On Modernity and Technologies of Nation-Building in the Projects of the Bucharest Sociological School

On Modernity and Technologies of Nation-Building

in the Projects of the Bucharest Sociological School

 Ion Matei Costinescu

Transilvania, nr. 11-12/2012

ABSTRACT

This article tackles the responses to the crises of modernity and technologies of nation building through the focalizing lens afforded by the Romanian sociologist Dimitrie Gusti (1880-1956) and the Bucharest Sociological School. Gusti’s “scientific” investigations of Romania’s “true,” organic culture as the basis for directing the country’s subsequent development illuminates broader phenomena during the first half of the 20^th century. First, the endeavors of the Bucharest Sociological School were part of the widespread quest for the resources and energies of popular mobilization. Second, the project of bolstering national ideologies with the epistemic apparatus of the social sciences marks a fundamental transition in the frames of references informing nationalist discourses throughout Europe and a shift towards more sociologically savvy strategies of nation-building. The cultural integration of the masses into unified nation-states would be justified by the “universal” truths of science. My analysis employs a transnational perspective focusing on the village as a privileged site of nation-building and social reform. The guiding premise is that notions of delayed economic or political development do not point towards historical exceptionalism. Rather, they are a constitutive feature of the modern condition. I thus deploy Gusti’s intellectual and political project as a means of interrogating a longstanding trope of Western scholarship on Romania: the notion of partial or delayed modernization.

KEYWORDS: Bucharest Sociological School; modernity; interwar Eastern Europe; nation-building; epistemic regimes.

Introduction  

This article is about responses to the crises of modernity and technologies of nation building. I analyze these matters through the focalizing lens afforded by the Romanian sociologist Dimitrie Gusti (1880-1956) and the Bucharest Sociological School. Gusti’s “scientific” investigations of Romania’s “true,” organic culture as the basis for directing the country’s subsequent development illuminates a broader phenomenon during the first half of the twentieth century. In many ways, the projects of the Bucharest Sociological School were part of the widespread twentieth century quest for the resources and energies of popular mobilization. At the same time, the project of bolstering national ideologies with the epistemic apparatus of the social sciences marks a fundamental transition in the frames of references informing nationalist discourses throughout Europe and a shift towards more sociologically savvy strategies of nation-building.[1] The cultural integration of the masses into unified, centralized nation-states would now be justified by the “universal” truths of science.

My analysis, therefore, employs a transnational perspective focusing on the village as a privileged site of nation-building and social reform. The guiding premise here is that notions of delayed economic or political development do not point towards historical exceptionalism. Rather, they are a constitutive feature of the modern condition. In this context, I deploy Gusti’s intellectual and political project as a means of interrogating a longstanding trope of Western scholarship on Romania: the notion of partial or delayed modernization.[2]

Gusti and his collaborators aimed to transform sociology into a veritable “science of the nation” by means of exhaustive sociological monographs of village life. The monographic endeavor illustrates an array of panoptical techniques well suited to the administrative requirements of consolidating nation-states aspiring towards supra-local coordination of their territories and homogenization of cultural space. The symbolic as well as practical importance of the village as a locus of social reform was rooted in the continued, but asymmetrical expansion of global capitalism, which engendered an acute need to socially stabilize new states and/or ideological orders. Inherent in this process of uneven expansion was the perception of “delayed development.” This pushed the “peasant problem” to the forefront of European social thought, especially since the prescriptions proposed to overcome this putative lag generated widespread anxieties about cultural authenticity and national integrity.

The pattern of asymmetrical economic modernization was not, however, configured solely by the complex interactions between “core” and “peripheral” regions classically described by world systems theory.[3] I want to suggest instead that this model might be spatially reconfigured as series of “nested” or layered dialectics of uneven development, in so far as the global pattern of irregular socio-economic modernization was replicated on the local level in both core and periphery. This phenomenon was widely perceived at the time, as exemplified by the authoritative Max Weber and somewhat later by the lesser-known though acutely insightful theorist of underdevelopment Virgil Madgearu (1887-1940). Both thinkers, Weber in his massive empirically based study of East Elban agriculture and Madgearu in his comparative studies of agrarian evolution, understood very well that the plight of their respective peasantries was rooted in a historical conjuncture characterized by the problematical articulation of residual, quasi-feudal structures with capitalist relations of production[4]. In this context, therefore, “modernity” can best be understood as a cluster of cultural diagnoses and political prescriptions having to do with uneven capitalist expansion.

Gusti emerges in this frame as an innovative, though by no means atypical figure among a considerable group of sophisticated European social scientists trying to alleviate the inequities inherent in societies that necessarily retained a significant agrarian structure, while undergoing the destabilizing effects of industrialization and urbanization. This quintessentially Durkheimian quest for social cohesion underpinned an array of palliative programs that privileged the nation over the economy. The nation-building and social engineering thrust of such projects found a clear articulation in Weber’s 1894 call for the re-colonization of Junker estates – increasingly manned by cheaper Polish labor – by native German farmers. This must be done, he argued, in order to save the Reich from Polish cultural contamination.[5] That Gusti intellectual career began in Germany at this very time (1898-1907) was surely critical to his future development as a scholar and state-builder. For, like Romania, Germany was also a “belated” nation, albeit one widely perceived as having achieved a stunning success at becoming “modern.”

In Germany he studied social psychology with Wilhelm Wundt, cultural history with Karl Lamprecht, and anthropogeography with Friedrich Ratzel. These architects of the German Kulturwissenschaften[6] subscribed to a broad and embedded conception of culture, in that they believed they could discern patterns of behavior characteristic of entire peoples. The discoveries of such causal patterns analogous to the laws of natural science, they believed, could help alleviate the tension between social change and the need for equilibrium.[7] The relationship between social equilibrium and change would thereby remain a central concern of Gusti’s mature sociological system and political agenda.

This cognitive interest in questions of social stability was reinforced by his year (1908) in Paris with Emil Durkheim, during which he also became familiar with the monographic method pioneered by Frederic Le Play (1806-1882). Much more than a method of collecting facts, Le Play’s monographs were part of a larger “science of society and government” whose ultimate aim was to promote stability by discovering the factors conducive to “social happiness” for all types of workers.[8] Le Play wrote at a time when French industrial workers, especially those in small factories, were still difficult to distinguish from peasants, because many of them continued to cultivate small plots of land. Consequently, Le Play argued that the best way to understand the social mores of the working class was to first study the peasantry. Hence, it was rural inhabitants, who had presumably changed the least, which embodied the more “authentic” version of national customs. This, in brief, is the general background against which Gusti’s attempt to articulate the sociological foundations for the “scientific” construction of the Romanian nation and state must be understood.

Gusti and the Quest for an Alternative Romanian Way

The quest for a resolution to the contradictions wrought by the complex interaction between state-building, national consolidation, and national ideologies acquired new urgency during the interwar period. The interpenetration of different ethnic groups during the preceding centuries made the post-imperial disentanglement of the European nation-state structure very difficult. The newly enlarged Greater Romanian state thus faced serious problems from a nationalist standpoint, “saddled” as it was with restive minorities and irredentist neighbors. The nationalist anxieties of Romanian politicians and/or state-makers overlapped with renewed social anxieties concerning the peasant question, which had detonated in the Great Revolt of 1907. They enacted agrarian reform and universal male suffrage as a response to the continued hunger for land and to forestall future agrarian unrest. Also concerned that cultural and political power was unfairly distributed among a rural/urban divide that privileged the educated ethnic minorities at the expense of the Romanian-speaking peasant majority, the state responded with a sustained campaign designed to promote “national” education and empower the peasantry at the expense of “foreign” elements.[9]

A firm believer in the rational capacity of the state to alleviate social inequities, Gusti was convinced that the building of the modern nation must begin with the scientific study of the village. A technocrat par excellence, Gusti nonetheless retained affinities to the ideological current of Poporanism that sought to elevate the peasantry to a determinant social position. The socially transformative capacity of the state, he believed, must be nourished and tempered by the fertilizing currents of peasant tradition. Insisting that authentic culture tends to grow with the village, Gusti’s project alerts us to the ways in which “tradition” itself is discursive, simultaneously shaping and modifying social practices. Thus, his synthesis of sociological theory and monographic research and subsequent interventionist actions in the rural world were active instruments of social engineering, aiming to fashion peasants into engaged citizens of the nation-state in a manner comparable to what Eugene Weber described as the transformation of “peasants into Frenchmen.”[10] Gusti himself repeatedly argued that the true

“purpose of popular culture (cultura poporului) is the transformation of ‘the people’ (poporul), a biosocial unit, into a nation, a superior spiritual and social unit.”[11]

This was a project riddled with tensions and contradictions: social engineering parading in rustic garb; folkloric vitality affirmed through anthropological distancing; and an ontology of national essence constituted through disciplinary practices. But such paradoxes are typical of nationalist projects and can be a powerful motor of political and intellectual innovation. Gusti’s political trajectory, then, constitutes a quest for an alternative way between western-style bourgeois democracy, Marxian socialism, and fascism. Yet, his vision of a “cultural state” built along rational administrative lines[12] was but one of several contending, albeit often intersecting, visions of Romanian modernity. On the right wing of the political spectrum stood an explicitly religious conception of modern life framed by the traditionalist language of Orthodoxism and a romanticized construction of the peasantry. This vision found expression in Nichifor Crainic’s ideal of an ethno-theocratic state.[13] A less aggressive stance was represented by Lucian Blaga’s theory of culture. Although rooted in landscape and folklore as wellsprings of authentic spirituality, it was saturated with a self-conscious modernist estheticism.[14] Finally, Gusti’s broader enterprises overlapped with a politically variegated eugenics movement determined to bring about a social modernization of the state.[15] Although interwar Romania eventually succumbed to the twin catastrophe of dictatorship and fascism, these examples show that the possibilities for different outcomes were always present and point to new interpretations of modern Romania.

Gusti’s institution-building efforts and effectiveness in mobilizing state resources in support of his projects underscores the imbrications of these alternative modernities within the Romanian body social and political practices. Critical to the implementation of his agenda were a series of initiatives that capture a vital moment in the social modernization of state technologies of power and control. These initiatives combined to rearticulate national space as an epistemic regime hospitable to the requirements of supra-communal administration. My narrative highlights the sociological monographs and the interventionist actions of the Romanian Social Institute, culminating with the establishment of the Bucharest Village Museum, the 1930 official census, and the 1938 Social Service Law. This cognitive and administrative démarches and the discursive practices they enabled were eminently suited to the dual task of constructing politically invested “national” subjects and to subordinating the bewildering array of resilient regionalisms and ethnic separatisms which plagued Greater Romania to an officially state endorsed map. The ideological construction of the peasants into national subjects would henceforth proceed in practical ways, structured by conceptually distinct yet intertwined formations of knowledge and power. 

The Nation as Epistemic Regime

Gusti’s instrument for promoting the assimilation of the peasantry into national life was the Sociology Seminar at the University of Bucharest and the Romanian Social Institute established in 1921. The goal of the Institute was to research all aspects of  (mainly rural) Romanian life, in order to understand the life-world of the Romanians and thereby determine their proper course of development. The monographic approach, however, was much more than a scientific tool. Regional Social Institutes were established, for instance, in Banat (1932) and in Bessarabia (1934), no doubt with an eye to legitimizing their territorial incorporation into Greater Romania, by establishing the “authenticity” of the Romanians living there. As Gusti himself pointed out, the sociological monographs had practical advantages in terms of enabling the subsequent “educative mission,” “administrative-political mission,” and “cultural mission.”[16] In short, these actions were to be a form of national education. Between 1925 and 1940, the Institute’s monographic teams and later large interdisciplinary teams of researchers and social activists had surveyed more than 600 villages and regions.

This vast body of knowledge was supplemented by the massive official census of 1930. Undertaken under the tutelage of the Romanian Social Institute and the Central Institute for Statistics, it was carried out with assistance from the state and the Rockefeller Foundation. The census attempted to devise more direct and sophisticated methods of determining Romania’s national/ethnic makeup. Prior to the First World War, many presumptive nationalities lacked a state of their own. In the absence of more “objective” classifications such as “citizenship,” the primary administrative criteria for defining “nationality” had been language. The new technique employed three combined variables. The first criterion was self-declared ethnicity. Language remained a central element, but it gained a more precise definition. “Native language” or “maternal tongue” was defined as the one acquired from parents and used most frequently in daily interaction. The third standard was religious affiliation.[17] Taken together, these norms provide a classic illustration of the ways in which natal filiations such as kinship are instrumentalized into political affiliations via citizenship and national belonging.[18] Underwritten by a positivist logic of representation, national identity was articulated here via bureaucratic criteria of inclusion and exclusion.

By the mid to late 1930s, there was sufficient information available to enable the formulation of a series of reform projects amounting to an ambitious project of national reconstruction along both ideological and administrative lines. Gusti’s conclusion was that the survival of the “Romanian” character of nation and state dictated peasant empowerment through increased political participation, additional land reform, the establishment of consumer and credit cooperatives, improved access to education, as well as improvements in public health. The latter was broadly conceived in eugenic terms,^[19] although Gusti himself cannot be characterized as an eugenist.

As already mentioned, this program was part of a broader twentieth century quest for the resources and energies of popular mobilization. However, it was no blueprint for people power. For Gusti, political democracy was but an empty husk if not accompanied by a corresponding enrichment of the national culture to serve as a spiritual bridge between citizens and state. Believing that the nation must embody the principle of collective action, Gusti postulated that all individuals can be divided into two social types: “active elements,” which are productive and therefore “national”, and “passive elements,” unproductive and therefore “antinational.”[20] In this ideological framework, there could be no national mobilization of the peasant masses and no pedagogical mission designed to empower them, unless their subjectivity was first framed as passive in order to legitimize interventionist actions. “Our peasants must cease being passive, humble victims of destiny and acquire a will that will influence it,” asserted Gusti in regards to the 1938 Social Service Law.[21]

The Social Service was established under the new law as an independent administrative arm of the state. One of its missions was to supervise the existing Cultural Homes and expand their number. The organization of village life would be improved by nurturing peasant leaders trained in Peasant Schools established for this purpose. A practical spirit of cooperation was to be fostered among the villagers by formally dividing the activities of the Cultural Homes into several domains. These included public health, labor issues, and popular education. Finally, an interrelated objective was to train school, college, and university students for social and cultural action in the countryside. The Social Service was made compulsory, being a condition for receiving a university diploma.[22] This was an ambitious plan, but not a formula designed to guarantee the full political participation of all citizens. Rather, it was hoped that education would enable peasants to become “productive personalities” in their own domain of social life, thereby contributing, albeit indirectly, to the great affairs of the nation.

Enacted at the very cusp of the royal dictatorship, the Social Service Law articulated a constrained though in some respects active conception of citizenship. While it enabled possibilities for popular agency, great care was taken to divert them into officially supervised channels. Rural priests and teachers were expected to take an active leadership role in the community. As such, the law was certainly in tune with the corporatist vision of the new Carolinian Constitution, which substituted the suffrage with representation via “colleges” organized by profession. Yet, there was nothing about the law that would have rendered it conceptually or practically untenable within the previous (1923) constitutional framework of parliamentary democracy and universal male suffrage. The institutional agent of a potent discourse of cultural homogenization via political subordination to the state, the Social Service can best be viewed in the larger context of extant academic arguments about the nation as a mass educational enterprise.[23] 

The Model Village and the Village Museum

The most compelling example of Gusti’s pedagogy of nationalism was the 1936 establishment of the Village Museum in Bucharest. It was designed as a culmination of the monographic approach, raising it to the level of national synthesis. Because the original plans for the exhibition complex provided for the building of a model village of the future, alongside the actual museum, the entire complex of 4.5 hectares was intended as a virtual laboratory of nation-building that would concretize Gusti’s vision of rural modernity. Though the model village was not built on the intended location, it was eventually erected in the village of Dioşti (which burned down in 1938) according to Gusti’s precepts. The outlines of the new modern village had in fact been pictured as early as 1927, and provided for the rational architectural planning of schools, dispensaries, and libraries. Such institutions would endow the village with the “conquests of modern civilization.”[24] The peasant household (gospodǎria), theorized as the fundamental unit of rural social organization and economic production, was set in sharp contrast to the atomized urban household. Envisioned as “small factory,” the individual household would function “together with the innumerable other village factories” as part of a “formidable productive organism” represented by the village community (obştea sǎtească). The Bucharest Village Museum embodied this approach to the rational planning of rural life.

Conceived as a visual and self-consciously “scientific” display of the special type of life of the Romanian people, this open-air exhibit was a collage of representative regional architecture assembled in an ideal-type “Romanian” village (sat-sintezǎ) on the museum grounds.[25] A powerful spatial articulation of national unity, the museum was an ideal medium for imagining the nation as regionally diverse, yet culturally and politically unified, precisely because it projected a curated version of regional traditions. This professionalized presentation functioned as an edited cultural script deliberately shorn of the semantic multivocality inherent in such displays of regional distinctions. The domestication of regional distinctiveness and normalization of national belonging was further regulated by an overall organizing metaphor drawn from the natural sciences. As one of Gusti’s contemporary critics insightfully observed, just as botanical gardens represented a miniaturized version of the natural environment so, too, the museum aspired to become a “sociological garden.”[26]

Originally inspired by the 1873 Skansen Museum established by the Swedish

Arthur Hazelius

ethnographer Arthur Hazelius and heavily promoted by Le Play at the 1878 Paris World Fair, the idea of a “social museum” was picked up by the numerous subsequent Universal Expositions and replicated in various national contexts. This was especially true in Scandinavia and Germany, which saw a proliferation of such museums. All these exhibits sought to complement the artifact collections displayed in traditional ethnographic museums with actual peasant households reconstructed in a framework that purported to display peasant life in its “natural” medium. Some village museums even featured “authentic” villagers transplanted on the premises so that they may continue to pursue their “ancient” customs.[27] For Gusti, however, all previous village museums were much too “romantic and ethnographic” because their cognitive interest resided in the preservation of traditional values and artifacts as opposed to being concerned with “contemporary man” and his “daily existence.”[28] The Bucharest Village Museum, therefore, would be the first genuine “social” museum. It would represent the “real” life of the Romanian village with a view to its future material and cultural improvement.[29]

This way of framing the mission engendered a breathtaking juxtaposition of scientific ethos and magical realism, for the museum relocated a number of “representative” villagers from various geographical regions to live on the site.[30] Naturally dressed in their “beautiful” and “picturesque costumes,”[31] these denizens were actually paid for their role in a compelling performance of staged authenticity and national belonging organized as a tourist production for the benefit of the general public. But it was precisely the imaginary quality of the travel, Gusti believed, which rendered this regional tour through the national essence into the “the most beautiful journey one can possibly imagine.” No other experience could impart so many lessons, he maintained, because no physical journey through the national landscape could condense in such powerful fashion Romania’s “entire personality.”[32] Far from distancing the audience from the performance, this dramatization was intended as a socially transformative experience that would embolden the public to partake in the great work of national construction. This is what brings us to the crux of this matter. 

Conclusion

Gusti’s vision of a quintessentially Romanian rural modernity was to be achieved through the selective pruning and “scientific” modernization of social tradition. In this sense, his concept of citizen-peasants, autonomous in their own social domain, yet guided by intellectual elites, was a kind of ideological fiction. But the Enlightenment ideal of the autonomous, reasoning subject, later articulated by liberal-democratic discourses and incarnated in constitutions, as well in an array of educational and disciplinary institutions, is equally fictitious in origin. Both types of subjects are convened by modernity, insofar as they can devise their own aims and forms of solidarity. This in itself is a good argument for dispensing with notions of historical exceptionalism.

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