Imperial pasts linked to imagined futures of European rural peripheries in Romania, Moldova und Ukraine

Abstract

We want to critically analyse how agricultural practices and narratives relate past political orders with present aspirations and belongings to Europe. They reproduce hegemonic interdependencies between a centre and periphery within Europe. We will take our empirical examples from Romania, Moldova or Ukraine.

Since the socialist collapse, a significant part of these areas seem to have been locked into a process of peripheralisation. The dependencies between small farmers and profit-generating agrarian elites are constantly being re-established. Huge companies capture the major part of the investments and aids of the European Union to modernize and generate important profits on the world market. The workers released by the mechanization and modernization of production have to look for work under precarious conditions in West European metropolises or in Moscow and St Petersburg to sustain a living at home.

Patterns of dependency that prevailed in these regions in earlier periods are (re)constructed: Dependency on Moscow or Bucharest during the socialist period; dependency on Saint Petersburg, Vienna, Budapest or Paris and London before the First World War. A bipolar agricultural economy is reproduced from globalizing capitalism in the Habsburg and Russian empires or in Romania at the end of the 19th century to globalizing capitalism in independent Ukraine and Moldova or Romania within the European Union. This structural continuity manifests hegemonic power relations.

In our intervention we will question in critical terms the modalities of the renewal of patterns of peripheralisation in contemporary Europe at two main interdependent scales: at the level of village actors who develop individual and family strategies within a constrained framework of experience and uncertain horizons of expectation and at the national and international scales, where regional and national elites generate profits, act locally and internationally and thus link the center and periphery.