oxford, all universities are struggling to survive, on the one hand, in preserving a certain quality of education, in providing a certain quality of education for future generations and, on the other hand, in preserving the survivability of research and free thinking.

These things are becoming more and more difficult, on the one hand, because of the fact that there is a pressure coming from the market, it is a pressure that has been there for at least 40-50 years in Europe with varying degrees in connecting the university space to the labor market and when we talk about law, we are basically talking about a form of education that is traditionally considered to be vocational. You go to law school because you want to become, later on, I don’t know, a lawyer, a judge and so on.

On the one hand, it’s somehow a kind of education that’s part of a particular vocational project, or trying to produce research in this space at a time when there’s increasing pressure to produce students for the market, and that market in turn can produce, say we want law firms can in turn produce sweat suits for people who want to hire them.

That raises questions about our work and our role. And it raises a somewhat important question for society – what are these people doing? The answer we often give, I don’t think it’s one of the best answers, the answer is how do we prepare people for work?

People can prepare for work in a thousand different ways. Private companies can prepare them for school, the state can prepare them as civil servants and so on. Because the university, maybe I’m an idealist, but the university in the model, I don’t know, that we’ve had in Europe for a couple hundred years throughout history, has been to basically be a space where we teach people to think.

I speak again from the law space. Lessons can change. What’s important is to transmit a certain way of legal thinking, a way of thinking irrespective of the political, say, or social context. And, well, maybe further on we can think about law in relation to society, think critically, think about what we do when we are lawyers. However, I see these things becoming increasingly difficult as we depend heavily on increasingly limited economic resources for ourselves.

This, I tend to think, is somewhere in the background of the problems. And I don’t know how we are going to solve them. And I do not know how we are going to solve them in today’s conditions, in which the state itself has increasingly limited resources and when the larger European countries, not to mention the budget deficits that they have been living with for some time, will have a large part of their budgets redirected, willy-nilly, towards issues related to climate change and issues related to the military threat. It will be increasingly difficult in the education and higher education space.

We can come back to these challenges, but I want to test with you a first topic of my own concerns that I think is relevant to more people. I study stuff on my own, on my own skin. And one thing that I study is what I define as dynamic identity, which is that I integrate different elements and they have a dialog or interact in a non-hegemonic way with each other.

And I even pretend that, in my case, there is a Romanian element and a Bulgarian element and several other elements, but these two are perhaps the basic ones and I say that I don’t really feel that there is a border between Romania and Bulgaria. Even if maybe many people feel the border from experience, I don’t feel it. I think I am well placed and have roots in both countries.

Okay, here’s the starting point. I find it interesting to study, I mean to write, to have initiatives that have a cross-border or transnational element.

Yes, yes, yes.

But I come to your point about law. Because there is a report at European level called the Leta Report.

The Leta report in the spring of 2024 argues that a 28th legal regime in the European Union needs to be set up. Something that is perhaps all-encompassing at the European level and to register legal entities in this regime that does not belong to any state.

I am not familiar with this discussion or the details, but I find this interesting, because I have the impression that the idea of dynamic identity and the Letta proposal are very different, but perhaps belong to a common family – namely, they spring from the quite human tendency towards transnationality. People and legal entities can also decide to develop an additional identity beyond the national one with which they are socialized. In the case of humans, curiosity or longing for the other might lead to the integration of elements from other cultures into our identity. Corporations seek to influence the law, to an area of the US where they pay low taxes, they are the bosses, corporations control the law and so on, not nation states.

So these things are very different, but it seems to me also somehow challenged in a similar sense, the tendency to regionalize or globalize, the tendency to put yourself in multiple contexts simultaneously. And this seems to me to be a great challenge for philosophers, for society, for legislation and for lawyers. And maybe you know these discussions and have observations to make.

Well, to say about that, there are some very interesting levels here. On the one hand, there is the personal, let’s say interpersonal, personal history level that we have and which is related to the fact that, well, we are in the language area called Romania and/or Bulgaria, but on the other hand, if we think about all the Balkans and the history of the Balkans, this transnational regime has existed for a very long time in different forms, right? On the one hand, there have been our state or parastatal or prestate entities as part or as subjects, i.e. subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

We existed in a unit, somewhere we can call it an imperial unit, which was the Ottoman Empire and it had different subjects. Now, for a long time at the beginning of modern history, Romania, Bulgaria did not exist as nation states, but they existed as, I don’t know, subjects, as vassals of the Ottoman Empire or as parts of the Ottoman Empire. And this has meant that a large part of our historical construction, which we have inherited on the one hand, has been reconstructed from the perspective of transnationalism.

It means that in one form or another in this cross-border space – because there were borders within the Empire as well, the borders were very porous, and through them people moved quite freely within the Empire. An example of this is the literature of Panait Istrati, which I like very much. Panait Istrati, who is a Romanian author, but he is also a Balkan author, an author of the Balkans and of the East, let’s say, of the Levant.

This is an important dimension in the sense that, for us, this experience of transnationalism is not a radically new experience. It’s something that historically we’ve had over the centuries – the experience of being part of an imperial entity.

Then we have the moment of the emergence of the nation state, right? At the end of the 19th century, when we have the differences between Romania and Bulgaria, let’s say, a gap of about 30 years, 40 years, depending on how we measure and count.

However, as soon as the nation state asserts itself, we believe that borders become less porous. The idea that a territory is closely linked to a small form of local, national sovereignty – Bucharest or Sofia, right? They construct separate legal orders and legal orders that, in principle, interact very little.

All of a sudden, law becomes, because we are talking about legislation, closely linked to a certain language, closely linked, perhaps, to a certain culture, which, somehow, is a culture that is imagined to be national, although the general culture, the culture of the people, is something else entirely. For we are talking about projects, projects of the elite. With different influences from other spaces.

In the case of Romania, there is talk of a very strong influence from France. I suspect that in Bulgaria there are influences from the German space. This is, to some extent, what was happening at the end of the 19th century, and these are things that, at some point, will end relatively ugly around the First World War and during the Balkan wars, which have only produced misfortunes in our area.

There is another dimension to this. There is also the fact that for a long time, although the countries were in this area, economically speaking, underdeveloped. All these spaces were connected to the global circulation of goods and were part of, let’s say, what we can call, I don’t know, a kind of emerging global capitalism. Emergent, perhaps, from the 17th century, but things become more and more serious in the 19th century, when Romania and Bulgaria have a certain role and a certain place in this space.

The, let’s say, Romanian space, or the space of the Romanian countries. As early as the first half of the 19th century, many of the conflicts between the great powers were linked to obtaining a free trade status and breaking the Ottoman monopoly on the movement of goods. In the case of the Romanian Principalities, we’re talking first and foremost about commodities, wheat.

Later on, we will talk about oil and all these positions that are linked to very large investments that come at some point at the end of the 19th century, closely linked to the national state, but they come from the Western world, such as English companies, German companies that build, let’s say, infrastructure in our countries and so on. But this underdeveloped status persists and makes these countries a kind of periphery. And it produces a certain kind of culture, which is a somewhat peripheral culture, because it is not a culture of the center.

We don’t necessarily have a classic colony status, where basically capital is extracted from those colonized areas and it goes directly to the center in the harshest possible form of domination. But it’s a system that is relatively similar. And that underdevelopment persists.

It persists over time. Now, for that, I’m very interested in the forms that law takes in such a context, and I’m basically a legal historian and theorist. And so I am very interested in what kind of form, what are the legal forms that emerge in this context.

One of the legal forms that I’m very interested in is related to how power is articulated through law in such a peripheral space, in such a space that has been maintained in a form of underdevotion. Now, what I can say, and here I’m going to speak relatively speculatively, is that the way in which law manages to articulate political power or limit political power is much less organized. But that does not mean, and this is something I think is extremely important, that law or the legal form has no place in this space.

Because very often we talk, I do not know, about the fact that in Romania or Bulgaria we do not have the rule of law because we do not have the culture of the rule of law, because we do not have the culture of democracy and so on. The problem is that we do not have, perhaps, a culture of democracy or the rule of law like in other countries, like in the center.

And we don’t have it because we couldn’t have it. It’s not because we didn’t want to, but because we couldn’t, in the sense that we couldn’t have it because there were social forces and economic forces that didn’t allow us to. On the one hand, our underdeveloped and peripheral status did not allow us to have it.

Even when we were independent nation states, we continued to exist economically and politically in a state of subordination, of domination. We are talking about domination because, for example, Romania in the inter-war period had its borders guaranteed by the great powers.

When things start to go from bad to worse in the West and France loses its power status or its power status is challenged, Romania suddenly changes its political trajectory. By the time France is occupied, Romania is approaching or is towards the end of a process of rapprochement with Nazi Germany. Which shows very clearly, in a way, its peripheral status, after all.

This takes place in a context in which we very often present Romania as a victorious country in the First World War, a country that has enlarged its borders and so on. But its status is dependent on other political arrangements. And at one time, its legal status is also dependent on other political arrangements.

The constitution is already being changed in 1938. And we see that, in fact, these legal forms are linked to different social and political contexts that support them. Now, that means that the legal form is often articulated differently, right?

What do I mean by that? I mean that, at some point, what we want to observe is that we have, and here again, I’m speculative, we have, very often, a very strange relationship with the Other. And this begins perhaps always within modernity. It starts in a relationship of opposition to the hegemon, to hegemonic power, and the assertion of sovereignty after the War of Independence, which is followed by the capture by another center.

We have, I don’t know, the pro-French or pro-German stance of Romania or Bulgaria over time, and then followed, in turn, when the European order or the order of the Center is about to disappear, by another form of assertion of sovereignty and power.

Suddenly, Romania, let’s say, is allied with the Nazi state? Suddenly, no? Suddenly a new assertion of sovereignty? But we want to assert ourselves in the new way, to recover our territories.

And this assertion is followed by capture by another center, the Soviet Union. And there, in 1968, for example, there’s another moment of asserting sovereignty against the Soviet hegemon, followed slowly, slowly by a, let’s say, basic decolonial project which we know how it ended, but which is slowly, slowly linked, if you look at the economic history of that period, to an economic turn towards the West – especially in the ’70s. If you look at the investments, where the money was coming from, where the debts were coming from that Ceausescu would later try to pay off and so on, and an attempt to reconnect back to the Western space, in one form or another, which fails.

But what I mean by all this is that, very often, in fact, throughout the history of our countries, we have such a pendulum swing between moments in which we accept, we let ourselves be, we are captured by a hegemonic power and moments in which we explode and assert our sovereignty.

And more often than not, these moments of explosion, of asserting sovereignty do not end well. The Ceausescu project, let’s say, did not end well.

The Antonescu project did not end well. All these moments of asserting radical autonomy do not end well. And they, in turn, produce certain forms, quite important in my view, certain legal forms that go on in society. One of the things that interests me is the use of exceptional measures or emergency measures, special measures in the space of law and the role of the military within political-legal thinking. Because they are linked, most of the time. The moment of asserting sovereignty is closely linked to a militarization of society.

When there is a militarization of society, it takes place within a re-articulation, let’s say, of the constitutional form, which often puts exceptional measures at the centre. And, well, I have the feeling that we have a constant problem with these things. Just as we have a constant problem with informal relations.

But informal relations that somehow persist in society as a kind of form of resistance to modernity.

We were talking when we met about the fact that there are two or three political figures who move everything. And we can see that and the citizen is not a subject.

He is just invited to vote and instigated by some instigators or propagandists that the other is bad and ours is good. And things are getting worse and worse in the sense that citizens’ political memory is extremely short. There are people who ten years ago were hated by a lot of people and, all of a sudden, after ten years, they become extremely preferable political figures.

I do not want to give examples, because that is not what interests me. What I am interested in is the way in which interpersonal relations or informal relations often come to displace everything we have at the official, formal level. This is an issue that sociologists have discussed and debated and so on. In Romania, we have a whole tradition of complaining that, in practice, Romania has never really understood modernity and has never really understood what a state based on legal rationality, based on a principle of rationality, individualism and so on, actually means. In other words, things are somewhat more complicated, because I often have the feeling that, in fact, this process of modern design was determined by our state of underdevelopment, not by the fact that we wanted it. Now, very often, when we come up against pre-modern leftovers, because, in fact, we know very clearly that the general problem of our countries that was recognized by the European Union was corruption.

Corruption, very often, we have tried to solve it using generally repressive methods. Why? I don’t know.

The secret services tapping phones, often without a warrant from a judge, or with a warrant that is given as a matter of urgency, because it has to be done now, and so on. And that, in turn, conflicts with many democratic principles and many principles of law, after all. Of law, of criminal procedure, let’s say, of criminal procedure or of substantive criminal law, which holds how the state relates to the individual.

But what do I mean? I don’t mean to say that corruption doesn’t exist, or I don’t mean to say that corruption isn’t a horrible thing. I mean to say that these forms of, I don’t know, illegality or a-legality, or of a different reception of legal modernity, we have to understand them as somehow structural, as somehow here, because of a certain historical trajectory.

And they are not something that can be changed all of a sudden. And, on the other hand, they are not something that can be changed simply by repressive methods. And that, basically, what we should do is to be able to understand that legal modernity itself, the legal form itself, the rule of law, is always coupled with issues like this.

That is how it is with us. But, at the same time, I do not want to say that this is how it is with us and we will have to resign ourselves to that. And we have to somehow understand that we need a political project to address these structural problems.

Unfortunately, these structural problems cannot be solved all at once. They are structural problems that are related to our underdeveloped and peripheral status. You talk about informal relations.

I could talk about Bulgaria as a gang society. That is, you fit into a certain group and, in a sense, your individuality is linked to that group. And those at the top of the group often have a narcissistic attitude.

That you have to be loyal. If you provide resources, for example, experience for another group, if you will collaborate with another group, then you are a traitor. This reality resembles a kind of mafia-type groups, even if in an EU state, maybe this is more ameliorated and often you can’t talk about criminality. It is what the English call tribes or in-groups.

And wouldn’t the change be a different social, economic, philosophical infrastructure that allows another form of organization? Not the group, but, for example, a network between equal but also non-homogenized elements, not subject to a single leader or power center.

Exactly. That would be it. But okay, we need to understand a few things.

For example, one of the things I think is extremely important. The way in which, I don’t know, the first Constitution in Romania, in 1866, is considered by everyone to be a great Constitution. It was inspired by the Belgian Constitution and everyone says that it was amazing. Well, maybe it was great, but if you think about who this Constitution was made for, things become much more complicated.

Because basically, less than 6% of the population had the right to vote. These people who could vote were only men of a certain type, of Romanian ethnicity, defined by law, they were people of a certain social status. What did the rest of society do? Where was the majority?

Things are not very different in Bulgaria from this, let’s say, functional or social history perspective. It might be more different because there is a tradition of the collective and so on. But in our case, in the case of Romania in 1866, this constitution and the legal forms of the state actually existed only for an elite that spoke French and if you read more about what was going on in that period, it was absolutely cut off from the rest of the people.

Now, after the First World War, universal suffrage is introduced, the rest of the people somehow enter the political playing space and they are all recognized. That is a positive thing. But beyond all the other economic and social problems and so on, there are a series of tensions that take different forms, the most serious form being the far right, but there are thousands of other forms, deep financial crisis and so on, authoritarianism, an authoritarian reaction. Then we have, I don’t know, the socialist period, right?

We have the era of the 1950s, which is a very tough era of post-war reconstruction, but at the same time also of nationalization, redistribution, construction, reconstruction of society and so on, reconfiguration of society. It is a brutal era. Stalinism, a Stalinist project and so on.

But after that, when you have rebuilt a society on, let’s say, relatively egalitarian bases, towards the end of the 1970s and 1980s, in the conditions of a deep economic crisis, there is a return of the informal space, a very serious return. Okay, everything that we were talking about at that time, I don’t know if you remember or I don’t know how it was in Bulgaria, but in our country it was black market, speculation, underground economy, a project that we can basically talk about more, a project where the economic centers or the centers of power, in fact, the real power, the informal power, was deeply centralized in the hands of certain people. These were the party secretaries. Party secretaries who suddenly had enormous power within the system.

Which, at some point, causes the system to collapse. Although it seemed monolithic and so on, an economic logic had suddenly returned to a form of pre-modernity. Which would be important, perhaps to begin to understand where this dimension of informality comes from, which is obviously disturbing.

In Bulgaria they wrote about these informal networks.

That is where they come from. They come from somewhere, they come from a space… They come, basically, from a project of modernity that was realized relatively late.

which was brutally realized. Or which reaches its peak in a brutal realization. And which, at some point, instead of producing a continuation of modernity, produces a pre-modernity in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and that’s pretty much what it was for our countries.

Even in our countries there were such things, for example, forms of banditry, right? Not at the level that existed, say, in what happened in the former Soviet Union, but nevertheless, there was a dissolution of authority.

In the case of Romania, we have the Mineriade. If we try to think in some way, I do not know, legally, about what happened there, there is a dissolution of state authority in the conditions in which groups, at a given moment, arrogate to themselves the ability to represent and exercise the sovereign power of the state. When the miners come to Bucharest to change the government, they arrogate that to themselves. It’s a moment of dissolution of the state, a moment of dissolution that, in the end, borders on a point of tension that could have ended in a civil war situation. That’s pretty much how things work, because when you have that level of dissolution of authority, what happens? The state collapses. And the state is organized along hierarchies.

Then during the transition and EU integration, there were national economic elites who opposed Brussels, and because of those economic elites, reform stalled and they prevented integration to a large extent. Political integration was fostered by economic integration, and what drove political integration was economic integration. Economic integration within an economy based on, to put it as clearly as possible, a market economy based on competition, cannot produce political forms that are profoundly egalitarian to the extent that it is driven. It is built on competition and inequality. It’s not as if we are trying to save ourselves by ourselves. Which very often means asking too much in the end, namely, asking the economic, financial and political elites to give up transforming their economic capital into symbolic capital, political capital and so on.

Maybe here in Western Europe too, there were moments in the history of Europe when these kind of elites said – we will have to give up the hegemony that we exercise in our societies. I don’t know how much we can think of the Swedish capitalists in the 1950s when they said: ‘We are going to create a welfare state. We will stop translating our economic power into political and social power.” But did they do that when there were proletarian revolutions; did they do that when there were strong socialist states? Yes. Or, after 1990, I cannot understand why someone who wields economic power and at a given moment operates in this logic of profit and exploitation, I cannot understand why they would want to give up, to transform this economic power into social and political power for the good of the community. To develop or understand the good of the community is perhaps asking too much of capitalists. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but I don’t know if it’s the logic of this kind of economy and this kind of social form that it imposes.

I was talking about our region having underdeveloped legal and social forms, and in general a region that has not had enough time to assert itself and seems doomed to oscillate between different centers of integration and power. Even if it sounds very utopian, I find it interesting to what extent our region can overcome in its entirety the mechanisms of dependency, to go through a kind of emancipation. I am not talking about getting out of the integrationist structures we are in. I am talking about discovering, within our societies, a dynamism of our own, something that can encourage the development of our region and positively transform its outdated social, legal and other structures.

If there is to be such an emancipation of the region, it must be, as Lenin says, an avant-garde, a subject that pushes things forward. Someone should carry a capacity to generate change. A classic subject of change is capital, because it has resources. But I don’t know if there is a regional capital that is really regional in nature, that is not just national capital, that has spread to other markets in the region….

I notice that every nation has different loyalties. Why not? Because if we look at the political projects that national capital supports, the one in Romania, it’s an extremely nationalist political project, ultra-nationalist even, and it’s actually trying to remove foreign capital just to be able to take the free space.

This type of political project has nothing emancipatory in it. Because, on the contrary, if we were to speak in terms of the local working class, it would mean less social protection. I’m not saying there is a lot of it in Romania, but it could be worse.

It can always get worse. There would also be less social protection and more precarity, because precarity, unfortunately, these days is good for capital. It’s the way it pays. As it were, hire people and pay them less, fire them.

Okay, so capital doesn’t really play an emancipatory role in our region. Are NGOs and the academic class emancipatory or not?

There would be a certain condition where there are still honest people in this space. Because very often, we can think that a large part of civil society and a large part of the intellectual or academic space, due to the conditions of generalized precariousness that we were talking about before and marginalization and so on, must somehow find ways to survive.

The state as a neutral actor, and the European institutions as a relatively neutral actor, can support policies here and there, or they can support development policies here and there, but these resources are not always available when they are needed.

It depends very much on the political coloring and the organization, I don’t know, that exists in the European Parliament and in the national spaces, so that this translates at some point in the vote in the European Council. That they fight for the emancipation of countries. But that could be blocked if there really was an understanding of transnational regional development.

There are all sorts of projects of transnational cooperation or at the regional level of transnational regions, European regions. I don’t know to what extent this logic of the nation state could be dislocated. Because this logic of the nation state is very often not only something logical, but also a story. It comes with a mythical history behind it. And this mythical history behind it only makes you think in certain ways about social problems.

After all, we’re all human, right? And now we understand this more and more in the light of the crisis, so to speak, in the light of the climate crisis on the one hand, and in the light of the generalized crisis, generalized insecurity.

When I look at Eastern European cities, I often see cities that, architecturally, are very similar to our cities, right? This helps us understand that there is something that unites us across borders. And maybe this is where we should start. This is where we should start thinking.

The fact that there are many things that unite us beyond the language we speak and beyond, I don’t know, the kind of theater or the kind of writing that we use in our description, right? That fills our libraries. And we have a lot of commonalities of lived experience, it’s just that that somehow has to be captured, organized, thought about, worked through, right?

In this context, how do you see the role of cross-border environments? And the challenges facing them?

This is extremely important. If they are really cross-border and if they really support the role of informing, of building, of relating, of bringing people together around the truth or around understanding reality.

Or maybe, I don’t know, we also have totally negative examples of non-media, right? Rumor peddlers through social media, through social networks, rumor peddlers through blogs, all sorts of I don’t know what and so on, which are cross-border in the sense that they cross borders, they are bilingual, trilingual and so on. They very often play the role of creating communities, very often, around a common identity, religious and so on, Orthodox or whatever. Their potential is not emancipatory, it is to create conflict, to create chaos.

You speak about media that form proxies.

Absolutely, exactly, because they don’t treat people as rational individuals and appeal in fact, not to people’s reason, but to all sorts of fears. Okay, and these fears, how shall I say, on the other hand, people are reacting, because we’re living in hard times. It’s a period in which many crises have overlapped.

Most of the time, things that seemed impossible to us before have kind of happened, and that scares you. You have the feeling that certain landmarks are crumbling. Who would have imagined, I don’t know, when we were in the 2000s, who would have imagined an assault on the Capitol in Washington?

No, it was something that sounded like science fiction, but I don’t know what exactly. Look, it happened. Who would have imagined, I don’t know, a war on the scale of what’s going on in Ukraine and Gaza, which is so close to the center of Europe, right?

Yes, it’s happening. Likewise, who would have imagined that we’d be staying indoors, I don’t know how long, like in the pandemic.

Faced with such crises, we often don’t have the mechanisms to react. And we don’t have the mechanisms because, on the other hand, we’re right back where we started. The last 30 years, not just in our country, but pretty much everywhere, have been years in which the state has practically withdrawn from the function of producing society.

The state no longer produces society, nor is it interested in producing, in coagulating society. And one of the primary functions in this area was, on the one hand, health, and on the other, education. And the state withdrew more and more.

I mean, well, at least I know, constantly, when things are going on in Romania, when discussions are going on from morning to night, about privatization of health, education, privatization, privatization, privatization, privatization, and this has been the discussion for 30 years.

There are, for example, people who really believe that the Earth is flat. That’s not because people choose to believe that the Earth is flat, it’s because they haven’t had the basis to understand that it can’t be. And they didn’t have the basis in school. They didn’t have the base around them to understand that it’s impossible.

So is the return of the church to the social space. It’s something that, how shall I put it, shows very well how far the state has retreated from creating community and society. Problems of a relatively similar kind in the health system and in the education system are also lurking in Western Europe. And equally, these things have been going in the same direction for over 30 years.

In England, the distinction between schools is important. You see what kind of students private schools can produce and what kind of students state schools can produce. Private schools in England are an exclusive space. That’s very clear. Things are very much in their place.

Well, I’ve had the privilege of thinking, of watching movies, of reading, because the well known question of Cherneshevsky and Lenin has to be asked, what do you do if you want change? For example, I have great reservations about understanding the left as resistance. I would like the left, if it thinks of itself as the progressive force, to be something that moves forward and is a catalyst or has the capacity to transform, not to resist change.

Together we have defined in this discussion so far several sub-problems. We have defined that we are an underdeveloped periphery or an unfulfilled modernity. In a way, I am not content to just observe and note that this is the case, and I think young people in particular (because it seems to me that our generation of 40-somethings has not changed much or at all), but the younger generation, the so-called Generation Z, remains a group of people who need representation, presence, involvement and action. I’m thinking what can be the hope, what can be the movement, given all these complexities, all these walls that we talk about, all these things very much rooted in the culture, in the psyche, if you like, all these subjectivities of ourselves and our fellow citizens. What can be this project that can give hope, a territory that is not conquered and where something alternative or something new and better can develop?

I am relatively pessimistic. It seems to me that the generations that come one after the other will be more and more withdrawn and it will be more and more difficult for them to be able to articulate what would mean a social space where everyone is on an equal footing in various respects, at some point it can no longer be a liberal society where we are true to ourselves, at least legally. And that means that they find it very difficult to think and understand themselves as part of a society or a common space. If we compare the present with the ’60s, with 1968, we must not forget that it came perhaps with an understanding or some global realization of the crisis in which we find ourselves, that very often the reaction of solidarity with Palestine was a reaction that linked a global problem to some concretet the fear of having nothing at the end of their studies, the fear of ending up in a global flood, the fear of ending up under a tyrannical regime, depending on how history goes, and at some point it came as a reaction to articulate this insecurity globally.

But if you look at the many rounds in which these spaces of resistance have emerged, have been produced in the university space, on the university campus, and have often been seen as a way of re-appropriating the university space as a space in which the common can be constructed, this can give us some hope that one of those things would be the spaces of the university. The university would be one of those things in which the common future can be produced, but I’m somewhat skeptical because I don’t know to what extent universities on the continent can be saved from this very precarious logic and a generalized precariousness of the UK university.

It is not very clear that they are being lost as a form of building a common space in the same way that in the American space universities are important market players. I mean, universities are not just universities. They’re also important economic actors and that makes me a little bit skeptical if there’s still such a place where you can build a common space, where these young people can be educated and exposed to something other than different projects of social dissolution, I mean different projects that do nothing but destroy social space, I mean, well, we have to think again. Well, we have to think again about the historical models that existed to organize something like this, and for a long time, perhaps darker periods than ours, there were popular schools organized by people who had the resources, the capacity and the science to do it, popular schools to educate these young people, not under the conditions of freedom of association as we have now. That would be, shall we say, one of the models.

So autonomous self-organization, I think this is an important thing that we need to try this change. Anarchists do have progressive potential under these conditions, that they are self-organizing, yes, the problem is that, well, and here I’m speculating, in my understanding of contemporary anarchism, something that preaches autonomy and self-organization, something that is dear to autonomy and self-organization, and autonomy can very often mean an exodus rather than a form of transformation of society.

To organize themselves, to find the capacity to be disciplined and able to be able to organize themselves and pool their resources, I have all due respect for that, but I feel that somewhere this idea or somewhere the caveat that we don’t have to be in a logic of autonomy, that we don’t have to be in the logic of autonomy the goal in itself. Therefore, I don’t really know how widespread the cooperative culture is in Romania in the new times, not in the past. There may be one or two in Bucharest, or I don’t know, I’m far away – but it means that a large part of the reluctance towards cooperatives comes precisely from the way cooperatives were understood and implemented, I’m referring to the socialist period. They functioned as they did because they were perhaps the best form of organization for the groups here and not because there was no history of common property in our space, and this is because one of the great economic and social problems of the Romanian space was what is known as the agricultural problem and the social claims of the peasantry throughout the 19th century. When people claimed property they claimed it as private property, not as the collective property of those who worked.

That means that there is somewhere a spatial history within a peasantry that I haven’t really measured, but there is somewhere a line of individualistic trajectories that I don’t know, from the little I know about Bulgarian history, it’s not really like that, I know that there were even family communities, but that was before communism. After that I do not recognize these forms of communal ownership as revived.

All these things you describe – about education, about property, about the ethos of competitiveness, are interesting and describe structural problems of our world. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a world with different structures and forces, set in a different way. But I would like to insist on the question of the agent of change – at national, regional, etc. What is this force, profession, type of activity or economic or legal form, which has the potential to offer an emancipatory and progressive transformation of our realities? Who can offer something beyond the eternal accumulation of money/capital/power and beyond the endless competition for control over resources?

I am very skeptical. It is very hard to see. There are people working together on a research project. There are universities that have the research conditions for it, but there are also people who don’t necessarily have the conditions for it, and yet they do it. And they do it because they think it’s extremely important. And then things like “I discovered this or you discovered that”, it doesn’t matter.

We have egos, but often those egos are not relevant when people are working together for a purpose and there is a passion. Then these things don’t matter. I think this is also the case in the arts, in artistic projects.

Maybe in this area we should look for models to build things together and understand somehow. In fact, to understand that the individual doesn’t make sense broken from time in community. In both cases it is a professional ethic.

Ethics may be the absolute word. And from there perhaps we should think about the kernel of the problems. The seeds of a form of utopia, perhaps. But if we are to think further in the general context, I think we are not doing too well.

So the main problem is that you can’t find common ground.

Exactly, that’s the problem.

But, well, on the other hand, we don’t necessarily want to disappear, do we? There have been times when solidarity has disappeared, right? And often the miracle happened.

Nobody expected, under the economic conditions that existed in 1848, that the Revolution of 1848 would take place. Retrospective historians began to figure things out. But at the time, who expected it to happen?

Conditions at the time seemed to be relatively stable in terms of empires in the area. Well, further on, the other things happened in other catastrophic contexts. The October Revolution and the nation states, such as those of the inter-war period, followed a catastrophe.

The relative order we have known post-1945 followed another catastrophe. Equally, we don’t necessarily have to be shocked to move. But, equally, who, under certain conditions, expected certain things to happen?

If you don’t see a force or a project that is unequivocally progressive in character, how do you think we can deal with something that increases potential? Can we increase potential and after some time a situation may arise where potential can be realized? But how does one increase potential broadly?

I don’t know other than by reading. I don’t see any other way. It takes social experience, perhaps. Who is the generation that brought about change in Tsarist Russia? There were people who went to Tsarist schools, under certain conditions. And they were people who were intellectually very well off. The elites, those who afterwards fought among themselves in the civil war, the different forms of the elites, the Bolsheviks, etc. It was a very good generation.

And likewise, let’s consider what was happening in the Austro-Hungarian space. It was a very cultured generation. They produced changes. I don’t know how good or how bad they were, but they produced serious, tectonic changes.

Similarly, the great generations in Romania, so on and so forth, were formed in schools and they produced a series of school reforms that circulated all over Europe in the early 20th century, around 1900, serious school reforms.

And these generations have produced a serious change in all European societies. Practically the whole of Europe has been transfigured thanks to changes in education, changes in educational models that have circulated through France to the Eastern space.

Since Bologna, for example, some changes have been introduced. Yes, I also say that these changes were… Good in reality, good on paper, others, on the other hand, much more complicated in reality.

I’m all for Bologna in terms of standardizing the system. Totally in favor. The aim of standardizing diplomas and so on.

Because it allows them to move around, frankly. And here, too, the influence of capital can come in because, well, not only does it produce, but it also breaks down barriers and feeds freedom.

It produces competition. But on the other hand, it allows us to live together. That, I believe, is extremely important. Somewhere this reform came along and suspended, at least partially, the existing hierarchies. And so a form of equality is produced.

It’s clear that a degree from the University of Bucharest never had the same value as a degree from the Sorbonne, let’s say. But somewhere, at a purely formal, legal, administrative level, it has the same value. And that produces something. It means something, doesn’t it?

Traditionally, the university’s role has been to create a space that you build to produce citizens. The idea is supported by the state, to produce citizens, not to produce some labor tools. If he wants to produce labor or skilled labor, the capitalist can produce his own school for skilled labor.

Most of the time, from what I’ve seen, and this is what I’ve seen in clips that frighten me, the idea would somehow be that, basically, the university is a kind of prerogative of the training of skilled labor. Which, from one point of view, is just asking for trouble. But, yes, in principle, Poland would have been the model in terms of university space.

I’m trying to think of examples. South Korea. Maybe China is an example. I think the closest would have been China. But being a big country, it’s a difficult space to understand.

I close the discussion with a provocative question, because we’ve discussed several areas of the problem – if the world is going in one direction there’s not much to be done, the younger generation doesn’t have a chance, the older generation is part of the problem and there’s no clear force for change. Tell me, does it make sense to have children in today’s world?

I have a 9-year-old daughter and I’m afraid for the fall.

That would be the short answer. What can I say to her, or what am I trying to pass on to her over time?

For the most part, the world can be pretty harsh. I know, maybe so. And I agree somewhere that we need to offer all the support now, because later will be much later.

So the world is going in the wrong direction. I don’t know if that makes sense. More than that, what can we do for the children… We try to pass on as much as we can of what the great culture once meant and to be able to make them understand that they will have a lot of work and they will have big responsibilities, much bigger responsibilities.

Photo: Cosmin Cercel (source: X)

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