Political Identities and Property Restitution in Transylvania, Romania
Authors: Verdery Katherine 
Published: November 2004

Statement of Problem. The changes produced by the fall of communist parties in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union offer opportunities both to investigate how such processes as privatization, democratization, marketization, etc. are unfolding and to reflect upon the very meaning and theoretical interconnections of these key western concepts. What are democracy and private property? Given that many theories of liberal democracy posit them as closely interconnected, exactly how are they linked, and what can we learn about this from watching Eastern Europeans try to create them?

Some scholars approach these questions by viewing democracy in a narrowly formal way (e.g., voting, protest marches, party membership, and petitions), and by thinking of property rights chiefly as matters of exclusive individual vs collective ownership. The present project, by contrast, emphasizes informal practices that contribute to forming political identities and social persons, and it sees property rights as complex and overlapping. It focuses on the privatization of land, to examine how newly apportioned rights to land are producing new possessing identities that lead people to defend their rights in court and in other ways; these actions and identities can be seen as elements of possibly democratic practices that are overlooked by other approaches to democratization as linked with property. Thus, the project — submitted for funding under NSF's "democratization" initiative—is guided by the questions, Where should we look for "the political" so as to talk about democratization? How does it intersect with local understandings of "property"?

Research Site and Methods. The project, already begun with IREX funding, is located in a Transylvanian community (Romania) in which rights to land are in the process of being returned; it includes regular observation of court cases in the county capital as well. Research methods consist of formal and informal interviews with a variety of people (villagers pursuing restitution, heads of other forms of agricultural enterprise, local authorities, judges and lawyers, and government officials), participation in the work of the village Land Commission, observation of events in court, discussions with parties to cases, reading newspapers, and copying statistics from local and county archives. These methods will produce a detailed picture of how property restitution is taking place, what kinds of rights (ownership or usufruct, exclusive or overlapping) are being created, how villagers think of themselves in relation to land, what activities they engage in to pursue their rights—particularly lawsuits and complaints to the commission—and what sorts of political identities and practices accompany these. The study's guiding assumptions are that because standard formal definitions of property and democracy are unlikely to suit the realities of Eastern Europe, the "successful" implementation of these forms must be approached as an open question, through field research. The result will be an ethnography of democratizing‐practice‐through‐property.

Significance. 1) The study will clarify aspects of the process of decollectivization, on which very little has been written to date. 2) It will offer a specifically Transylvanian answer to the question, How are democratic practice and private property linked?, thus broadening awareness of the various forms assumed by these concepts. 3) It will propose answers to the question, Where should we locate "the political" so as to assess the prospects for democratization in a more nuanced way than through people's ritual participation in meaningless elections. 4) It will contribute to theoretical questions about the nature of "the state," "democracy," and "property" as concepts, thus permitting reflective criticism of foundational western political notions and enhancing theory‐building about them.