CHARY OPPORTUNISTS: MONEY, VALUES, AND CHANGE IN POSTSOCIALIST ROMANIA by Narcis Sorin Marius Tulbure B.S. in Finance, Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, 2001 M.A. in History, Central European University, 2003 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology) University of Pittsburgh 2013 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Narcis Sorin Marius Tulbure It was defended on April 10, 2013 and approved by Nicole Constable, Professor, Department of Anthropology Gabriella Lukacs, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology Irina Livezeanu, Associate Professor, Department of History Dissertation Advisor: Robert M. Hayden, Professor, Department of Anthropology ii Copyright © by Narcis Sorin Marius Tulbure 2013 iii CHARY OPPORTUNISTS: MONEY, VALUES, AND CHANGE IN POSTSOCIALIST ROMANIA Narcis Sorin Marius Tulbure, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2013 This dissertation examines the connections between shifting notions of money and values in contemporary Romania as a way to analyze the unfolding economic, political, and social changes during postsocialism. It is based on the ethnographic analysis of disputes following the collapse of several mutual funds during the late 1990s. Such ongoing disputes have taken the form of public protests, petitions to state authorities, media interventions, suggestions to improve regulations regarding the capital market, and, most conspicuously, legal actions against those responsible for the bankruptcies and for compensation to the investors whose money was lost. I situate such contentious interactions within histories of institutional importation after the end of socialism, such as the emerging capital market at the beginning of the 1990s, the electronic market created soon after that with support from USAID, the mutual fund sector growing at the end of the 1990s, and the regulatory reform of the capital market with Romania’s accession into the European Union in 2007. My informants were living not only a postsocialist transition to capitalism but also a neoliberal transformation in the global architecture of financial capitalism, and a reorganization of the state with its inclusion into the EU. I found that an ethos of chary opportunism was emerging both as a response to and as a catalyst of the economic transformations experienced by my interlocutors. I also argue that, as the financial instruments materializing indexical and performative forms of money engendered volatile registers of value common for the capital market, my informants faced growing economic uncertainties through a iv wary form of opportunistic conduct, the appeal to courts for solving key disputes about money and its value, and constant demands to the state to mitigate risks and the effects of the market. Their outlook makes it easier to understand that change is not determined by pre-existing configurations of values, but is often the result of attempts to apply previously tested routines to new situations. Change happens while many are still looking backwards, and the past enters the present not as continuity but as a template replicated instrumentally in situations of radical uncertainty. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ................................................................................................ XI DEDICATION .................................................................................................................... XIII PREFACE ........................................................................................................................... XIV 1.0 INTRODUCTION: MONEY, VALUES, AND CHANGE IN POSTSOCIALIST ROMANIA ................................................................................................................................1 1.1 DEPARTURES AND RETURNS.....................................................................1 1.2 RESEARCH QUESTIONS ............................................................................ 10 1.3 LITERATURE REVIEW: MONEY, VALUES, AND THE LAW: MEDIATORS OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN POSTSOCIALIST ROMANIA ................ 13 1.3.1 Postsocialism and postcolonialism .............................................................. 16 1.3.2 Europeanization, EU conditionality, and external imposition of values ... 18 1.3.3 Markets, moralities, and the ambivalent role of money ............................ 20 1.3.4 Money and social change: From Melanesia to Eastern Europe ................ 23 1.3.5 Circulation, capital, and the production of value ...................................... 27 1.3.6 Financial practice as knowledge production .............................................. 29 1.3.7 Law and the mediation of economic categories ......................................... 32 1.3.8 Legal ideologies and the metapragmatics of disputes ................................ 34 1.3.9 Money as an object for semiotic anthropology .......................................... 37 vi 1.3.10 Property, risk, and financial securitization............................................... 39 1.4 CASES AND DISPUTES ................................................................................ 44 1.5 AN OVERVIEW OF ARGUMENTS AND CHAPTERS ............................. 49 2.0 CHAPTER 2: FACETS OF MUTUALITY: MONEY AND FINANCIAL PRACTICES UNDER SOCIALISM AND AFTER ITS END .............................................. 53 2.1 IDEOLOGIES OF MONEY UNDER SOCIALISM ..................................... 55 2.2 MONEY AND THE ECONOMIC PRACTICES OF STATE ENTERPRISES ............................................................................................................... 59 2.3 MONEY AND MUTUAL ORGANIZATIONS (COOPERATIVES) ........... 63 2.4 MONEY AND ITS SUBSTITUTES UNDER SOCIALISM ......................... 67 2.5 SHIFT IN MONEY PRACTICES AFTER SOCIALISM ............................. 74 2.6 THE POLITICS OF STABILIZATION, MARKETIZATION, AND PRIVATIZATION .......................................................................................................... 78 2.7 THE CONUNDRUMS OF VARIOUS PRIVATIZATION METHODS ...... 81 2.8 THE GROWTH AND FALL OF THE NEW COLLECTIVES ................... 86 2.9 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................... 91 3.0 CHAPTER 3: COMPETING STORIES OF SUCCESS AND FAILURE: CAPITAL MARKETS AS EXPERIMENT ........................................................................... 93 3.1 THE “NAÏVE” VIEWS OF LOCAL ECONOMISTS: HOW THE CAPITAL MARKET WAS CREATED ........................................................................ 97 3.2 USAID IN ROMANIA: STORIES ABOUT THE EASTERN INVOLVEMENT OF WESTERN DONORS .............................................................. 103 vii 3.3 NEOLIBERALISM AND THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS: SITUATING THE ROMANIAN MARKET POLICIES ............................................ 115 3.4 MARKET AS EXPERIMENT: NEOLIBERAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN POSTSOCIALIST ROMANIA .................................................................................... 122 3.5 A LOCAL THEORY OF THE MARKET IS CONFRONTED BY JOSEPH STIGLITZ ..................................................................................................................... 130 3.6 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................. 145 4.0 CHAPTER 4: REASON, GOSSIP, AND THE REPELLENT MEDIATORS ... 149 4.1 HANGING IN IN SPITE OF PERPETUAL LOSSES ................................ 152 4.2 THE "GREAT COMBINER”: A ROMANIAN OSTAP BENDER? ......... 172 4.3 CONCLUSION.. ........................................................................................... 194 5.0 CHAPTER 5: ILLUSORY MONEY AND CONTINGENT CLAIMS TO VALUE: THE METAPRAGMATIC LANGUAGE OF DISPUTES .................................. 199 5.1 THE INITIAL CREATION AND REGULATION OF ROMANIAN MUTUAL FUNDS......................................................................................................... 204 5.2 THE RENEWED “ILLUSION” OF THE CAPITAL MARKET ............... 211 5.3 CONTRACTUAL FORM(S) AND METAPRAGMATIC FUNCTION/DISCOURSES IN THE FNI TRIALS .................................................... 219 5.4 THE TRIAL AND RETRIAL IN THE FNA CASE .................................... 236 5.5 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................. 250 6.0 CHAPTER 6: AMBIGUOUS OWNERSHIP, COLLECTIVE RIGHTS, AND CHANGING NOTIONS OF WORTH IN ROMANIAN MUTUAL FUNDS ..................... 257 viii 6.1 THE CAPITAL MARKET REFORM IN ROMANIA: FROM AMERICAN TO EUROPEAN-TYPE REGULATIONS .................................................................. 261 6.2 THE MEDIATION OF EUROPEAN REGULATIONS BY LOCAL DISPUTES ABOUT THE CAPITAL MARKET ........................................................ 275 6.3 SOCIAL CHANGE, EU INTEGRATION, AND THE CHANGING ORDERS OF WORTH IN ROMANIAN MUTUAL FUNDS ..................................... 290 6.4 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................. 297 7.0 CONCLUSION: CHARY OPPORTUNISTS: CONVERSIONS OF VALUE AND SOCIAL MUTATIONS IN POSTSOCIALIST ROMANIA ............................................... 300 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................. 320 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Certificates of property