Ieşirea din tranziţie: Spre o nouă teorie a tranziţiei
Existing Transition: Towards a New Theory of Transition

Summary/Abstract: Sociologists, with few exceptions (Vladimir Pasti, Ștefan Buzărnescu, Elena Zamfir, Vasile Dâncu and others), have paid marginal attention to the overall transition process in Romania. We failed to explain how Romanian society is and why it is so. Until yet there is no articulated theory of Romanian society undergoing transition. Transition ideology that dominates public discourse is focused on the strategy behind the whole process. But this view is not able to explain the strong negative processes that characterized the transition, mainly the collapse of the economy and the explosion of corruption. The theory we expose here examines two strategic options on which the Romanian transition was based: immediate privatization carried out “anyhow”, even if enterprises were sold for just a penny, and the “small currency” strategy. These two policy options that have characterized the entire political transition explain a wide range of characteristics of the Romanian society in the last 25 years. They must be included in a powerful explanatory theory of Romania undergoing transition.

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