BUILDING STATE CAPACITY IN INTERWAR ROMANIA. RAILWAY INFRASTRUCTURE AND POLITICAL CENTRALIZATION
BUILDING STATE CAPACITY IN INTERWAR ROMANIA. RAILWAY INFRASTRUCTURE AND POLITICAL CENTRALIZATION

Summary/Abstract: The article sets out to explore the role played by railway infrastructure in the political centralization process in interwar Romania. In the theoretical part, the article argues that the concept of radial state is heuristically more appropriate than both statebuilding and state capacity for illustrating how the public transportation system, with an emphasis on railway infrastructure, underpins the bureaucratic accumulation of modern state. In its empirical part, the article seeks to demonstrate that political centralization in Romania, from the perspective of the public transportation system, depended mostly on railway infrastructure. The article argues that railway infrastructure was turned into an exclusive domain of public interest once Romania became independent in the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish war (1877–1878). Then, the article explains how a project of building the radial state through railway infrastructure in interwar Romania emerged right after WWI. The article also lays emphasis on the way railway infrastructure has been systematically favorized over road infrastructure during the interwar period.

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