Минали стипендианти

The project explores post-1989 discourses, genealogies and political-intellectual communities that undergirded the rethinking of peripherality in Romania after EU accession. Its central hypothesis is that the resilience and diversity of domestic discussions about the country’s European incomplete self and its problematic recognition within the EU fuelled an equilibrium that prevented neo-authoritarian hegemony over political and intellectual fields. I examine three interrelated trajectories for identity production: the recent past, democratisation, and Romania in Europe. I argue that the cognitive dissonances amassed along these axes during the first eighteen years after 1989 constitute the foundation for the discursive shifts since 2007. I connect such dynamics of self-representation to social mobilizations from the 2010s to point out (dis)continuities in the fusion between identity and social-political discontent. The project compares Romania’s path to countries where elites positioned themselves as the West or, later, the real Europe (Poland or Hungary), or with those that experienced similarly torturous trajectories to and within the EU (Bulgaria).