Past and Present 2012 March 6

Geopolitics, Regime Type and the Internationalization of Romanian Economics During the Cold War The nexus between economists, state and society has emerged as one of the most fertile areas of research on how economic science is shaped by institutions and viceversa (Valdes 1995; Babb 2002; Fourcade 2006; 2009; Mandelkern and Shalev 2010; Lindvall 2010; Kogut and Macpherson 2010; Ban 2011; Farrell and Quiggin 2012). One of the main insights of this literature is that the interaction between domestic economists and their counterparts in the Western epistemic core has become a driving force in shaping the boundaries of the domestic economic profession and of the policy sphere. The evidence for this argument is compelling but its ambit is limited to regional contexts where the ideas being imported served the economic policy agenda of powerful domestic actors. Latin America’s “Chicago Boys,” to take a familiar example, were encouraged and even bankrolled by powerful business and state actors from their home countries or from abroad. But such alignments between dominant interests and the new ideas did not exist elsewhere. Consider the case of Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Here, the economic profession was so tightly regulated by an ideologically anticapitalist state elite that open advocacy for Western economic ideas hostile to the political economy of state socialism often entailed professional costs and, in some of the more repressive regimes, it even led to political persecution. How did diffusion take place this political context and what factors powered and respectively filtered diffusion dynamics? To address these questions, this paper examines the case of Romania, a country where the poverty of the neoclassical tradition before the war would lead one to expect a lot less diffusion of Western economics than in East-Central Europe. At the same time, the paper suggests that geopolitical openings facilitating East-West scientific exchanges enabled the emergence of practices of diffusion of Western economics among critically minded economists. Literature review Two positions clash in social science accounts of the politics of economic ideas in Eastern Europe before 1989. According to a popular view, the epistemic parochialism of East European economics during the Cold War was overwhelming. Consequently, local economists experienced systematic exposure to Western neoclassical economics only after 1989 (Grosfeld 1992; Kovacs and Tardos 1992; Murrell 1995; Wedel 2001; Kaas et al 2002). For this literature, East European state socialism was relatively effective at suppressing incentives to appropriate the theoretical and methodological instruments of the schools of thought dominating the economic profession on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In contrast, other scholars anchored in very diverse epistemiological and normative agendas unearthed evidence showing that since the 1960s many reform-oriented East European economists had been anything but parochial (Kaase et al 2002; Bockman and Eyal 2002; Bockman 1997; 2007; 2010; Bockman and Bernstein 2008; Aligica and Evans 2009). In her extensive work on this topic, Johanna Bockman went further and showed that many had in fact become members of an East-West professional network that connected Western critics of the then mainstream neoclassical-Keynesian synthesis with the empirical findings of East European economists about the systemic weaknesses of state-led macroeconomic interventions. According to this alternative framework, when communism collapsed in 1989, the process of incorporation of Western economics into East European economic debates had been going on for at least two decades. Rather than represent a kind of tabula rasa awaiting Western proselytizers, well before 1989 an important part of the economic profession in this part of the continent had become familiar with current debates in Western economics and some even became incorporated into the most conservative quarters of the neoclassical school. But like the “Chicago Boys” literature, the findings of this alternative have a regional limitation. As its proponents stress, its arguments deal with intellectual and political contexts in East-Central Europe where the neoclassical tradition had been strong before communism. Moreover, post-Stalinist authoritarian rulers in this region allowed such a degree of intellectual freedom for dissident economists that the latter were able to challenge bureaucratic elites themselves as the economic contradictions of the socialist political economy became more manifest. This is a relevant qualification that points towards East European contexts where neither of these enabling factors existed. In countries like Romania or Bulgaria authoritarian rule was considerably tighter and the pre-communist acceptance of neoclassical ideas had been much weaker. Was Western economics completely screened off in these Southeastern European contexts and, if not, how did its theoretical and methodological instruments travel there? Analytical framework: the regime type-geopolitics nexus The opportunities for diffusion in authoritarian systems do not emerge in a vacuum. Granted, even the most authoritarian political order is not airtight and dissent can be exercised in multiple creative ways. From this standpoint Eastern Europe was no exception (Kopstein 1996; Johnston and Snow 1998; Johnston and Mueller 2001) and even in Ceausescu’s Romania intellectual dissidence was, despite its ambiguities and vulnerability to cooption (Verdery 1995; Ciobanu 2011), far from being uncommon (Culic 1998; Mungiu-Pippidi 1999; Plesu 1995; Verdery 1995; Tismaneanu 2003; Deletant 2008; Fichter 2011). Yet the opportunities for intellectual dissidence in Romania were not the same during the “hard” Stalinist and isolationist 1950s and 1980s as they were during the less repressive and more open towards the West 1960s and 1970s. As some political scientists amply evidenced, the very end of the cold war could not be explained without paying attention to the emergence of epistemic communities of security studies in the Soviet Union that promoted such concepts as “common security” and “interdependence” once détente opened up possibilities for doing research abroad (Checkel 1993; Risse-Kappen 1994). Drawing on this argument and on Marion Fourcade’s exhortation to take the organization of the international space in which economics is practiced as a variable rather than as a constant (Fourcade 2009: 256-260), the paper sees the geopolitics as being of essence for the discussion. It suggests that the longitudinal transformations of the regime in terms of its authoritarianism and the dynamics of strategic rapprochement/closure with ideological foes that result in academic exchanges increase and respectively decrease the space for diffusion of Western economic ideas among domestic economists. In other words regime type and geopolitics should make a big difference in the process of diffusion of Western economics in an authoritarian regime. The empirical investigation undertaken in this paper is based on a number of primary and secondary sources. In addition to secondary literature published in Romanian, I carried out several interviews with pivotal figures of the Romanian economic profession during the Cold War, explored previously unavailable autobiographical books and examined Romanian economic scholarship published during communism where evidence of East- West exchanges could be traced. Throughout the examination of these sources I sought evidence of professional transnationalization, that is regular professional exchanges occurring between Romanian and Western economics, ranging from graduate and/or postgraduate study abroad and participation in workshops and conferences to more modest forms, such as active use of Western references. Methodologically, the paper employs a least likely case selection and undertakes a historical institutionalist analysis of the conditions in which critical economists in communist Romania crafted their mechanisms of diffusion in structural conditions set by larger socio-political forces (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003). The paper is organized as follows: the first section uncovers the poverty of the neoclassical tradition in pre-communist Romania; next, the paper examines the shifting dynamics of the Romanian authoritarian state and the results they had on the economic profession; the discussion of the role of détente in re-transnationalization of a part of the economic profession is carried out in the third section, while section four undertakes an analysis of its effects. The last section probes the effects of the tightening of the authoritarian rule on the spread of Western economics in Romania. The burden of the past Romanian economics had been highly transnationalized before the advent of the communist regime in 1948 but had a thin commitment to neoclassical economics. During the interwar years, the discipline had been taught in a separate department whose structure and curriculum closely followed that of the French grandes ecoles.1 Beginning in the late 19th century, a solid publication record in respectable foreign journals and presses plus a Western PhD became basic conditions for acquiring and maintaining university employment.2 Economics departments were well-stocked with the latest French and German books and journals and a flagship Romanian economics review (Revue roumaine des etudes sociales) was published directly in French and enjoyed a 1 Suggestively, the very name of the department

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