Human Agency in the Interstices of Structure

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Human Agency in the Interstices of Structure:

Choice and Contingency in the Conflict over Roşia Montană, Romania

Filip Mihai Alexandrescu

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of Sociology

University of Toronto

Human Agency in the Interstices of Structure:

Choice and Contingency in the Conflict over Roşia Montană, Romania

Doctor of Philosophy, 2012

Filip Mihai Alexandrescu

Department of Sociology

University of Toronto

Abstract

Sociology has long struggled with the problem of human agency in its theoretical constructions. Systematically purged from the corpus of positivist, functionalist and rational choice theories, agency has nevertheless surfaced repeatedly in empirical analyses as a constant reminder that individuals are able and willing to act in ways that are not fully explained by the dominant theories. This thesis deals with the problem of human agency by exploring a particular instance of human interaction in which the choices and actions of individuals as well as the contingencies facing them are particularly conspicuous. The example chosen as a case study is the conflict over the planned Roşia Montană gold and silver mine in

Romania. As neither the supporters, nor the opponents of the planned open cast mine have managed to impose their will and determine the commencement or cancelation of the mining project, the resulting struggle was extended over more than a decade. During this period, a variety of social actors with different interests and worldviews were drawn into complex interactions with each other, thus making the trajectory and outcome of the conflict unpredictable. At the same time, there emerged an enlarged space for human agency,

especially for those actors that have been usually conceived as voiceless and powerless. The origins of this space of agency are traced to the particular configuration of macro-social processes which interacted in series of highly contingent events. More exactly, none of the broad processes discussed in the literature on resource conflicts – such as accumulation by dispossession, the resource curse or unequal development – ran its full course in determining the outcomes of the conflict. The temporary suspension of overpowering structural determinations opened up a realm in which social actors could convert the contingencies of the conflict into opportunities and risks. Individuals became relatively free to make choices and influence the choices of others. The language of the sociology of translation is used as the most apt description of the fluidity of these interactions. The dynamic between the ordering and reordering of the social world of Roşia Montană through interaction is a key insight of the thesis.

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Acknowledgments Writing this thesis has been a lengthy and complex process, during which I developed and refined my ideas through discussions with a significant number of people. All of them have helped me build and rebuild the thesis step by step, sometimes in ways that were not necessarily linear, until the final product. Professor Bernd Baldus has been my main intellectual interlocutor and mentor in developing this thesis over many fascinating discussions and rich exchanges of ideas. For his vision, advice and constant encouragement throughout the years I would like to express my heartfelt thanks. Even if not directly involved in the dissertation process, Professor Michael Cernea from George Washington University has offered me encouragement and good advice for thinking about the specificities of the Roşia Montană case. I am also grateful for his constant help and advice for publishing my work. The members of my dissertation committee - Professors John Hannigan and Ken MacDonald - provided me with helpful comments at different stages. I am also grateful to the external and internal appraisers of the thesis - Professors Raymond Murphy and William Michelson - who offered constructive criticism that will help me strengthen my arguments and analysis for future research on Roşia Montană. The present thesis has benefited from extended discussions with my colleagues Irina Velicu and Alina Pop, both of whom have carried out research on the Roşia Montană case. I am grateful for their encouragement and for the scholarly atmosphere in which our debates took place. Informal discussions with Matthias Gross and Alena Bleicher from the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany have also helped me try out or challenge some of the ideas that had emerged from the thesis. I would like to express my warm gratitude for my wife, Andreea, and my children, Gabriel and Diana, for making the last few years such a meaningful period of my life. Their long patience and strong encouragement have helped me greatly in finalizing the thesis. My parents - Marcel and Rodica - have also been very encouraging and have helped me with numerous newspaper articles on the ongoing Roşia Montană conflict. My brother and sister-in-law as well as my friend Andrei have been supportive in many different ways. The residents of Roşia Montană, my friends and host there, have been very open and their willigness to share their thoughts and experiences with me have proved invaluable in writing this thesis. Thanks are also due to all those who shared their articles or writings with me over the last five years. The funding received from the University of Toronto and the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU) is also gratefully acknowledged.

Table of Contents Chapter One: Theorizing Agency at Roşia Montană ...... 1 Introduction ...... 1 Roşia Montană Vignette ...... 3 Theoretical Background of the Thesis ...... 8 Disciplinary Traditions and the Idea of Agency in Sociology ...... 9 Agency in Sociology: Concepts and Theories ...... 18 Formulating the Research Problem: Structuration, Morphogenesis, and Actor-Network-Theory ...... 22 Agency in the Literature on Ecological Distribution Conflicts ...... 31 The State of Knowledge on Roşia Montană: A Critical Assessment ...... 37 Chapter Two: Methodology ...... 47 Before Entering the Field: Early Conjectures on Roşia Montană ...... 47 Entering the Field: One Situation, Many Definitions ...... 51 Entering the (Mine)field: the Politics of the Project ...... 61 The Selection of Respondents ...... 67 Applying the Research Instruments ...... 72 Analysis of the Information Gathered ...... 78 Limitations of the Methodology ...... 79 Chapter Three: Powerful Processes, Complex Interactions, Unpredictable Outcomes ...... 81 Introduction ...... 81 Mining in the Social Scientific Literature: An Historical Overview ...... 83 Brief History of Mining at Roşia Montană: Changing Property and Production Regimes, Shifting Mineral Fortunes and Variable Survival Strategies ...... 90 The Political Economy of Resource Extraction ...... 93 Roşia Montană: From Tight Integration to Laissez Fair ...... 101 The Economic and Political Case for Roşia Montană: Between Neoliberalism and Nationalism ...... 106 Roşia Montană: The Beginning of the Resource Curse for Romania? ...... 114 Living with Another Curse: Fragmenting Development at the Subnational Level ...... 117 Conclusion ...... 118 Chapter Four: Dynamic Choices and Emerging Contingencies at Roşia Montană ...... 121 Introduction ...... 121 Choosing the Actors: the Initial Relocators ...... 127 The First Alliances in the Gabriel Resources Actor-World ...... 131 v

Interessement or the Movement from Absolute Space to Abstract Space ...... 135 Expanding Translation and the Role of Surprises ...... 138 The Ambiguities of Relocation: Individual Experiences at Roşia Montană ...... 144 Landscapes as the Focus of Human Choices ...... 159 Translating Arcadia: The Enchantment of Roşia Montană ...... 169 The Effects of Interessement on the (Temporary) Success of the Anti-Mining Campaign ...... 177 “Fighting Fire with Fire”: Contested Environments at Roşia Montană ...... 186 Alternative Translations of the Environment: the Residents of Roşia Montană ...... 189 The Variable Translations of Community ...... 191 Roots and Home Places: The Variable Meanings of Profound Experiences ...... 196 Conclusion ...... 203 Chapter Five: Summary and Conclusions: the Threefold Promise of Agency ...... 205 References...... 217

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Overview of actors included in the analysis, classified in terms of physical and media visibility………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….71 Table 2.2 Break-down of research stays in Roşia Montană (2005 – 2008)...... 73 Table 4.2: Residential choices of 77 inhabitants from Corna and Bunta...... 146 Table 5.1 Overview of the dynamic between the solidification and the renewal of choices….209

List of Figures

Figure 2.1 Graphic display of the physical visibility of project developer (RMGC) – poster located in the central square of Roşia Montană (2005)…………………………………………………………..53 Figure 2.2 House in Roşia Montană, “Property of Roşia Montană Gold Corporation” (2005)….54 Figure 2.3 House along the central axis of Roşia Montană bearing a “This property is not for sale” plaque (2005)………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...55 Figure 3.1 Location of the Roşia Montană deposit and town in Romania………………………………..97 Figure 3.2 Mining concessions in Romania (2010). The numbers shown refer to concessions in each county [Roşia Montană is located in Alba county)………………………………………………………….99 Figure 3.3. The increase in the world gold price since 1992 (the year of the Aurul joint venture at Baia Mare)………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..101 Figure 4.3 The relocation status of 110 residents and relocatees of RM and the types of interviews carried out...... 150 Figure 4.4 New structures mushroomed during the “cottage frenzy” (“cabaniada”) of Roşia Montană (2006 – 2007), erected by residents interested in obtaining additional compensation from GR...... 152 Figure 4.5. Arcadian views of Roşia Montană (selection of relevant quotes)...... 171

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Chapter One: Theorizing Agency at Roşia Montană

Introduction

The problem of human agency has been repeatedly eschewed in some of the dominant theories in sociology since the heyday of positivism and functionalism around the middle of the 20th century. Whether relegated to a peripheral status or simply rejected from the sociological pronouncements that the world is orderly, agency has only seldom reached the center stage of sociological interest. On more than one occasion, however, sociologists confronted with complex empirical situations have been compelled to admit that individuals sometimes do not follow the scripts outlined for them, that is, do not behave in the expected ways. Sociological concerns with the patterning of human behavior – with the structures of human action – have been recouched as problems of structure and agency. The present thesis is broadly located in the “agency-structure” debate in sociology and draws inspiration from the related attempts at agency-structure integration, proposed over the last three decades. Rather than following the debate and the resolutions advanced in their strict “technical” terms, the approach taken here will apply some of the major insights from this literature to an instance of human interaction in which the choices, actions and reflections of individuals are very salient. The case under discussion is the protracted conflict over the Roşia Montană mine in Romania. My main aim is to show how several contingent processes converging in a specific setting interact in complex ways and provide a space in which social actors engage in a variety of agentic processes. The main focal point of the thesis is, therefore, the agency of actors, more exactly the processes of diversifying cultural choices in the face of contingent and uncertain processes of change (Baldus 2011b). The general theoretical argument is that contingent events and circumstances are actively assembled and converted by actors into opportunities and risks. These assemblages are also known as translations, in which different actors seek to speak for others and build alliances in an effort achieve their goals. This conversion is not always functional or free of error, and it also need not remain stable. The paper is primarily empirical – in that it seeks to bring to light the richness of agentic processes taking place in a specific context. The theoretical contribution is to identify a case of

2 human interaction that is atypical, in that it is not amenable to the usual interpretations of predictable sequences of events. More exactly, the conflict over Roşia Montană challenges the literature on ecological distribution conflicts, and thus provides insight into under-theorized forms of agency. Academic observers would be hard pressed to apply to this case one of the usual categories used to describe local actors in distribution conflicts, such as “ecological resistance”, “grassroots organizing”, or “globalization from below” etc. The Roşia Montană case resembles a kaleidoscope of perceptions and experiences, of hopes and fears, of speculations and conservative reactions, each confirmed or belied by changing events. Rather than the usual depiction of a powerful corporate “Goliath” imposing its will against a powerless community “David” – quite common in the literature on mining conflicts – what can be observed in Roşia Montană is quite different. The most noteworthy feature of the conflict over Roşia Montană is the constant shifting of David’s and Goliath’s roles among different actors. Therefore, if one were to use a single word – a distinct concept – that captures the effervescence around this place it would certainly be that of agency. In small or large ways, with carefully planned or spontaneous strategies, inspired by narrow or broad visions (or anxieties), the actors meeting in the space called Roşia Montană show that not only is “another world possible” (as anti-globalization movements call for) but that, at this critical juncture in the history of this place, a variety of worlds are possible. Which of them will materialize is not mine to say, not only because it would prove nearly impossible to offer an informed speculation; rather, the vision that inspires this thesis is to focus on the actions of actors meeting on the stage of Roşia Montană, actions which are, to quote Niklas Luhmann, “neither necessary, nor impossible”. The failure of the above labels and theoretical approaches to highlight a process of constantly renewed action – as it isvisible in Roşia Montană - makes a fresh look at agency important. In what follows, the Roşia Montană case will be introduced by means of a short descriptive vignette. I will then briefly trace the problem of agency in the sociological literature in general and in the theories that deal specifically with agency-structure integration in particular. I will then outline the theoretical frameworks which have incorporated both agency and structure and formulate the research question and objectives in relation to two preferred

3 theoretical approaches: morphogenesis and actor-network-theory (ANT). The last section of the first chapter will be devoted to a critical assessment of the existing literature on Roşia Montană. The second chapter provides a discussion of my intellectual engagement with the Roşia Montană case, the entry into the field and the epistemological and political aspects associated with this entry. The framework for the selection of the relevant aspects of the case and the data gathering process are also discussed. The third chapter addresses the first objective and shows that despite the operation of powerful world-structuring processes which seemed to push Roşia Montană in a predictable direction, the contingent interaction of these powerful processes suspended temporarily the path dependency of this mining town. The fourth chapter is the core focus of the thesis; it aims to interpret the interaction of the processes outlined in chapter three in terms of the micro agentic processes taking place in and around Roşia Montană and show that the inevitable push of structural forces depends on the complex and changing translations advanced by different actors in place. The fifth and last chapter summarizes the complex translation processes observed at Roşia Montană. It also deals with how this case can inform sociological debates on agency and what would be some areas of future research. The contribution of this analysis to the literature on ecological distribution conflicts and to the growing scientific interest for Roşia Montană are also highlighted.

Roşia Montană Vignette

Introducing the empirical material which will form the basis for the present dissertation is both straightforward and challenging. It is straightforward because the case involves a conflict over a proposed large-scale mine to be developed in a historical mining town called Roşia Montană, which is a clearly identifiable place and community in Western Romania. On the other hand, the description of the case is challenging because the question immediately arises over the partiality of the description offered. What details are included and, more importantly, which are left out in presenting the case? Which aspects are brought into the spotlight and which are left in the shadow? What sort of speculation about the future of the conflict is offered, even if

4 it is implicit? Every human community has, and in fact exists, through a variety of stories (Maines and Bridger 1992) and in presenting the “case”, the researcher is forced to choose (or concoct) only one of the variety of possible stories. This is even more problematic in conflict situations when storytelling activities tend to become intensified and in which the actors themselves claim that theirs is the “true story” 1 . More often than not, these different stories are in competition with one another. Each detail or particular turn of phrase with regard to the place under discussion, however “factual” by some accounts can be taken to represent fiction or misrepresentation by those holding opposing views. But dealing with these many partial stories, which proliferate and are muted, which empower some but may disempower others, which are constantly reproduced or shifted, represents the intellectual focus of this dissertation. Creating and transforming stories or, to use the language of actor – network theory, constructing translations of a heterogeneous reality is taken here as an inexhaustible expression of human agency. Human agency and its diverse manifestations appear to be especially worthy of exploration in situations that seem pre-structured by the “omniscient reality of state and capital” (Howlett 2010: 101). With the caveat of inescapable partiality in mind, I shall describe in broad outlines what the “Roşia Montană case” is about. Roşia Montană is a commune with a semi-urban character (Pop 2002), located in the Apuseni Mountains of Romania, also known as the Western Carpathians. From a geological point of view, it is part of the Golden Quadrilateral containing gold-bearing rocks and stretching between the historical mining towns Săcărâmb, Brad, Abrud, Baia de Arieş and Zlatna. It is about 70 km away from Alba Iulia, the capital of Alba county to which Roşia Montană belongs, and about 130 km from Cluj Napoca, the largest city in Transylvania. Until 2006, it could pride itself with having an almost uninterrupted history of gold mining since at least the second century AD (Dordea 2003: 275). The year AD 105 – 106 witnessed the Roman conquest of the territory known as “Dacia” roughly corresponding to present-day Romania, after the two wars between the legions of the Roman emperor Trajan and the army of the Dacian king Decebalus. The Roman conquest was driven, in part, by the fabled gold riches of

1 Interestingly, between 2006 and 2010, one party in the conflict (the Roşia Montană Gold Corporation) made its online presence known through the website: www.truestory.ro.

5 the Dacian kings (Roman et al. 1982). The first written document in which Roşia Montană is mentioned by its ancient name – “Alburnus Maior” – is dated February 6, 131 AD, and it contains a mining contract. Mining activities were continued – with the usual ebbs and flows – over the course of the centuries, under different regimes of extraction, using various technologies and with different social and environmental consequences. Mining came to a grinding halt in 2006 when the state-owned company RoşiaMin, a subsidiary of Minvest Deva, ceased all operations (underground and opencast) in Roşia Montană. This would have been a rather unremarkable event, mirrored in countless other mining towns in Romania during the 1990s and early 2000s, had it not been for a special circumstance which singled out the name “Roşia Montană” in Romanian and international public opinion. The circumstance that made Roşia Montană visible for wider audiences was the discovery by Canadian gold mining junior Gabriel Resources (GR)2 of a major gold deposit (Ganzelewski 2002): the largest reserve known now in Europe. This discovery3, which was the result of several years of exploratory work (carried out between 1997 and 2006), set in motion several processes which have changed Roşia Montană in significant ways. Taken together, the processes to be outlined below provide a dynamic overview of the Roşia Montană case. At the same time, it should be noted that these transformations are neither complete, as some of them are still unfolding, nor coherent, as some work in favour and other against the proposed mining project, and even less predictable in their future unfolding. Moreover, the processes described represent only a partial representation of a complex reality. First, the plans of Gabriel Resources to develop the gold deposit at Roşia Montană met with substantial opposition from several hundred resident families (who identified themselves as “property owners”) who founded an association with the name “Alburnus Maior” (2000). At roughly the same time, several Romanian archaeologists called for the mine and town to be

2 In 1997, Gabriel Resources established a joint venture with the Romanian state enterprise RAC Deva under the name Euro Gold Resources. RAC Deva was renamed in the following two years Minvest Deva and in early 2000, Euro Gold Resources was renamed Roşia Montană Gold Corporation (RMGC). (Ziua 1998 and GR press releases). In what follows I will refer to GR rather than RMGC as the more visible and powerful actor behind the joint venture. 3 The term “discovery” is itself contentious given that Romanian mining engineers counter that a significant deposit (30.977 tones), albeit only about one tenth of what GR estimated ( 314.145 tones), had already been identified at Roşia Montană before 1990 (Sîntimbrean et al. 2006).

6 declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO, after German and French archeologists unearthed 20 altars dedicated to Roman gods (Damsell, National Post 2000: C2). In 2002, the Roşia Montană-based opposition was joined by international environmental movement organizations (Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth) and a few international activists moved to Roşia Montană to help the resident organization achieve greater visibility and effectiveness in its opposition against the plans of Gabriel Resources. The highpoint of the movement opposing the proposed Roşia Montană mine, judged by its international visibility, was reached in 2005 when a Swiss-born Alburnus Maior activist (Stephanie Roth) received the Goldman environmental prize for grassroots environmentalism in Europe. The movement achieved its greatest effectiveness, however, in 2007 when legal challenges by Alburnus Maior and allied organizations put the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process for the GR mine on hold for three years (2007 – 2010). The struggle is, however, far from over as legal challenges by Alburnus Maior continue and, at the same time, the company uses all institutional and legal means to push its project through. All these legal and administrative entanglements in which the project and its different stakeholders are caught make the ultimate fate of the project and its trajectory over the coming years unpredictable. A second process was set in motion by Gabriel Resources in 2002, when it began its so- called property acquisition program. As a result, a growing number of people began to leave Roşia Montană, partly enticed by the compensations offered by Gabriel Resources for their properties, in part for fear of being expropriated by the project developers, or for various personal, family or cultural reasons. Especially during the first two years of property acquisitions (2002 – 2004), the mining company used different pressure tactics to compel Roşia Montană residents to sell their properties (for example, the local doctor was apparently payed by the company to leave Roşia Montană in 2003 – Popescu 2003a). At the end of 2007, approximately three quarters of residents had sold their properties but in the following years no more acquisitions took place. The (currently) smaller number of Alburnus Maior members still residing in Roşia Montană claim that they are determined to resist any offers and pressures that the company might mount against them. Other residents have no such determined stance towards refusing any compensation offer but they have refrained so far

7 from selling their properties to GR. The company has – as yet - no means to get the state to expropriate these residents so any single landowner could, in principle at least, block the advancement of the project in its current form. A new legislative proposal to change the mining law so as to enable mining companies to expropriate property owners on behalf of the state is currently (October 2011) been considered by the Romanian parliament. A third process which characterizes the conflict over Roşia Montană is the involvement of a variety of national and international actors, which cannot be neatly divided between an “environmentalist” and a “pro-mining” camp. The Romanian Orthodox Church, the Romanian Academy and public and private universities have been outspoken against the proposed project, most of them on more than one occasion. On the other hand, various political leaders and high-ranking state officials (viz. the president of Romania and the minister of the economy) have expressed favorable views with regard to the mining project. Internationally, the European Parliament (which dispatched a team of European MPs to Roşia Montană in 2003), the European Commission, the Council of Europe or different specialized bodies within these institutions took more or less explicit stances with regard to the Roşia Montană project. Things went even further than simply expressing views for or against the project. A resolution to ban the use of cyanide in mining – the preferred extraction method in the Roşia Montană project - was adopted with overwhelming majority in the European Parliament (2010) but was subsequently rejected by the European Commission in the same year. Cyanide leaching thus remained an accepted extraction method for precious metals in the European Union, of which Romania is a member since 2007. In addition, a variety of journalists, filmmakers, actors, natural scientists, economists, historians, and philanthropists, among others, both Romanian and foreign have voiced their concerns and views about the proposed mining project. Musical, artistic, political, religious, civic events and meetings have been staged in Roşia Montană and elsewhere by all these actors. As a result, the problematique of Roşia Montană has ceased to be a purely “environmental” or a merely “local” one as different actors picked up different aspects of the case – archaeological, cultural, economic, political, developmental – to argue in favor or against the proposed mine.

Finally, the involvement of these actors raised the political and cultural stakes of the conflict4 at the same time as the economic pressures to build the mine waxed and waned over time but generally followed an upward trend over the last few years. The incentive to exploit “one of the world's few remaining undeveloped giant gold deposits” (Casey 2006), as one mining commentator put it, has grown in tandem with the mounting price of gold, which has increased almost fourfold between 1997 – 1998 and 2011. If anything, these changing contexts in which Roşia Montană found itself over the years made it almost impossible for both resident5 and non-resident actors to clearly anticipate the course of events or even to have a complete picture of what is going on. This fact makes the case apposite for a study of social agency in all of its varied manifestations.

Theoretical Background of the Thesis

In terms of its disciplinary location, the thesis is rooted primarily in the sociological literature, with only occasional incursions into the rich geographical and anthropological literatures. Apart from contingency and agency – the key concepts used in describing the aim of the thesis – which will be discussed at some length in what follows, the notion of space needs some initial clarification. The conceptual link between agency and the broad notion of space adopted here is essential for the argument of the thesis. Faist (2005) follows Roland Robertson’s (1995) notion of glocalization in defining space as a “relational process of structuring relative positions of social and symbolic ties between social actors, social resources and goods inherent in social ties, and the connection of these ties to places.” (Faist 2005: 762). In similar terms, Doreen Massey (2005) formulates three propositions that characterize her approach to space. All three of them lend themselves to a useful agentic interpretation, because they eschew abstract and predictable interpretations of the absolute/Euclidian view of space (cf. Faist 2005). According

4 At different times, Roşia Montană has been touted “oldest documented settlement in Romania”, the “birthplace of the Romanian people”, a unique European treasure, a test case for the rule of law in Romania etc. (Kocsis 2004; Soros Foundation Romania 2009) 5 As mentioned above in relation to the families which are members of Alburnus Maior, residence refers to property ownership or to spending one’s life in Roşia Montană before the arrival of GR (1995).

9 to Massey, space should be recognized as: “constituted through interactions”; as the sphere of “contemporaneous plurality, in which distinct trajectories coexist”; and as “always under construction” (Massey 2005: 9). In short, for Massey space is a “simultaneity of stories-so-far”, which, I would add, are ripe to be continued, refined or sometimes terminated, while new others can be brought to life in innumerable ways by living human agents. This broad and open-ended conception of space is particularly apposite for the approach taken here, which seeks to bring to light, as much as possible, the plurality of stories-being-made-now at Roşia Montană. The other concepts with which space will be brought in (mostly empirical) connection will be introduced at a later point in chapter four. These are inspired by Edward Relph’s (1976) phenomenology of place and includes the concepts of location, landscape, community and the question of roots and home places. The theoretical argument about the link between agency and these aspects in the experience of place is that human choices and actions tend to shift the reality and meaning of place in ways that are not predetermined.

Disciplinary Traditions and the Idea of Agency in Sociology

Massey (2005) admits that, in one sense, her three propositions concerning space are a way of stating the obvious. If this rings true for (some) geographers, sociologists might be willing to recognize that the history of their discipline over much of the twentieth century has, with some exceptions6, not engaged with space in any serious way (Lobao and Saenz 2002). In the present context, space is not mentioned simply as a key geographical concept of wide sociological applicability – although this is certainly the case, see Giddens (1984) - but as a proxy for the irregularities of human life and action, from which sociology has repeatedly shied away. For example, post-war methodological positivism in US sociology held that causal structures were invariable across time, space and interactional contexts (Steinmetz 2005:

6 An exception would be the Chicago school of human ecology during the 1920s and 1930s. McKenzie (1967[1925]) defines human ecology as the “study of the spatial and temporal relations of human beings as affected by the selective, distributive and accommodative forces of the environment” (1967: 63 – 64). Another is Pitirim Sorokin’s book on Sociocultural Causality, Space and Time (1943).

283)7. The unevenness, contingency and lack of predictability of human actions across different times and places could be smoothened away so that the search for “basic regularities” and “pattern variables” can yield the image of an orderly world. David Harvey (1995) provides a cogent characterization of positivist social science that chimes well with Steinmetz’s assessment:

When the rest of social science was dealing with general theories specified in time [or even not], geographers were struggling with the specificities of place. Furthermore, the incorporation of space into existing social theory, of whatever sort, always seemed to disrupt its power. The innumerable contingencies, specificities and ‘othernesses’ which geographers encountered could be (and often were) regarded by geographers as fundamentally undermining (dare I say ‘deconstructing’) of all forms of social scientific metatheory (Harvey 1995: 5).

This state of affairs had, indeed, a rather long history in sociology, at least on the Western shore of the Atlantic. Witness the reference to sociologists’ “mania for classification” made by Robert E. Park (1864 - 1944) in a review essay of four geography books published in 1925 and 1926: Sociology seeks to classify its facts and to describe social changes in terms of processes. But geographers will make no concession to "the mania for classification," since to proceed in that way "would mean passing over, in most cases, anything peculiar, individual, or irregular - that is to say, in short, all that is most interesting." The italics are not Febvre's (Park 1926: 487).

Park concedes in this way that the pursuit of classificatory and abstract knowledge – for which geographers had little regard - forsakes some of the most intriguing aspects of social phenomena. Although Park is well-known for his human ecological theory, which viewed the city as an ecological order determined by ecological processes (competition, dominance, succession), his career as a journalist made him also aware of the large variability in human behavior and ability. In an article dealing with “News as a form of knowledge”, Park (1940)

7 The assumption that there were no salient differences between the United States and the rest of the world during the 1950s and 60s, has sometimes resulted in almost comical research methodologies, such as the one that informed project Revere as part of Air Force’s Korean War effort. This project assessed the effectiveness of airdropped leaflets through tests in rural areas of Washington State, assuming that regular Americans were interchangeable with Korean peasants (Steinmetz 2007).

11 acknowledges that there is a great variety of forms of knowledge, ranging from the rational and formalized “knowledge about” to the intuitive and practical “acquaintance with” (two categories he borrows from William James). His views regarding a basic human ability – intelligence – show that he is not insensitive to the peculiarities of individual thought processes and their implications:

There seems to be a very great difference in individuals, families, and genetic groups as to their ability to learn specific things. Native intelligence is probably not the standardized thing that the intelligence tests might lead one to believe. In so far as this is true studies of intelligence in the future are, I suspect, more likely to be concerned with the idiosyncrasies of intelligence and the curious individual ways in which individual minds achieve essentially the same results than in measuring and standardizing these achievements (Park 1940: 671 – 672).

Park also devoted particular attention to the emerging forms of personality, brought about by significant structural changes in society, such as migration and cultural contact. He refers, for example, to the so-called “marginal man”, who lives “on the margin of two cultures and two societies,” whose personality traits are ever in flux which leads to “spiritual instability, intensified self-consciousness, restlessness, and malaise” (Park: 1928: 892 – 893). However, it is in these types of personality that one can observe, according to Park, “the processes of civilization and of progress”, that is, the harbingers of social change. Rather than being the plaything of structural forces, human personality becomes an indicator of structural change. In European sociology, we similarly encounter in the interstices of the grand theories – more exactly in the sociologism of Emile Durkheim (1858 - 1917), the historical materialism of Marx (1818 – 1883), the economic liberalism of Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) - the unsettling image of purposeful, but also error-prone, human agents. In what follows, I will offer a brief reconsideration of the ways in which the classical sociologists have acknowledged, sometimes in the lesser known corners of their work, two facts: first, the active role played by human beings in small or large-scale social change (as opposed to their assigned roles as “cultural” or “structural dopes” – see Giddens 1979: 52) and second, the wide range of behaviours that they

12 exhibit, ranging from the rational to the non-rational (as opposed to the “hardwired” rational actor). It is important, however, to mention from the beginning that not all founding fathers were reluctant to engage with the problem of human agency in their work. Max Weber is known as the creator of a verstehende Soziologie and the author of the four-fold typology of social action. In this sense, he is a counter-example of a founding father who placed human action at the center of understanding social life. Human action was also the central concern of the Americam Pragmatists, such as Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. The role of practical human activity in validating truth claims and ideas generally was essential to pragmatism. At first sight, Durkheim would appear as the least likely candidate for the successful recovery of the active human being from his work. He is too well known for his social facts pronouncement and his sociologistic explanations of social phenomena. However, Mustafa Emirbayer (1996a) discusses a little known body of Durkheim’s work – his research on the French educational system – to show that not all his writings exhibited the mechanistic logic of The Division of Labor. In the Evolution of Educational Thought (published in 1904 – 5), Durkheim depicts the “key actors in his story as goal-oriented, moral beings striving to realize their cultural and institutional agendas against sometimes fierce and active resistance” (Emirbayer 1996a: 278). Another Durkheimian recognition of the influence of human agency over enduring social structures can be found, according to Emirbayer, in his concept of “collective effervescence” (2006b: 123). Marx’s work, especially in its earlier contributions, bears the Hegelian inheritance and thus emphasizes the active consciousness and the affirmation of the subject in history (Zeitlin 2001). For Giddens, this point of view “mingles uneasily and in an unresolved way in Marx’s works with an allegiance to a deterministic theory in which actors are propelled by historical laws.” (Giddens 1979: 52). However, Marx pointed out at times and in specific contexts of his work, that “the law” should not be interpreted as a trans-historical determination: “Under capitalist production, the general law [of the rate of profit] acts as the prevailing tendency only in a very complicated and approximate manner, as a never ascertainable average of ceaseless

13 fluctuations.” (Marx 1959: 119). Marx also recognized the active role of the class-for-itself in bringing about abrupt social change in the form of revolutions (Liebman 2001). Vilfredo Pareto can be considered a representative of Spencer’s economic liberalism, who nevertheless appreciated the role of non-rational tendencies in human behavior. More exactly, Pareto distinguishes between three forms of action, namely instinctive, logico-rational and non-rational. Of these, the first two forms occur relatively seldom, while non-rational actions are much more prevalent in social life. Pareto’s theory of the motivational bases of behavior explains it in terms of two components – residues and derivations. While the former are the basic, residual core of social behavior, the latter are rationalizations of these basic tendencies. Taking the form of political slogans, myths, ideologies or historical symbols, derivations help individuals make sense and justify their actions (Baldus 2011a). While residues are the prime movers of humans, they are not predetermined in their direction:

It is on such interests and sentiments, not on any deliberate, premeditated resolve, that their activities [i.e. of men rich in Class I residues] depend, and these accordingly may eventually carry them to some objective that they may be aiming at, but also quite as readily to points where they would never had dreamed of going (Pareto 1935: 1577).

The first residue that Pareto mentions is the so-called “propensity for combining”, that is, the ability to experiment, to seek new and creative solutions to problems, to reorganize existing factors in an innovative way, or to uncover hitherto unseen opportunities in familiar environments. This type of behaviour manifests itself through innovation, speculation, opportunism and compromise. The second residue, also known as “the persistence of aggregates” is the opposite of the first. It expresses the tendency of human beings to stick to what is known and trusted, to maintain a conservative view of the world. Both residues are present in the elites who govern society at any given moment, and both are important in exercising political leadership. These residues are replenished by the circulation of elites, that is the upward movement of capable individuals with the required residues and their integration into the political elite and the downward movement of less

14 capable elites who leave the ruling circles. However, this movement is not automatic and there are different factors – unequal proportions of residues in the ruling elites, favoritism, nepotism etc. – which can slow down or stop the circulation completely. In situations of closure, elites with a surplus of residue one will appeal to any means that enables them to hang on to power – thus exercising ever greater degrees of agency. Elites with residue two would tend, under closure, to take on a more active role in enforcing their authority. The discussion of the active subject in classical sociology cannot elide the contribution of Georg Simmel (1858 – 1918). In the introduction to his “sociology of conflict”, Simmel (1904: 491) discusses the unity of personality which, in his view, does not coalesce harmoniously around “logical or material, religious or ethical, standards” but includes contradiction and strife. In the same way, internal conflicts give form and consistency to social unities. Using the example of the caste system in India, which rests not only on hierarchy but also on the reciprocal repulsion of castes, Simmel explains:

… [I]t is hardly to be expected that there should be any social unity in which the converging tendencies of the elements are not incessantly shot through with elements of divergence. A group which was entirely centripetal and harmonious-that is, "unification" merely-is not only impossible empirically, but it would also display no essential life-process and no stable structure (Simmel 1904: 491).

Simmel also sees a potential conflict between the well-being of individuals and that of the groups they belong to. He thus rejects any simple utilitarian notion that equates the happiness of the individual with that of the collectivity and points to sources of tension. An individual’s pursuit of satisfaction and the maintenance of his own life cannot be unambiguously related to the preservation of the group:

[T]he individual's instinct for self-preservation demands very different actions and powers than the self-preservation of the group, so that self-preservation of the individual sometimes can be unscathed and successful, while at the same time the group can be weak and fragmented; conversely, the latter may present itself in its full strength, even when its individual elements may already have reached a state of decadence" (Simmel 1908: 496)8.

8 Translation by Matthias Gross (2003: 45).

Matthias Gross (2001) shows with great skill that not only was Simmel aware of the variable (and often unpredictable) relationships of individuals in their different webs of affiliation, but that this indeterminacy also extended to the realm of nature. He provides two suggestive quotes from Simmel:

„Humans can make themselves accomplices (Mitschuldige) of nature and of her inherent tendencies (Wirkungsrichtung), which may be opposed to their own interests“

And…

„with all its freedom and being itself’ (Fürsichsein), with its juxtaposition to ‚mere nature,’ [the human ego] is still a member or limb (Glied) of nature; precisely this is the all encompassing connection of nature“. (both quotes cited in Gross 2001: 241).

Despite these early awakenings, sociology worked over much of the twentieth century under the assumption that the macro system functioned according to regularities that could be discovered by a positivist epistemology. At the micro level, it assumed that the behavior of rational actors could be modeled in terms of utility functions. By the early late 1980s, signs of “positivism’s twilight” had become visible, not only to hermeneutic/interpretive sociologists but also to those in the positivist camp (Baldus 1990). The irregularities of space and time, but also those of human behavior, resurfaced and began to be taken seriously, as they had, indeed, been taken by some of the classical sociologists of the Chicago School (e.g. Park 1926). However, even today, sociological interest for the “minutiae of cultural ‘discourses’, ‘narratives’, ‘power’ and ‘agency’ “ still is, at times, interpreted as a lack of commitment to science on the part of natural scientists (Baldus 2011b). Accounts of human behavior which ignore agency and choice – in the name of “fundamental mechanisms” (e.g. Deary and Johnson

9 2009) - are still were much alive , not only implicitly but also in explicit terms. Indeed, they are still largely the norm, at least in the top-ranking US sociology journals (Johnston 2005). Modern theorists assured their readers that causal laws existed (Baldus 2011a) even if they “cannot be directly observed” (Mahoney 2004: 461), or pleaded for a “sociology with fuzzy edges” (Collins 1989), “theories of the middle range” or “social mechanisms” (Reskin 2003; Gross 2009) which were less likely to show the effects of causal complexity. Statistical tails and outliers were treated as residual “unexplained variance”, background noise which would be clarified by more research and could, in the meantime, be hidden in constants or error terms. Giddens summed up sociology’s unwillingness to approach the topic of agency in that “recognizably human actors seem to escape our grip: the stage is set, the script is written, and the roles are handed out, but the actors strangely never reach the scene” (Giddens 1979: 253) (Baldus 2011a). In spite of the examples cited above, does Giddens’ assessment still retains validity three decades later? The answer seems to be overwhelmingly “yes”, at least with regard to functional and rational choice theories, as well as neo-Darwinist theories of cultural evolution (Baldus 2011b). The notion of functional prerequisites and associated concepts inspired by functionalism left an enduring mark on the sociological discipline10. But these views have not gone unchallenged. In contrast to the predictable worlds of sociological positivism and rationalism, the theoretical implications of contingency in social systems were recognized by Niklas Luhmann. His argument was that the fundamental problem of all systems was to cope with contingent environments, whereby he defined contingency as being everything which was “neither necessary nor impossible”. According to Luhmann, social systems of any sort, from individuals to societies, always confronted more options than they could use, and more outcomes than they were able to predict. Their primary problem was therefore to achieve stability “in the face of a relentlessly variable environment that changes independent of the system and therefore makes a constant search for other possibilities unavoidable” (Luhmann 1970: 39). This

9 Article titles such as “Looking for the fundamentals of human nature” (Deary and Johnson 2009) are still being published in the literature. 10 For example, the 2005 edition of the Encyclopedia of Social Theory still discusses the AGIL schema as if it would still be part of the theoretical toolkit of contemporary sociologists (Murphy 2005).

17 amounted to a reduction in complexity and unpredictability, through the subjective construction of “sense”, and through the structural elaboration of procedures and rules which put an end to the potentially interminable weighing of options. Sense imposed meaning on a contingent world by distinguishing system from environment, “inside” from “outside”, what mattered from what did not. To arrive at this cultural achievement it was necessary, nevertheless, that the actor uses her sense-making capacities, that is, his agency. Unlike Parsons, Luhmann did not confuse sense with consensus, and procedure with function and left ample room for complex (internal) choice processes (Baldus 2011b). On the other hand, rational choice approaches, premised on the assumption that in the majority of circumstances, individuals tend to act rationally or at least reasonably in the light of their unambiguous and coherent beliefs and desires, still hold sway in sociology, even if in more refined versions (Gross 2009). But things are about to change in this area as well. Neil Gross (2009: 365) claims that a great number of sociologists nowadays would be prepared to follow Neil Smelser in his effort to “resuscitate the role of nonrational forces in individual, group, and institutional behavior” by employing the idea of ambivalence (Smelser 1998: 3). Smelser puts ambivalence – the simultaneous attraction and repulsion towards a person or object – as a fundamental idea and key insight in the social sciences. Furthermore, by eschewing any biological/functional notions of adaptation, he contends that human adaptability in the “age of temporariness” is fraught with recurrent ambivalent reactions – a far cry from the dominant image of the rational actor11. He thus leaves the door open for more flexible interpretations of human behavior in which intentionality interacts with contingency in unpredictable forms of social action. The last few decades have also seen the emergence, rapid development and application of social constructivism. The key moment was the publication of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1967). While constructivist approaches have significantly reshaped some of the sociological specialities (e.g. social problems, environmental sociology or science, technology and society (STS)) they appear to a have had a

11 These views are all the more remarkable keeping in mind that Smelser is a trained economist and an erstwhile protégé of Talcott Parsons (Alexander et al 2004: 6).

18 limited impact on sociologists' search for unilinear causal relationships and underlying regularities in social life. The latter field - STS - has taken constructionism further by developing what is now known as actor-network theory. The present contribution is an empirical illustration of certain key theoretical insights drawn from the above-mentioned bodies of work. From Durkheim I borrow the idea that humans are goal-oriented, moral beings who make choices that are essentially open-ended, with no possibility to be certain about their outcomes (Emirbayer 1996). The relevant lesson to be drawn from Pareto’s discussion of class I residues is that innovation, speculation, opportunism and compromise are not epiphenomena of pre-determined relationships (such as power) but are a recurrent feature of human interactions, which enlarges the range of choices available to actors. Simmel’s insight which is applicable to the subsequent discussion is that human personalities do not coalesce harmoniously around specific standards of moral conduct but often include contradiction and strife. Finally, the thesis is most indebted to the original formulation and application of actor-network theory in the work of Michel Callon and John Law.

Agency in Sociology: Concepts and Theories

If the previous section has dealt in a general way with the problem of agency in sociology, in what follows the focus will turn towards the sociological literature that theorizes agency (and its conceptual twin, structure) in explicit terms. Within this body of research, Giddens’ rather pessimistic assessment may be countered by a more reinvigorating observation: a significant number of sociologists have taken agency seriously and have built it into theories that are, to use a fashionable term, at the cutting edge of sociological theorizing. Moreover, Giddens’ (1979) dramaturgical metaphor has been turned on its head by sociologists working in evolutionary theory:

Social actors have scripts in the form of rules, but unlike on the stage, the actors are free to engage each other (and themselves) in deciding what scene and act and indeed what characters and what play to perform (Dietz and Burns 1992: 189).

The “freedom” of actors – something of which the early Karl Marx and the later Emile Durkheim were not unaware (Giddens 1979) – was not simply hailed in an isolated journal article. Rather, since the heyday of functionalism, it has gradually made its way into the “mainstream”, if by this term we mean the major reference works in sociology. For instance, the Encyclopedia of Social Theory (Ritzer 2005) discusses the integration of structure and agency as “one of the most important developments in recent European social theory”, paralleling the related concern with micro-macro linkages in American sociology (Ryan 2005: 5). The conceptual pair “structure and agency” is relatively frequently used12 in the sociological literature, and for this reason it has commanded the attention of editors of major encyclopedias and dictionaries of sociology. It is useful, therefore, to survey the concept of agency and the related theoretical concern with the integration of agency and structure in the principal reference works published recently in (mostly US) sociology. As editor of several major reference works, George Ritzer reserves a distinct article to discuss agency (and intention) in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (Ritzer 2007) and The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology (Ritzer and Ryan 2011). Agency is defined as the “[human] faculty for action”, in this way distinguishing it sharply from the “mere behavior of non-human organisms” (Fuchs 2011: 8)13. The Oxford Dictionary of Sociology (Scott and Marshall 1998; Scott and Marshall 2009) refers to agency as a “synonym for action, emphasizing implicitly the undetermined nature of human action, as opposed to the alleged determinism of structural theories”. Emphasizing the same notion of relative freedom from constraints, the Oxford Dictionary of the Social Sciences defines agency as “the capacity for autonomous social action” (Calhoun 2002).

12 A search for “structure and agency” (or “agency and structure”) in the full text of 85 sociology journals archived in the Jstor database yielded 758 articles, published between 1963 and 2011. For comparison, the other well- known conceptual pair known as “micro and macro” (or “macro and micro”) yielded 1849 articles between 1955 and 2011. 13 This narrow definition of agency seems rather dated, as recent research has shown (e.g. Baldus 2006)

On the other hand, agency seems to be conspicuously ignored in other recent reference works in the social sciences. For example, the massive 4000-article long International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2004) includes no article on “agency” or “structure and agency”. Furthermore, no index entry points to a definition of agency in its 26 volumes (Smelser and Baltes 2001), a striking absence for such a comprehensive survey of the social sciences in the early 21st century. Similarly, the Encyclopedia of Sociology (Borgatta and Montgomery 2001) includes no articles on “agency” or “structure and agency”. As a sociological concept, agency receives a “brief comment” in an article on metatheory (Wallace 2001: 1854), while it is discussed at greater length in the articles on pragmatism (Maines 2001) and is mentioned once in the articles on social change (Calhoun 2001) and revolutions (Liebman 2001). Agency is also present in more small-scale glossaries of sociological concepts. For example, in Sociology: the Key Concepts (Scott 2006: 3), the authors define agency as the “dynamic element within an actor that translates potential capacity into actual practice.” Ken Robert’s short definition of agency, included in his Key Concepts in Sociology (2008), states that “this is sociology’s term for individuals’ (alleged) ability to think, to reflect, to interpret, to exercise choice and to act accordingly.” In any case, whether taken seriously or more lightly (as the nuance in Robert’s epithet “alleged” implies), agency has been accepted as a standard sociological concept. But what are the precise contents of the agency concept beyond the nominal lip service paid to humans’ abilities to think, create and act independently of functional or historical imperatives? A tentative answer is suggested by the rich literature which, over the last two or three decades, has taken agency as its key analytical concept. In an early contribution, Gary Allan Fine (1992) identifies agency with the “range of actions that are possible” while structures are “systematic limitations of that action” (1992: 89). Building on insights from Thomas’ famous definition of the situation, Fine argues that this definition – a vital component of agency – reveals the power of individuals to “remake the world”, but that, at the same time, “there is an obdurate and consequential reality that surrounds it” (Fine 1992: 93). Maintaining a still strong – in my view – commitment to

21 structure, Sewell defines agency in a more narrow way as “the capacity to transpose and extend schemas [conventions, recipes, scenarios, principles of action] to new contexts.” (1992: 18). Digging deeper into the structure of agency, Dietz and Burns (1992: 192), identify four features which define agency, namely “an ability to be effective through the exercise of power, an intentionality or consciousness about action, a lack of constraints so that it is possible to choose which rules to implement and the ability to be reflexive about the consequences of action”. This broader definition is a clear improvement over Sewell’s (1992) understanding of the concept, in its emphasis on intentionality, reflection and the exercise of power. On the other hand, however, it conditions action on the absence of constraints, in this way diminishing the possibility to experiment – maybe even temper – with those constraints. Finally, the most comprehensive definition, and one that comes closest to the view of agency developed in this thesis is that by Emirbayer and Mische (1998). Drawing on pragmatism, they conceptualize agency as “a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment)” (Emirbayer and Mische 1998: 963). Fine’s identification of agency with the definition of the situation reminds us that for Thomas the reality of the definition was not oblivious of the context in which the definition took place: “the behaviour reaction can be studied only in connection with the whole context, i.e., the situation as it exists in verifiable, objective terms, and as it has seemed to exist in terms of the interested persons” (Thomas 1928: 572). There is, in other words, a recognition that agency is a context-dependent process, that there are larger or smaller openings in the obdurate character of structures which enable larger or smaller degrees of agency, or at least of those forms of agency which are conceivable in an empirical science. This observation is important and will be retained in formulating the research problem.

Formulating the Research Problem: Structuration, Morphogenesis, and Actor-Network-Theory

Michael Ryan (2005) provides a condensed and useful survey of the major approaches which, over the last three decades, have aimed to reconcile the agentic and structural ends of the agency – structure continuum. In the English-speaking literature, the obvious point of departure is Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration. Premised on a wholesale rejection of positivism, Giddens upholds human agency – that is, the capacity to alter patterns of human organization in Turner’s (1986) interpretation – as proof against the existence of invariant regularities in human life. Giddens defines action or agency as “a stream of actual or contemplated causal interventions of corporeal beings in the ongoing process of events-in-the- world.”(1979: 55). He identifies two basic characteristics of a sound sociological conception of agency (as opposed to one strongly biased towards structure): first, the characteristics of the actor as a subject should not remain implicit or unexplored but should be taken into account as part of a generalized notion of praxis. Second, it is important to recognize that “at any point in time, the agent could have acted otherwise” (Giddens 1979: 56). In avoiding the dualism of structure and agency, Gidden’s advances the notion of the duality of structure. This denotes the use of rules and resources of structure by agents who, in this way, reproduce these very rules and resources that mediate institutionalized patterns of interaction (Turner 1986: 973). Through this “single conceptual move” of the duality of structure (Giddens 1979: 5), Giddens aims to overcome the three dichotomies that have traversed sociology over much of its history, namely determinism and voluntarism, object and subject and synchrony and diachrony (Archer 1982: 456-7). Giddens’ strategy is to amalgamate (Archer 1982) the two sides of each divide, based on the argument that social reality is Janus faced – agency and structure are imbricated in any social phenomenon. This represents the premise for his well-known theory of structuration, according to which the “seeming opposition of perspectives actually disguises a complementarity which they display” (Giddens 1986: 531).

Giddens (1983) argues that his theory of structuration is not directly applicable in empirical research. Given the primarily empirical aim of this thesis, it worth asking how can Giddens’ structuration be useful? In fact, it is not the theory itself which appears useful but rather some important principles on which his theory rests. These principles include useful clues that can inform empirical approaches similar to the one pursued in this thesis. On the one hand, he argues that “human actors must be treated as ‘knowledgeable’”, both in terms of their discursive consciousness (what they are able to articulate about the conditions of their action) and of their practical consciousness (the knowledge about how to ‘go on’ in various contexts of social life, which actors do not necessarily articulate explicitly) (1983: 76). ‘Discourse’ is thus not only what actors say in the form of statements: “humour, wit, irony, asides and other discursive phenomena are vital features of human knowledgeability” (Giddens 1983: 76). On the other, the knowledgeability of actors and the intentionality built into their behavior “should not blind us to the pervasive significance of the unintended consequences of action” (Giddens 1983: 77). In short, Giddens alerts researchers to take their human subjects seriously – in what they say and do - but to also be aware that they face a complex and contingent world, in which the most carefully planned actions can be obliterated by unanticipated events, whereas “blind” chance can bring about the most desired (or most feared) changes. This insight is important for the approach taken here as it emphasizes the human capacity to convert contingent events into opportunities but also into risks. However, if one is concerned with how the contingent events have come to be or, more exactly put, what sorts of structural articulations make the production of contingency more or less likely, structuration theory reveals its limits. If the approach taken here makes any theoretical claim regarding structure, then it would most likely be in terms of the morphogenetic approach proposed by Margaret Archer (1982, 1990). Although highly appealing in theoretical terms, Giddens structuration theory offers no clear empirical “entry point” from which to begin to distinguish agency from structure (Smith 1983). Together they represent a seamless totality which makes it difficult to formulate any sort or propositions about their relationships (Archer 1982). More refined interpretations of structuration and morphogenesis show that the two are, at a deeper level,

24 compatible (Stones 2001). On the other hand, Archer’s morphogenetic approach takes as its point of departure the separation – the dualism if one may wish - between agency and structure. As with structuration, morphogenesis denotes a process of change that involves structure and agency (Archer 1982). However, structuration is only that, a continuous process and in this sense Giddens quotes Allen Pred approvingly that structuration is an “unbroken flow” (1983: 79). On the other hand, morphogenesis has a product, namely structural elaboration (Archer 1982: 458). According to Archer:

The emergent properties which characterize socio-cultural systems imply discontinuity between initial interactions and their product, the complex system (Archer 1982: 458).

In other words, the structural effects of agentic processes have to be distinguished from the initial conditions that defined the structure in its initial configuration and from the outcome of those processes (the new or modified structure). Archer proposes a dynamic perspective in which structure is continuously elaborated, following a potentially endless series of cycles of structural conditioning / social interaction / structural elaboration. This approach seems highly suitable for making sense of the Roşia Montană case. Anticipating the discussion dealing with the historical transformation of Roşia Montană (chapter three), it is important to suggest at this point that the current conflict over Roşia Montană seems to occur at the interface – in fact in the overlapping space – between the structural conditioning of its mining history and the interaction of various agentic processes which have been set in motion with the arrival of the foreign investors (GR). The morphogenetic approach thus helps establish the theoretical relevance of the “social interaction” phase – or what I prefer to call the space of agency – which breaks the ‘long duree’ (Archer 1982: 470) of previous historical conditions at Roşia Montană. However, it is my contention that the beginnings of the new structural elaboration, of the following morphogenetic cycle as Archer calls it, are not yet in sight at Roşia Montană. However, their seeds might be sown every time actors manifest their agency, which is informed by the past but also oriented towards the future and the present (Emirbayer and Mische 1998). Even if one can make different conjectures about the first inklings of a new

25 phase of structural elaboration – e.g. the commencement of the mining project or its eventual suspension / cancellation - the aim of the thesis is to focus on this “in-between” space of enlarged agency in the historical and spatial trajectory of Roşia Montană. The conflict over Roşia Montană pries open a variety of temporal and spatial “dependencies” – for example the “forces” of neoliberalism (Szombati 2007), the vast processes of peripherialization (Waack 2004) – and lays bare the extraordinary liveliness of actors meeting in a space “opened up”, as it has never been before, by the contingent interaction of these macro-historical processes. In order to capture this heightened level of complexity manifested by the agency of actors meeting in place, I propose to use the sociology of translation (also called actor- network-theory or “ANT”) (Callon 1986) to identify the various problematizations, definitions, alliances, and mobilizations that actors carry out in their individual or collective struggles over Roşia Montană. Despite the ontological differences between morphogenetic theory and ANT, recent research has advocated a critical engagement between the two perspectives (Elder Vass 2008)14. The approach taken in this thesis is that while structural conditions are important in understanding how the Roşia Montană scene has been set as an enlarged space of agency, I do not want to commit myself to a full-fledged morphological interpretation of this case. The bulk of the analysis will be devoted to exploring the variable alliances of actors and actants (“non- human actors”) using ANT. Such alliances are viewed as dynamic processes of simplification, as alliances tend to smoothen the complexities of actors once they are enrolled into goal-oriented networks. In other words, actors are translated as participants and supporters of a given set of interests. On the other hand, actor-network theorists also contend that the formation of alliances is forever at risk of being betrayed, for example when actors in the network refuse to cooperate. This leads to the destabilization of alliances as “translation becomes treason” (Callon 1986a: 15). The process of alliance-building is further carried on as the “liberated” actors tend to construct their own (new) networks. This dynamic of order-inducing and order-

14 According to Elder Vass (2008: 464), “the vast majority of ANT writing on the subject presents reasons why theorists should substitute explanatory references to individual actors for references to social structure”. In this sense, it might be argued that is inappropriate to marry the agentic “bias” of ANT with the more structural viewpoint of morphoenesis whose end product is, after all, the elaboration of a new structure. It is my argument that the empirical analysis will demonstrate the usefulness of combing the two perspectives.

26 undermining processes is what, I contend, best characterizes the interaction of actors at Roşia Montană. As useful as actor-network-theory seems from the point of view mentioned above, the adoption of ANT will be carried out without a full commitment to the principle of symmetry. In other words, the human ability to act is not uncritically extended to non-human beings or objects. This assumption of the sociology of translation seems unnecessary to make sense of the shifting alliances between different actors or between the latter and natural or technological objects. The human actors retain primacy in the analysis but prompts from non- human actors are also recognized, especially as sources of unexpectedness and surprise, mediated via human interpretations. My use of actor-network theory will focus mostly on the application of this theory in empirical research (e.g. Callon 1986a and 1986b) and will not build on ANT as a general theory about the world. For this reason, the more recent developments in ANT theorizing will not be pursued. An important caveat is in order. By claiming that the space has been opened up like never before I do not mean to suggest that, prior to the arrival of GR, Roşia Montană had been “closed” or immobile. Following Massey (2005), space is always a product of interrelations. The spatial and social identity of Roşia Montană is, thus, constructed relationally and is not simply to be found in a physically delimited place. Even if a place can be culturally defined in a specific way, its inherent relationality does raise, as Massey puts it, “the question of its internal negotiation” (2005: 10). By borrowing Luhmann’s distinction between system and environment, I argue that simplifying the more complex political economic context of Roşia Montană increases the internal differentiation of the system. This creates an increased level of relationality, of purposive network-building and contingent network-transformation in which local actors are engaged. The theoretical argument of the thesis can then be stated as follows: in spite of the historically unique pressures and constraints over resource-dependent communities imposed by worldwide processes of capitalist accumulation, uneven development and fragmentation (Bunker 2007; Harvey 1995, 2006; Scholz 2004), contingent interactions among these processes

27 may enable local actors, under specific circumstances, to convert the growing number of contingencies into opportunities and risks. By local actors I mean not only the indigenous or “traditional” inhabitants of a given place, but all those actors who happen to be present in the same place at the same time. In short, the term local refers to the relationships between actors meeting in a given place, while extralocal refers to those relationships extending beyond the place. There is no disjuncture between these understandings of local and extralocal, but rather a continuum of differently organized relationships. In this case, the set of relevant actors includes: the foreign company (GR), the NGOs opposing the project, the NGOs supporting the project, the resident population and state authorities at various levels (local, regional and national). Their reasons for being (temporarily) in a given place can vary quite widely, but what is important is that their interests, visions, livelihoods or lifestyles related to the place intersect in socially meaningful ways. Neither are place or “the local” to be construed as univocal spatial categories: “The argument about openness/closure [of the local/the local way of life] should not be posed in abstract spatial forms but in terms of the social relations through which the spaces, and that openness and closure, are constructed” (Massey 2005: 166). This thesis is based on the assumption that both perspectives discussed above – morphogenesis and the sociology of translation - can be used to illuminate the empirical case under discussion, if each of them is applied at a distinctive level in the trajectory of Roşia Montană. Morphogenesis is used to refer to the transitional stage in which the stasis of previous historical determinations is gradually undermined by contingent interactions between broad economic and political processes. The sociology of translation, on the other hand, applies to the heightened level of social agency manifested at the micro level of recurrent social interactions. The two research objectives derived from the above argument can be formulated as follows: First, what are the dynamic sources of contingency which render the predictability of place-shaping processes (accumulation, fragmentation, peripherialization) problematic? This translates the “structural conditioning” phase from Archer’s morphogenetic sequence with a view towards its ultimate indeterminacy. Second, how do social actors diversify their cultural choices in the stream of contingencies associated with the Roşia Montană conflict and what are

28 the consequences? This asks about how local actors shape the space of their interactions in ways which manifest both agency and contingency, by alternatively engaging in, and disengaging from, a variety of alliances. The two objectives do not carry equal weight in the analytical contents of the thesis. As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, agency will be analytically privileged while taking structure into account, rather than trying to offer an entirely balanced account of the hermeneutic interplay of structure and agency. In the case under discussion, this would be largely impossible since the new structure is still an indistinct possibility. For this reason, the morphogenetic approach will not be further elaborated other than to mention that it used here as a proxy for a structural opening in the historical trajectory of Roşia Montană. It is also important to not reify the structural determinations which have characterized the context of Roşia Montană before the arrival of the Canadian mining investor. Of course, the end of the stasis was the result of individual and collective actions which have rendered the trajectory of this place more fluid than it had been before, and thus they entail a good deal of social agency. Morphogenesis, that is the beginning of the broad structural transformation which pushed Roşia Montană out of its long mining trajectory, will be considered as a more or less inert background. This will be done only to better highlight the agentic processes taking place at the local level. Such processes would be lost from view if only the most visible and powerful actors and their agendas (e.g. political and economic institutions at the national and European level) would be taken into account. Actor-network-theory will be considered in more detail both in what follows and especially in the fourth chapter which deals with the analysis of the agentic processes taking place at Roşia Montană. There are several insights offered by this theory which could be usefully employed in analyzing the space of agency created at Roşia Montană. The four guiding principles of this theory provide useful clues about how it can be made relevant for a study of social agency. ANT theorists contend that:

… the social is heterogeneous in character; that all entities are networks of heterogeneous elements; that these networks are both variable in geometry and in principle

unpredictable; and that every stable social arrangement is simultaneously a point (an individual) and a network (a collective) (Callon and Law 1997).

What is significant for the purposes of this thesis is that each of these principles can be couched in agentic terms without, at the same time, losing sight of the unintended consequences of human choices. In what follows it will be shown how these principles provide useful insights into the agency of actors interacting at Roşia Montană. First, the notion that the social is heterogeneous (including human and non-human entities) allows for a more complex interpretation of the actions of different actors than it would be possible if only the most visible contestants, the project supporters and opponents, would be considered. Raymond Murphy (1994) argues that in environmental conflicts, the visible sides of the struggle cannot provide an accurate basis for distinguishing contributors, beneficiaries, and victims of environmental degradation nor, by extension, of the multiple stakes involved in such conflicts. When applying this idea to the conflict at Roşia Montană it is not necessary to share the assumption of symmetry between humans and non-humans (still endorsed by ANT theorists – Callon 2004) to recognize that purposeful human actions can meet with unexpected reactions/responses that originate in non-human nature or in the broader structural context in which the interaction takes place. That the latter two – nature and structure – are often interlinked has been shown long ago by Harvey Molotch (1970) in the case of technological accidents such as the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. Mine is a “moderate” reading of actor-network-theory, which is compatible with current evolutionary perspectives in sociology (e.g. Baldus 2011b). For example, those who oppose the mining project at Roşia Montană are not simply (social) actors making discursive claims about the inappropriateness of the mining project proposed by GR. They are, at the same time, landowners who own properties (houses, trees, animals) in the project-affected area. The way in which these elements are linked together in a given context can function as effective barriers to thwart the project15 or the image of the project. The advantage of

15 The workings of this form of corporeal agency can be observed in the famous case in which a Guatemalan mother of six cut a power line on her property, putting a $150-million gold mine on hold (https://secure.globeadvisor.com/servlet/ArticleNews/story/gam/20080710/RMINING10).

30 considering the links between human actors and non-human objects or configurations rather than merely the discourses through which humans establish alliances will be discussed in the last chapter. The argument is that actor-network theory is a more appropriate approach to the study of the agency than that provided by framing theory. The principle that entities are networks of heterogeneous elements also finds application in the analysis of Roşia Montană. It offers a dynamic and nuanced picture of how agentic processes are created and transformed via a complex process of assembling networks. This process includes four “moments” – problematization, interessement, enrollment and mobilization (Callon 1986a) – in the transformation of networks. Translation always begins with an actor or set of actors whose first move is to define the other actors and their interests in a given course of action and thus establish themselves as a nodal point in the network. If a specific goal is to be met, a goal which presumably interests all actors involved, the initiating actor takes upon itself the task of organizing the actions that need to be carried out towards that goal. This stage is called problematization (Callon 1986a). Interessement, the second moment of translation, involves the stabilization of the identity of the other actors as defined by the initiator of the translation. The third moment is called enrollment; if interessement is successful, what follows is the conclusion of alliances with the other actors, that is, their enrollment in the network. The fourth and last moment is that of mobilization, when the actors, in fact their spokespersons, are mobilized in action and decision-making. But spokespersons seldom remain uncontested. If they are contested, the translation can break apart or, in Callon’s suggestive formulation, “translation becomes treason” (1986a: 15). This translation framework is particularly appealing because, in addition to recognizing the freedom of actors to choose distinct ways to problematize the identity and define the shapes of alliances, it does not obscure the fact that none of these networks is necessary. Contingent responses from human or non-human members in the network are thus acknowledged alongside highly elaborate strategies to set up such networks. To give a simplified example of the translation of water pollution at Roşia Montană, it can be said that the mining company sought to translate its “existing pollution of water – future remediation through mining” network through an innovative approach: it sent/showed bottles with red

31 water collected in the Roşia Montană valley to demonstrate the chronic/historical pollution of this area. This strategy would have been likely to backfire had it been used immediately after the two contingent events that reverberated in the environmental consciousness of Europeans: the Baia Mare gold mine accident (January 2000) or the alumina plant disaster that took place in Kolontar, Hungary (October 2010). Despite GR’s “red water” campaign, the uneasy association in a (potential) “network of polluted waters” across several sites (Roşia Montană/Baia Mare/Kolontar) was quickly established in the international press16. If it will actually evolve into a network of binding environmental regulations is still an open question.

Agency in the Literature on Ecological Distribution Conflicts

In reviewing the role of agency in a number of political ecological writings, I aim to show that the meaning of the term is far from unitary. Agency can be understood more narrowly or more broadly, depending on the intellectual allegiances of different analysts. Some authors seem content to interpret the agency of others in ways which lend support to their theoretical parti pris. Others are willing to go further in recognizing agency as an independent process which can have expected as well as unexpected outcomes, optimal but also suboptimal results for the acting humans. The literature on ecological distribution conflicts (Martinez Alier 2005) has been increasingly preoccupied with asserting or, in stronger terms, rescuing local forms of agency. Debates over resource conflicts under neoliberalism, for example, have pointed out a “pervasive asymmetry [in] which the global is equated with space, capital, and the capacity to transform while the local is associated with place, labor, [and] tradition” (Escobar 2008: 30). Since the late 1990s, however, a number of authors have set about to reverse this asymmetry. This task seemed the more urgent as several major sociological theorists had announced in various ways the demise of place. Manuel Castells (2000: 446) claimed, for instance, that “the space of power and wealth is projected throughout the world, while people’s life and

16 Eastern Europe Worries About the Next Toxic Time Bomb. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2026177,00.html#ixzz1JPimwtCP

32 experience is rooted in places, in their culture, in their history.” Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman argued that being and acting locally in a globalized world is a “sign of social deprivation and degradation” (1998: 2). He further explains that localities tend to “lose their meaning- generating and meaning-negotiating capacity and come to be increasingly dependent on interpreting and sense-giving actions which are beyond their control” (Bauman 1998: 2-3). John Urry (2003: 61) posits global fluids as a “utterly crucial categories of analysis in the globalizing social world that have in part rendered both regions and networks less causally powerful.” In part as a reaction to these pronouncements, there has been a renewed interest for the agency of people living in place (Dirlik 1999, Escobar 2001) and on the intersections of ecological, economic and cultural difference in shaping local forms of agency (Escobar 2006). In an earlier work, Castells himself suggested the possible re-emergence of place-based actors in the big interplay of trans-local flows by claiming that “the emphasis of ecologists on locality, and on the control by people of their living spaces, is a challenge to the basic lever of the new power system [i.e. the space of flows]. (Castells, 1997, cited in Peña 2003). This signals a new theoretical interest for the space of agency at the local level. This effort to restore the vitality of locality singles out, for example, the agency of women and of children in general (Dirlik 2002), that of the subaltern peasantry in India (Kumbamu 2009), of indigenous groups in Northern Quebec (Atkinson and Mulrennan 2009), of peasants in Bergama – Turkey (Çoban 2004), of sundry social movement organizations in Colombia (Escobar 2008) and Chile (Gordon and Webber 2008), among many others. In short, there is substantial empirical evidence that, despite the penetrability of neoliberalism and other global processes into the interstices of local life, local actors are still able to manifest their agency (Scott 2010). However, in parallel to this renewed emphasis on human agency in the face of (apparently) overpowering structures and processes, there seems to be a persistent tendency to reify local forms of action and resistance. For example, Martinez Alier (2000) opens his “Green Justice” section of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (volume 11, issue 4) with the following lines:

An Environmental Justice movement is growing in the world. It is a local and global force leading society and economy towards ecological sustainability (Martinez Alier 2000: 45).

This unqualified statement about the necessary emergence of environmental justice movements, both local and globally networked, is no isolated occurrence. In a more recent contribution, Todd Gordon and Jeffery Weber (2008) acknowledge that “the motivations behind growing popular rebellion are multifarious” but they nevertheless reach the conclusion that “what becomes clear in our analysis is the inevitability of popular struggle” (Gordon and Weber 2008: 72; emphasis added). Popular struggles against natural resource extraction on traditional or indigenous lands are animated by values which are the opposite of the short- term, profit-driven, environmentally unsustainable and socially harmful practices of transnational corporations. For example, in the case of the Tambogrande mining conflict:

Our results suggest that local people opposition to the project, as well as resistance to be relocated, are founded mainly upon sociocultural values, such as fairness, trust, attachment to community ties, and self-determination (Muradian et al. 2003: 787 – 788).

The absence of any suspicion that this “foundation” might be more dynamic and contingent than appears at first sight does much to prevent a nuanced understanding of what is going on in these complex - indeed, as Escobar (2006) shows - multi-dimensional struggles. In theorizing community-based resistance movements, Aykut Çoban (2004) draws on the Gramscian concept of war of position to argue that such resistance is not simply an oscillation between challenge and collaboration. Rather, it is mobilization “around the strong demand for a return to the earlier condition of the community’s way of life” (Çoban 2004: 441). This assumes, in a rather uncritical way, that the manifold changes brought about by the external intervention in the community’s way of life can – in the eyes of local actors - simply be brought back to the common denominator of a unitary past. Such a point of view tends to ignore the considerable complexity that lies beneath the apparent unitary surface of the so-called resistance movements: Local activism and regional, national, and international coalitions working in concert towards some common end are dynamic sociological phenomena, but aside these is the almost

inescapable presence of community. Shift the focus from local activists to the more inclusive idea of community, and a somewhat different, often more complicated, picture emerges (Gunter and Kroll-Smith 2007: 2).

The difference between the agency of the movement and the more complex one of the community is what I identify as the narrow and the broad visions of agency, respectively. In a few isolated cases, not even the narrow conception of agency finds any resonance in a largely determinist interpretation of the changes brought about by resource extraction. For example, in discussing the Roşia Montană case, anthropologist Don Kalb (2006: 110) laments the constraints imposed by harmful technologies and the structure of international investments which prevent a “battered local population” from changing post-socialist realities into more than nominal democracies. The same notion of utter choicelessness is expressed, oddly in its similarity, by an American banker investing in the export of waste treatment facilities in Eastern Europe: "If they [East Europeans] want to become part of the greater European community, I don't see they have much of a choice" but to accept such facilities! (Gille 2000: 258). Whether animated by a genuine concern for the locals or by self-interested pragmatic judgment, the same perception underlies both views, namely that the local “other” will (or has to) accept the role of the underdog. However, the prevailing trend in the literature on ecological distribution conflicts is to recognize the increasingly complex contexts in which local people find themselves, and the broader notion of agency which I also endorse here. Perhaps the analysis of the proposed waste treatment plant from Gare, Hungary, illustrates this best:

In contrast, localities, with newly found independence from the state and new struggles for resources, face choices that are far more complicated and that do not map easily onto these mega-scenarios and mega-identities [nationalist totalitarianism or cosmopolitan democracy] (Gille 2000: 243).

Another exemplary formulation, which brings to the fore the contingent element from beneath seemingly deterministic structures, and the proliferating activism of subjects in the face of power-knowledge configurations, is that of Harry Sanabria. He writes about the…

…growing realization that seemingly dominant ideologies are rarely if ever as pervasive as they seem to be, that behind the apparent acquiescence to state and elite rule and domination are alternative visions, hopes, and expectations and a deep questioning of existing politico-economic arrangements and their ideological underpinnings, and that the power of the state and dominant classes, while very real, is rarely all-encompassing and hegemonic projects are often quite fragile and fragmentary (Sanabria 2000: 56).

Recent research has also challenged the common assumption that, in environmental conflicts, there is a shared representation and collusion of interests between local populations and extralocal NGOs (mostly national or international organizations) speaking on their behalf. Environmental conservation is usually assumed to be the binding element between indigenous populations and environmentalists. For example, in analyzing the relationship between NGOs and the Cree in the struggle against the James Bay hydropower project in Quebec, Roué (2003: 620) asks whether the NGOs can legitimately claim to hold grassroots political power. Her answer leaves little room for doubt: “NGOs, like developers before them, are prevented from being true interpreters of indigenous peoples due to their inability to understand the other’s perceptions – or even to imagine that they may be different from our own.” Similarly, in a study in Chimalapas, Mexico, Doane (2007: 460) identifies “some serious ideological disjunctures between the “local” and the “global” elements of transnational environmental movements”. In the context of rural Malagasy society, Simsik (2002) criticizes the “conventional wisdom” of international environmental NGOs, which are out of touch with local realities and ultimately fail to prevent continued environmental degradation. Similarly, in their study of mining in New Caledonia, Ali and Grewal (2006), discover that environmentalists and indigenous groups do not always regard the impacts of a given project in the same way. In general, a large body of research has documented the complexity of circumstances in which local populations find themselves when confronted with outside interventions. A variety of cleavages (by social class, gender, tradition etc.) can re-emerge or be created anew and new practices or value systems can become reactivated when a uniformly looking “local population” is faced with unprecedented challenges, which also include opportunities. From the minutest details of daily life (Horowitz 2002) to all-encompassing worldviews (Golub 2006), local lifeworlds undergo ramifying transformations which cannot be reduced to any simple

36 framework of “resistance” or “colonization”. The very identity of “local people”, be they indigenous groups, peasants or, in the case of Roşia Montană, former miners/state employees/part-time farmers, is neither natural and inevitable nor simply adopted or imposed. Li (2000: 151) explains this identity as “a positioning which draws upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes, and repertoires of meaning, and emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle.” The work of Leah Horowitz (2001, 2002, 2004, and 2011) has consistently shown the complexity of engagements between the native New Caledonian Kanak population and nickel extraction companies. For example, in her study of the Koniambo nickel project in New Caledonia, Horowitz (2002) discovered among members of the Kanak population a near- universal desire for economic development brought by the project. However, some groups wanted to make sure that they did not lose control over the land. Among the latter, some emphasized the maintenance of local ecosystems and cultural heritage and appeasing the area’s spirits (Horowitz 2002: 36). By comparing the Koniambo project with the Goro project located also in New Caledonia, Ali and Grewal (2006: 383) discovered that the response of the Kanak community to the two projects is not simply a positional resistance, as many environmental activists assume, but rather a combination of cautious and differentiated pragmatism. Horowitz (2011) has also recently used the sociology of translation in analyzing a mining conflict in New Caledonia. More specifically, she focused on the alliances between non- indigenous, environmentalist grassroots organizations (GROs) and indigenous grassroots organizations, but also between the latter and the mining company, the provincial government and a human rights lawyer. She discovers that through processes of interessement and enrolment, “tenuous alliances formed and shattered” (Horowitz 2011: 23). While these alliances are the source of power (that is the ability to achieve one’s group’s objectives), the process of aligning the translations of different actors in the network can weaken the position of one or another of the actors. Although not framed in actor-network terms, Gille (2000) also provides a useful empirical case – and useful framework – that is applicable in the Roşia Montană case as well. In

37 her words, her work tells a “story in which the local actors [from a Hungarian village] can use their imaginations to put those global forces to work on their behalf” (Gille 2000: 261). She seeks to identify the factors that have the potential for “liberating their political imagination and hijacking global forces” - a strategy which can also be used to illuminate the networked forms of agency at Roşia Montană. There are four factors that she identifies: 1) the vanishing of an omnipresent state; 2) a strong sense of local history; 3) the immediate connections between localities and global forces; and 4) the nature of the issue, that is, environmental destruction.

The State of Knowledge on Roşia Montană: A Critical Assessment

The social scientific literature on Roşia Montană is rather limited, therefore a fairly exhaustive survey of it is feasible in the confines of this thesis. This will allow an understanding of the main concerns that the Roşia Montană case has raised in the social scientific literature. On a more critical note, the review of this literature will aim to reveal insights and blind spots in analyzing the problem of agency at Roşia Montană. One of the earliest contributions to the study of Roşia Montană is that of German geographer Christoph Waack (2004a, 2004b). Waack approaches the problem of foreign direct investment in gold mining in the Apuseni Moutains from the perspective of fragmenting development, a theory developed by geographer Friedrich Scholtz. In his assessment, the planned mine and investment by RMGC will turn Roşia Montană into a globalized place, characterized by a strong dependence on foreign investment. In a globalized place, opportunities and risks lie close by each other. With regard to Roşia Montană, Waack points out that the potential benefits of technology transfer and modern mining know-how, direct and indirect employment in mining and higher taxes could be offset by lesser-recognized risks. One of these would be the power imbalance between the local population and the large investor (GR), which could have negative repercussions on local democratic processes, while another risk would be the dismal prospects for sustainable development due to dependence on a single large investor (Waack 2004a: 98). The alternative, however, is a further spiraling

38 towards the status of a new periphery, which means a wholesale exclusion from investments and markets, if the national political elites do not mobilize resources to redress this deepening regional imbalance. In this context, the local population is generally portrayed as powerless in relation to the economic and political influence of the investor. Those who have worked in the state- owned mine tend to favour the planned investment while those who are old and are not related to mining in any way tend to oppose the project and their relocation (Waack 2004b: 97). Waack cites an opponent of the project, on elderly lady who affirms that she was born in Roşia and this is where she wants to die. Waack argues that there is an economic basis of the cleavage which has pit opponents against supporters of the mining project. While the former depend to a large extent on subsistence agriculture, the latter pin their hopes both on the future jobs created by the mine and on the compensation that they will receive for their properties. Going more in-depth, Waack notes that the sudden availability of a large sum of cash creates tension both within and between families (2004b: 97). He points out, however, that the opposition and the supporters of the project cannot be simply distinguished on the basis of their anticipated economic benefits and losses. There are other, extralocal influences which shape the conflict, such as connections and alliances with national elites and national and international NGOs. Waack thus takes a first step towards the recognition of the networked character of agency as it will be emphasized and developed in this thesis. In a subsequent article, Waack (2005) tackles the local representation of the conflict surrounding the RMGC project from a different, more cultural angle. He explores the role of a political-geographical construct known as the Country of the Moţi (Ţara Moţilor) in the instrumentalization of the conflict. During socialism and afterwards, Ţara Moţilor and the image of the popular hero Horea, the leader of a peasant revolt that took place in 1784 – 1785, became established as a major national narrative of Romanian history. Methodologically, the author approaches the emergence of the Ţara Moţilor construct both in terms of a survey and the content analysis of the first article, written by journalist Horia Ţurcanu, that ignited a whole media campaign against the RMGC project, spearheaded by the

39 weekly magazine Formula As. Both approaches are meant to bring Waack closer to the representations of those involved in the conflict. The survey applied to respondents from the area of Ţara Moţilor (N = 317) shows that there are a variety of themes which are considered “significant to them” when they think about the Country of the Moţi. There are, however, significant intraregional variations. For example, mining and gold are most significant for 84% of the people in the mining area, but only for 41% of those living in the rural areas of the Ţara Moţilor. On the other hand, the name of Horea enjoys a much more balanced recognition (71% in the rural areas where Horea was born, and 58 % in the mining area of Abrud). Horia Ţurcanu is the first ethnographic journalist (Cramer and McDevitt, 2004, ch. 8) who went to Roşia Montană, walked the streets and hills of the place and met with the people there. His first article has the revealing subtitle “The Road to the land of Moţi/death”, a play upon words meant to suggest that the stakes of the conflict are huge: the very survival of the moţi, whose land is now threatened by the huge opencast mine. Waack follows his arguments which are meant to connect the local understanding of the conflict brought about by RMGC to the historic national frame of Horea’s struggle against foreign oppression. Waack cites Ţurcanu (2002a):

To all of us, those who have come from Bucharest, the heroes of the Apuseni are merely historic characters. But to the Moţi, Horea lives with them, in their houses, all those events happened just yesterday, his spirit can be seen by the Moţi each moment, on the decrepit streets of Roşia Montană. History has the consistency of palpable reality. This gives them strength, stubbornness, this kind of resistance, with a scent of heroism, that refuses any compromise.

This statement (as the whole article) aims to convey both the impressions and emotions of the journalist as well as the sense of history of the moti, the traditional inhabitants of this place that is now threatened with destruction. The agency of the locals is revealed by powerful descriptors (“stubbornness, resistance, scent of heroism” etc.) and the fact that they literally “live” history. From a different viewpoint, this agency is contrasted with the assumed numbness of outsiders (“those who come from Bucharest”). It is interesting that, despite his

40 initial macro-level concerns with peripherialization, Waack (2005) was drawn towards the subjective, agentic aspects of this case, which may provide a first indication that the level of symbolic effervescence is quite high in this case and may have a bearing on the structural context. Other authors are similarly eager to tap into local concerns, local views and even local “senses of place”. However, their interest for Roşia Montană seems more geared towards a confirmation of the image of a “community David confronting a corporate Goliath” than towards the particular character of a place. The critique of World Bank support for environmentally harmful projects seems to be more important than the particular identities and actions of local agents (see Giddens’ concern with the characteristics of actors). It is surprising to read, for example, in an article written by anthropologist Don Kalb (2006), that the “Bank is now considering a new loan [in the amount of $100 million] for expanded gold mining” at Roşia Montană (2006: 106) when the IFC had terminated negotiations with the Canadian miner in October 2002, and the event was celebrated by environmental NGOs as a major victory. Kalb cites Stephanie Roth on the need that the Bank “listens to the people” (2006: 107), four years after FOE stated on its website that “according to a Bank source, however, Wolfensohn personally pulled the plug on the project after speaking with the two Romanian campaigners” (FoE 2002). These are not simply documentation errors17 since Kalb seems to collect evidence selectively to support a particular argument which is integrated into a well-known narrative. This is the view that transnational investments in capital-intensive operations, backed by large financial institutions such as the World Bank, disrupt well- established and relatively sustainable traditional economies:

There are 750 family farms in this valley that live by what the land brings and their situation will deteriorate once resettled on new lands with low fertility and decreased water access. Many of these family farms are part of complex household economies in which ‘traditional’ mining is one of the occupations. This particular sort of regional social economy, quite typical of the whole Apuseni mountains, will be destroyed as the relocated people will lose access to land and orchards. Locals and NGOs have tried to sue the Rossia Mountain Gold

17 The name of the place itself is spelled erroneously as Rossia Montana.

Corporation in regional courts on the basis of this evidence, but none of the judges has dared to take the corporation on.

Only someone wholly unfamiliar with the history of Roşia Montană could take this description as accurate. As part of the above-mentioned narrative of the clash between the global Goliath (or even alliance of Goliaths) and the local David, this description fits hand-in-glove. As a historical and anthropological account it is severely distorted as it posits a local history extending uniformly into the past, in which internal processes of change, periods of growth, crisis or decay are glossed over. Kalb does not mention that traditional mining has ceased in 1948 and that since 1978 there has been no underground mining but only the open cast exploitation (Sîntimbrean et al. 2006: 39). The complex household economy has been under severe stress at times, not least because of the nationalization of the mines in 1948. For anyone who has travelled up the Roşia Montană valley to the main square with its distinct urban character (Pop 2002: 171), the unqualified insistence on “family farms” will appear as rather peculiar if the “place and its people” were the real focus of interest. There are eight socialist-era apartment buildings in Roşia Montană, whose dwellers cannot be said to “live by what the land brings”, although some of them do keep poultry. But others, especially in the central square, pride themselves to live like urbanites. This lack of attention to the local context of Roşia Montană also leaves the desires of the population in a theoretical penumbra. This peculiarly narrow understanding of social agency is achieved, it seems, as a result of the commitment of the author to endorse a deterministic view of the interactions between a foreign investor and a local community. The sociology professor Mihai Pascaru (2007) has carried out extensive research in the Roşia Montană area in 2003 (in the villages Corna and Bunta) and in 2005 (Roşia Montană). The results of his work and that of his students were published in a volume titled The Habitat Dispersed by Globalization (2007). The research included both qualitative (in-depth or exploratory interviews) and quantitative methods (surveys) aimed at finding out what changes took place in the project-affected area since the arrival of RMGC, focusing on factors such as level of living, level of information and relationships between inhabitants. Some findings are

42 noteworthy as they reveal a variety of views and stances taken by the local population in relation to the RMGC project. For example, Pascaru (2007: 89) notes a rather unexpected diversity of residential choices – respondents were asked where would they go if they left the Roşia Montană commune? - expressed by the residents of Corna and Bunta (see Table 4.1 in chapter four) It is hard to distinguish a clear pattern in the 77 cases investigated. It seems that urban areas are preferred in contrast to rural ones (31 vs. 20 choices) and that most would leave the area of Roşia Montană but not the county of Alba (one of the 41 administrative units into which Romania is subdivided). Other than this, choices are widely distributed and the category “undecided” has the second highest frequency. Other findings from this study are, however, of more limited usefulness because, even if some of the interviews were deemed exploratory, most of the answers quoted tend to be highly structured, almost stereotypical, as if the respondents were asked to agree or disagree with certain statements. For example, Pascaru asks how do the “roşieni” (local people from Roşia Montană) see their future under the circumstances created by the RMGC project? What would they advise others? Two responses cited in the book are: “My own projects and those of my family are linked to those of RMGC and I put all my hopes in this project. Yes, I would advise others to think about their future as I do.” (TT, RMGC employee) and “the Gold’s projects are not linked to me or to my family and I would advise others to think as I do.” Although Pascaru (2007) possibly went the furthest in collecting residents’ views in their complexity, the interpretation given to these data seem to constrain responses to being either in favour or against the project, while ignoring the ambiguity, complexity and temporality of such choices. Kristof Szombati’s research on Roşia Montană (2006 and 2007) promises to “draw on anthropological field work” in order to investigate people's contribution to environmental destruction, but also their power to resist ecologically disastrous practices. In his first article, Szombati does not take his reader very much further than Waack had done a few years earlier. He also draws attention to the two parties in conflict, the opponents and the supporters of the RMGC project. The former are identified by uncritically accepting the discourse of the project opposition as “three hundred subsistence farmers” who form the NGO Alburnus Maior

(Szombati 2006: 11). The project supporters are, however, identified in more nuanced terms as a “silent majority who has come to heel with RMGC's plans” (Szombati 2006: 17). Three factors account for the strong support enjoyed by the project among the locals, according to Szombati: the experience of deprivation, the hope for jobs and the deep-seated faith in those “standing above” coupled with a need for direction and assistance. In his concluding remarks, Szombati adds a forth factor: “If the majority of local citizens have not joined the ranks of the opposition, it is because of an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness.” In a subsequent paper, however, Szombati (2007) greatly refines his approach and arrives at deeper insights into the internal complexity of the Roşia Montană conflict. While critically revisiting his own earlier assumptions, the author notes that “there is ample ethnographic evidence of local citizens displaying not only awareness of the unfairness of their treatment by RMGC, but […] genuine loyalty to the investor.” Szombati goes even further to criticize the view that in a struggle waged at the global scale, the views and voices of the locals have no relevance. Szombati comes very close to the kind of argument developed in this thesis by making a distinction between “what to the distant observer appears as ‘powerlessness’” and how his “informants tended to relate in a thoroughly personal way to the ‘Stranger’ [străin]” (2007: 12 - 13). In contrast to his previous article, the local affective context moves to centre-stage in that Szombati’s aim is to identify the “conditions of existence of corporate hegemony in Roşia Montană’s mining community” (2007: 14). Methodologically, the author sets out to assess the “GOLD’s affective and symbolic (omni)presence in the everyday lives of [his] informants.” (2007: 16). His careful analysis, inspired by notions of affective politics and governmentality, reveals two processes that relate local inhabitants to the mining company or what Szombati calls the “Hegemon”. One of this processes stems from the ability of the Hegemon to put local life on “stand-by”, which leads to a “numbness’ of both body and mind among some of the local inhabitants (2007: 16): “During my fieldwork I was again-and-again confronted with evidence of people’s boredom and sense of stagnation” (2007: 18). And “Life in Roşia Montanã appears to have entered a stage of hibernation” (2007: 18). The second process is the creation

44 of personal attachments between locals and the Hegemon which endows this power relationship with a certain degree of legitimacy: “What, from the perspective of the outside observer, appears as the neo-colonial treatment of powerless natives may be experienced as a source of hope” (2007: 24). In this second paper Szombati manages, indeed, to bridge the distance to the lifeworld of the Roşia Montană inhabitants and bring to light the local dynamics in their complex relationships with outside forces. His investigation reveals, however, only a snapshot of the changes brought about by the arrival of GR in Roşia Montană. Through my research I hope to show that the relationships between the various locals and the “Hegemon” are more complex and shifting than Szombati intimates in his careful anthropological research. Rather than stagnation and numbness, my research focuses on the vitality of local actors in bringing about smaller or larger changes in the spatial relationships of Roşia Montană. In contrast to Szombati, then, I repeatedly found confirmations of Giddens’ argument that “actors could have acted otherwise”. Two considerations form the basis of this claim and they apply, to some extent, to the work of Pascaru (2007) as well. First, having benefited from a more extensive research basis (both geographically and temporally, as will be detailed below), I was able to observe the Roşia Montană scene in a more thoroughgoing way and take note of certain events which occurred after Szombati carried out his research (especially in 2007 and 2009 – 2010). Second, my theoretical approach does not posit an a priori relationship of hegemony between the company and the local population. This leaves a considerable broader space for conceptualizing a plurality of possible relationships between local viewpoints and interests and global pressures and their images/counter-images of place (Harvey 1995: 23). Other research carried out on Roşia Montană in recent years takes a different approach, dealing with the activism of the project opponents, thus focusing on one specific form of agency. The work of Cornel Ban and Anca Romanţan (2008) and that of Katharina Kühnle (2009) focus on the campaign organized by the project opposition and on the mobilization of European institutions as allies in what has been recognized as the most visible environmental conflict in post-socialist Romania. Indeed, it is small wonder that the “Save

Roşia Montană” campaign attracted the attention of these researches as it occurred against the background of a virtual absence of environmental activist movements in post-socialist Romania. Both analyses stand out by the accuracy with which the authors identify the subtle mechanisms of Europeanization of the Roşia Montană movement. However, if one were to look for a discussion on the varieties of local agency, there is little to be found in these articles. Ban and Romanţan explain that the resistance against the RMGC project took shape in September 2000, when villagers from Rosia Montana, Corna and Bucium established the NGO Alburnus Maior, under the leadership of former mining engineer Eugen David. They do not go further than noting that “the grassroots nature of what was to later become a transnational environmental movement was thus firmly established.” (2008: 6). The authors also mention that threats to property rights, emphasized by the “movement framers” resonated well with “local peasants”. Kühnle (2009) similarly focuses almost exclusively on the Save Roşia Montană campaign and the role of “Europe”, as an ideological and institutional construct, in explaining the success of this campaign. Kühnle collected interview data in Roşia Montană but all interviews except one were carried out with non- resident opponents of the mine. With its origins in the environmental movement literature, this research does not problematize variations in local agency, albeit it does an excellent job of tracing links between local and extralocal (non-Roşia Montană) agents. It takes the grassroots character of the struggle against the RMGC project for granted and devotes most of its attention to the extralocal articulations and alliances of the struggle (involving European or Romanian institutions). Finally, the work of Pop (2008) takes an explicitly distant point of view in analyzing the images of the Roşia Montană place but forward by non-resident actors. Pop chose to analyze photographs published online by the project opponents and supporters to explore the iconic- code expression of social representation of the two groups. Building on French research on social representations, she justifies her choice of photographs by pointing out that “images possess the power of hypostatization, of transforming concept into substance.” Her finding is that the images of place in favour or against the mining project are polar opposites and highly stereotypical at the same time. Indeed, they form an inseparable pair of polemical

46 representations of the environment and community of Roşia Montană (Pop 2008). Having drawn our attention to the iconic character which the Roşia Montană place has achieved in the struggle between supporters and opponents, the question that suggests itself is: is agency singular or rather plural, despite its reification through images of supporters and opponents of mining? In general, the research reviewed above tends to give little credit to the agency of local actors other than the visible activism of the anti-mining NGO Alburnus Maior. Or, to the extent that unaffiliated local actors are considered, they are viewed as (sometimes consenting) victims seduced or coerced by the hegemonic machinations of the power holders. The present research aims to deepen the understanding of agency, both vertically – by focusing on routine/everyday activities to more radical/consequential actions – and horizontally – by opening the analysis to all actors meeting in place (mining company, NGOs supporting the project, anti-mining NGOs, different individual stakeholders, themselves at various stages in the resettlement process, and state authorities). For reasons of space, however, only the mining company, the NGO Alburnus Maior and different individual stakeholders will be analyzed in depth. The ultimate aim is to show the extraordinary liveliness of local actors in this conflict. However, it should be made clear that this is a study of a “privileged moment” in the history of Roşia Montană, in which different possibilities of change are still open, but which could come to an end in an unforeseeable future if the mine is given the green light.

Chapter Two: Methodology

This chapter provides an account of the empirical basis of the thesis. It describes my initial interest in the case of Roşia Montană, the entry into the field and the insights offered by my first research visit to Roşia Montană (2005). The chapter also discusses the positionality of the researcher and some of the power dynamics related to his presence in the field (2005 – 2008). It explains how the respondents were selected and what sorts of questions were asked. In an overview of the actors included in the analysis (table 2.1), I also mention those instances in which I used other sources of information (mostly written documents) to complement the primary empirical data. The last section is devoted to a brief discussion of the possible limitations of the methodology used. Before presenting my field experience at Roşia Montană I will first describe my long-term interest in Roşia Montană and my attempts to make theoretical sense of this case in the absence of primary data (2002 – 2004).

Before Entering the Field: Early Conjectures on Roşia Montană

My interest in Roşia Montană was stirred in June 2002 by several articles published in the Romanian daily Evenimentul Zilei (Event of the day – henceforth Evz), shortly after I completed my master’s thesis in environmental sociology. The titles of the articles which grabbed my attention – e.g. “Stop the Madness in the Apuseni Mountains” (Evz 2002c), “Roşia Montană – a possible ecological disaster” (Evz 2002e) or “Teachers from Baia Mare protest against the Roşia Montană project, asking the prime minister to ‘stop the poisoning of souls!’” (Evz 2002d) – signaled the presumed environmental and human risks associated with this planned large-scale mining operation. I initially became interested in one of the most controversial aspects of the project – the displacement and resettlement of part of the local population – and began collecting documents regarding this process, mostly from print and online sources. These included the Roşia Montană Project Description (RMGC 2002), the Resettlement and Relocation Action Plan (RMGC 2003), and the corporate profile of the project developer (Gabriel

Resources)18. On the other hand, being aware that the proposed mine had generated opposition, I also collected reports released by the opposition to the project, such as Rosia Montana: Cyanide in a Community: Ecology, Corporate Profit, and the Struggle for People’s Rights (Simion and Brand-Jacobsen 2002) or Roşia Montană gold mine: a future predictable catastrophe (Bankwatch 2002). These and similar materials provided insights into the initial stages of the relocation of the local population, as it began to unfold in 2002. The events anticipated in the newspapers – the “largest mine in Europe”, several hundred households resettled, cyanide poisoning or dramatic changes in the landscape - were striking for the Romanian public opinion, mostly because they were unprecedented. The resettlement aspects of the case drew my attention, especially because they seemed to receive somewhat less attention in the media than the more visibly contested environmental problems. At that time (2002 – 2003), I was taking an online master’s course at Lund University on “Globalisation and Transformation in a Comparative Perspective” and decided to write my thesis on Roşia Montană. Despite my intellectual eagerness to study the resettlement process at Roşia Montană, and more exactly its “risks”, “impacts” and the “foreseeable future” of the relocatees, I had to face a practical problem: the lack of empirical data on the relocation process and its outcomes. Part of the difficulty stemmed from the very nature of the case – relocation was ongoing during the time I carried out my master’s research on it (2002 – 2004) – while another part was due to the lack of any data collected directly in Roşia Montană. Media reports were too idiosyncratic, I thought, with a wide range of perspectives all of which could obviously not be true at the same time. There were journalists who titled their articles in dramatic terms, for example, “The Moţi [are] on the Brink of War” (Ţurcanu 2002a), “The torturers from Roşia Montană: The war over gold kills people” (Lupescu 2004), or “Save the Apuseni Mountains” (Evz 2003), while detailing in their articles the risks to which the local inhabitants and the local ecosystems were exposed. Others suggested or claimed that the relocation was not such a bad deal after all, given the sometimes substantial compensations paid to the owners, with titles

18 Available at: www.gabrielresources.com

49 such as “Overnight Billionaires” 19 (Evz 2002) or “At Roşia Montană, a nut tree is sold for 3 million, a hut for 1.5 billion” (Nicolae 2004) praising the unexpected wealth that had befallen the residents of this historic mining town. As an intellectual and sociologist, moderately animated by a sort of armchair activism, I felt that it was my scholarly duty to develop a critical argument with regard to the Roşia Montană project. At a minimum this was the prevailing attitude in the academic environment in Romania and abroad (Academy of Economic Studies 2003, Ecological University 2003, Haiduc 2003; Cernea 2003; see also Ban and Romanţan, 2008). Animated by this critical spirit and in spite of the lack of data, I decided to take an alternative methodological approach, without being fully aware of its implications. The international literature on development-forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR) is quite univocal with regard to the outcomes of DFDR processes. If carried out hastily and without proper regulatory enforcement, involuntary displacement almost inevitably ends up impoverishing the project affected population. This finding is so consistent across a large number of cases that a well-developed analytical model – the Impoverishment Risks and Reconstruction model – was proposed to study the different dimensions of impoverishment (Cernea 1990, 1991, 1995, 1996, 1997, 2000; Downing 2002). Encouraged by this observation, I used the IRR model as a predictive tool (Cernea 1997) to assess the possible impoverishment risks that could ensue as a result of the relocation of the population from Roşia Montană. In short, I applied the IRR framework to Roşia Montană to assess whether and to what extent the local population would be exposed to the risks of ending up with one or several impoverishment risks. These included landlessness, joblessness, homelessness, poor nutrition, increased morbidity and mortality, marginalization, social disarticulation, and restricted access to common property resources20 (Alexandrescu 2004). My case yielded mixed results, in the sense that while some residents seemed to be (potentially) affected by the future mine (especially those in the buffer area of the new project), others were likely to be little or not at

19 This refers to amounts paid to the relocatees from Roşia Montană in Romanian currency (ROL), at an approximate exchange rate of 30,000 lei for 1 USD. One billion lei was the equivalent of 33,000 USD. 20 These are the eight impoverishment risks postulated by the IRR model (see Cernea 1997).

50 all affected (e.g. homestead land was to be compensated at market value). In fact, lacking data on the actual situation in Roşia Montană, the whole assessment seemed quite artificial as I had no means to ascertain the similarity of Roşia Montană with other cases of DFDR. In a review of the master’s thesis in which I analyzed this case (Alexandrescu 2004), two professors from Lund University concluded that while the paper had merit, “one could have wished […] that empirical detail and description had been more worked out, as it now [stands], the mountain and its inhabitants remain enveloped in mist and fog!”. This statement expressed an obvious shortcoming of the paper, namely the lack of primary empirical data. This was to be corrected by my entry and subsequent fieldwork carried out in Roşia Montană. On the other hand, it also pointed to a methodological assumption which informed the paper, namely the assumption that prediction can be based on analogy. The logic behind this was outlined long ago by Bertrand de Jouvenel (1967, cited in Colquhoun 1996: 36):

[P]rediction by analogy presupposes that the mind has defined the present situation well enough to discover analogues for it, judging the resemblance to be fundamental enough for the same sort of events to follow as in the reference-situation.

The problem with this approach was that the situation had not been defined well enough – and this was more than just a lack of data – and that the “fundamental resemblance” with the reference-situation - that is, with other cases of development-forced displacement and resettlement - was problematic from the beginning. However, my eagerness to “predict” what would happen at Roşia Montană drove me to develop a whole paper based on the comfortable conjecture that “displacement has the same effects everywhere.” My first trip to Roşia Montană helped dispel this uncritical assumption but it also raised more difficult questions about what was actually going on in this mining town.

Entering the Field: One Situation, Many Definitions

There are three theoretical and methodological issues which my use of the IRR model seemed unable to resolve once I entered the field at Roşia Montană. First, the IRR framework assumed the existence of four, generally unproblematic categories of actors involved in DFDR processes, namely: the project developers, the state (frequently in partnership with public or private companies acting as developers), development agencies (international financial institutions) and the local (affected) population. The model is, therefore, not designed to accommodate a much larger variety of actors with different definitions of the situation. Second, the implicit argument of the IRR is that while the developers, in agreement with the state and financiers, have the decision-making power with regard to the whole displacement and resettlement process, the locals are relegated to the receiving end of the this relationship of subordination (Oliver-Smith 2009) and thus can only suffer (to a larger or smaller extent) the consequences of those decisions. Certainly, the IRR approach does not rule out the possibility of resistance (Cernea 2008), but it tends to relegate the subjectivity and agency of the affected population to a residual category (Dwivedi 2002). Building on the work of Ranjit Dwivedi (1999), more recent approaches point to the need to understand risks as variable, shaped by cultural norms and policy frameworks and often steeped in uncertainty (Oliver-Smith 2010). Third, by entering the field at Roşia Montană I entered a site “invested with hierarchies, competing ideologies, and struggles over resources” so I was almost inevitably “trapped in networks of power” (Burawoy 1998: 22). Investigating risks directly – especially material risks related to the means of livelihood – was almost impossible due to the power effects of silencing (explained below). In what follows I will address each of the three issue raised above. First, the actors on the Roşia Montană stage are more varied than the IRR model appears to suggest and they also have different degrees of visibility. Visibility itself can be conceived from different perspectives as physical visibility, media visibility and social visibility (each of these three forms will be explained in detail below). The degree of visibility is crucial in any effort to understand the different DFDR situations in which social actors residing in Roşia Montană find themselves and in which they have to act. The project developers/mining

52 company have a high degree of physical visibility in Roşia Montană with banners, buildings and cars carrying the logos of GR/RMGC which can be seen in the central areas of Roşia Montană (the main road along the Roşia Montană valley and the central square, henceforth the central axis of Roşia Montană). The company headquarters and various company-owned buildings are located in the same central areas. Figure 2.1 includes a poster of RMGC which reads: “The truth is stereo. Listen to both sides. [This way] to the information centre of Roşia Montană Gold Corporation”. The company is also highly visible throughout the winding streets of Roşia Montană, where all houses that have been acquired by the mining company bear the sign “Property of Roşia Montană Gold Corporation” (see Figure 2.2). Local state authorities are, by comparison, less visible, also because, for example, the town hall is located in a building owned by RMGC. The NGO “Alburnus Maior”, which opposes the RMGC project, was somewhat less visible than RMGC (in 2005) as it was not located in the central square, but a short distance from it (approx. 200 m). The poster depicts this differential location of the two information “sources” (RMGC, identified on the map as “one source” and Alburnus Maior, identified as “the other source”), albeit in a biased way. The actual location of “Alburnus Maior” is not as far from the town square as the poster implies (“the other source”). Despite the reduced physical visibility of Alburnus Maior, its media visibility is quite high, thanks to Stephanie Roth, the Swiss activist who created a trilingual website (Romanian/English/Hungarian) on behalf of Alburnus Maior in 200221. From the point of view of internet presence, the visibility of the Alburnus-led opposition is comparable to that of the project developers22. The overall media visibility of GR/RMGC in Romania is, however, substantially higher given the two TV/newspaper PR campaigns of the mining company which took place between November 2005 and December 2006 as well as between May 2009 and late 2011 (the time of this writing).

21 At present (April 2011), the website is only in Romanian and English. 22 Although no quantitative analysis of website hits has been carried out for the two websites, they both have had continued internet presence (at least since 2002) and have been updated regularly. Over time, their addresses have varied to some extent, their most recent urls being: rosiamontana.org and www.rmgc.ro (April 2011).

Figure 2.1 Graphic display of the physical visibility of project developer (RMGC) – poster located in the central square of Roşia Montană (2005) Source: personal photograph

Figure 2.2 House in Roşia Montană, “Property of Roşia Montană Gold Corporation” (2005) Source: personal photograph

The physical visibility of the local population varies significantly among the inhabitants of Roşia Montană. It is high in the case of those (relatively few) who posted on the outside walls of their homes the message “this house is not for sale” (in this way publicly expressing their opposition to the RMGC project, see Figure 2.3). It also high for those who are seen entering the company’s headquarters on a daily basis as RMGC employees. At the opposite end, which is that of low visibility, are those residents who live in several hamlets around the main village of Roşia Montană (e.g. Bălmoşeşti, Iacobeşti, Ignăţeşti, Cărpeniş or Vârtop). They are invisible from a physical point of view due to distance which separates many of these households from the central axis of Roşia Montană. Their houses are accessible only via unpaved roads, sometimes going over steep slopes. This distance/difficulty of access keeps those who visit Roşia Montană oblivious of their existence. I became aware of these residents only during my third and forth visits to the field (2007) after completing a 10-ten hour long

55 hike down the Roşia Montană valley (passing through Bălmoşeşti, Iacobeşti, Ignăţeşti) and up the Vârtop valley (Cărpeniş and Vârtop).

Figure 2.3 House along the central axis of Roşia Montană bearing a “This property is not for sale” plaque (2005) Source: personal photograph

Between these two extremes of high and low visibility are those residents whose homes are visible along the central axis of Roşia Montană. Their visibility is expressed in a variety of “shades” of intentionality, from gardens kept in good condition, which suggest that the owners might not be willing to leave Roşia Montană soon, to freshly painted homes, which might suggest the same intention as above, or its opposite, namely the eagerness to receive a higher compensation from the company (for a property in improved condition). By the third form of visibility, namely social visibility, I mean the perception of different stakeholders with regard to the degree to which other stakeholders have a say in the resettlement situation or in the project as a whole. It is in terms of this understanding of social visibility that my IRR-inspired expectations were most directly contradicted during my first field

56 visit. This is the second shortcoming that I identified in my application of the IRR model at Roşia Montană – no sense of pure victims and all-powerful oppressors. The evidence gleaned during my first visit (which was confirmed during subsequent trips) suggested that the relationship of subordination implicitly or explicitly assumed in much of the DFDR literature (e.g. Oliver-Smith 2009) might be more tenuous in the Roşia Montană case than in others. From my initial contact with local residents (Mihaela and Horea23), but also with some representatives of the project developer (Andrei, the public relations representative at RMGC) and a representative of Alburnus Maior (Simona), the attitudes of the local populations with regard to the project were portrayed in predominantly voluntarist terms. There was almost unquestioned – albeit mostly implicit - agreement among these different stakeholders that there are different groups in Roşia Montană: those who oppose and those who support the RMGC project. Beyond this, there were obvious disagreements between RMGC and AM representatives with regard to the numbers of opponents vs. supporters or their share in the total population. But there was essentially no disagreement over the fact that people chose to support or oppose the project, to sell their houses to the mining company or resist the company’s offers etc. In other words, local people had a voice and the conjectures made by different stakeholders assumed a more or less democratic stance; for example, statements such as “less than 1 percent are really against the project” (Horea) or “Alburnus Maior represents the interests of about 300 – 350 villagers” (Simona) suggests that the politics of numbers of deemed supporters or opponents of the project is important for both sides. Indeed, as I reflect back on my initial field experience at Roşia Montană and on subsequent visits there, the debate over resettlement was (largely) a struggle over the hearts and minds of the locals. Rather than taking the project or the resettlement process as a given, my (informal) informants24 mused or argued over their role in the project without being asked or encouraged to do so. My only (explicit) statement about my presence in Roşia Montană was that I am

23 In what follows, I will use pseudonyms rather than the real names of respondents (see also Table 2.1). 24 I will use the expression “informal informants” or “initial informants” to refer to those individuals who agreed to talk to me on my initial field visit (September 2005). They are informal in the sense that they were not asked, at this initial point in my research, any specific questions but conveyed their views spontaneously in relation to who they thought I was.

57 interested in what different stakeholders think about the project.25 More on my positionality in Roşia Montană can be found in the section entitled “entering the minefield”, below. For example, one day after I arrived in Roşia Montană, Mihaela spontaneously claimed that she would leave Roşia Montană if RMGC would give her a house of equivalent size plus 600 – 700 million lei (US$21,500 – 25,000). However, if they don’t agree to give her this level of compensation, she will stand up against the project and the latter will not be successful even if she were to stay in Roşia forever. Mihaela was not born in Roşia, she explained, and always yearned to leave Roşia, adding in a raised, half-joking tone that Roşia Montană could well end up as “dust and ashes”, because she never loved this place to begin with. A related shortcoming is that the IRR model focuses – as its name suggests – on risks which can accrue as a result of resources being lost in the process of resettlement. Michael Cernea defines risks as “the possibility embedded in a certain course of social action to trigger adverse effects (losses, destruction, functionally counterproductive impacts, deprivation of future generations)” (Cernea 2000: 19). The resources that resettlers are likely to lose can be material (land, houses, and adequate nutrition), social (social networks, social status) or human (skills, practical knowledge). The language of risks thus points to a linear and additive logic – the resources of an individual or a household can diminish as a result of resettlement; the more such resources are lost, the higher the level of impoverished of the individual or household will be. Conversely, if some (or all) risks are mitigated by specific counter-measures (for example, land-for-land compensation), the less will be the risk of impoverishment. In the ideal case in which adequate compensation and an additional investment for development is provided, the affected individual and his/her family might end up better off. The first visit in Roşia Montană, however, revealed a variety of “takes” on the problem of resettlement, which could not be divided up neatly in one or several of the eight categories of risks of the IRR model (see p. 29 above). Take the problem of joblessness and its proposed

25 More exactly, my introductory speech included the following: I introduced myself as a Ph. D. student in Sociology at U of T. who is interested in the project and what the different stakeholders think about it. In some cases I mentioned that I will visit all of the stakeholders. Also in some cases I mentioned that I am interested in the social and environmental aspects of the project and how these are viewed by the different stakeholders. Lastly, I mentioned that I am in Roşia Montană only for a few days to establish a first contact but I intend to come back and stay for a longer time here, probably next year.

58 corrective, informed by the IRR model, of land-based reestablishment and reemployment (Cernea 1997). Horea, the son of Mihaela and a salt mining engineer in nearby town, asks what would happen to the inhabitants of Roşia Montană without mining? He suggests that most male inhabitants of Roşia Montană have been employed in gold mining and that any alternative future for this place (such as a tourist resort) is unrealistic due to the lack of necessary investments. In asking rhetorically about a future without mining, he also has in mind the imminent closure of the RoşiaMin state-owned mine in Roşia Montană, which occurred one year later (2006). His proposed solution is, therefore, neither the abandonment of the proposed RMGC mining project nor its outright implementation, but an extension of the project in its proposed version: it should take place over a longer time, not just 10 years, but for something like 40 years. He offers two arguments to support his amendment of the “RMGC version” (my words) of the continuation of mining: on the one hand, the environmental pollution with cyanide would be reduced, because smaller quantities would be used, while on the other people would have jobs for a longer time, perhaps for a whole generation. As my subsequent research in Roşia Montană revealed with clarity, unemployment was considered a significant problem in 2005, even before the legal steps for approving the project had been taken. At that time, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), the document based on which the mining project could be considered for approval by the Romanian government, had not yet been submitted to the Ministry of the Environment. In other words, the pre-project situation was viewed by several respondents as having a high risk potential in terms of joblessness. For example Georgian, an RMGC employee and local resident, claimed that in the absence of the project, Roşia Montană will be abandoned. He avers that the process of depopulation started as early as the 1950s. Alex, the local chair of a pro-mining NGO [“Pro Roşia Montană”], which supports the RMGC investment, similarly claims that Roşia Montană will perish, the youth will leave, and the old people will pass away. Another informal respondent, Marcel (former mining technician) says that the state-owned company will cease all activity in 2006 and that afterwards “the area will become deserted, stripped of what is most beautiful in nature”. From his latter statement it is not clear whether this bleak future is due to the end of state mining in Roşia Montană or will be the result of the large-scale project

59 proposed by RMGC. Marcel adds that the arrival of this investor will extend the exploitation of this area by 15 – 20 years, while Horea (above), was concerned that it will only last for 10 years. In short, if the future of Roşia Montană without the project RMGC looks problematic to some employees and supporters of the company, others also see the prospect of a relatively short term investment as troublesome. What about land-for-land compensation? Most of my initial informants seemed unconcerned about this widely prescribed policy measure encouraged, among others, by the World Bank via its operational policy 4.1226. The question of the agricultural use of the land proved to be, even on my first visit, a deeply contested issue among different stakeholders. Mihaela, Georgian and Andrei, the first two long-term residents of Roşia Montană, the latter a non-local RMGC employee, claimed that practicing agriculture is next to impossible in Roşia Montană due to poor soils and a harsh climate. On the other hand, Simona, a non-local activist with Alburnus Maior, maintains that her organization wants to propose alternative development projects based on agriculture and milk-processing. She cites the example of Dorin, a former mining engineer-turned-farmer who currently lives off agriculture. My personal observations in Roşia Montană during the first visit covered a wide variety of situations, from residents who raised 2 – 3 cows or had a small vegetable garden to households which lacked any significant garden space and/or place to keep domestic animals. The risk of impoverishment due to lack of land-based employment was, thus, highly variable among different groups. In conclusion, joblessness is not simply an expected effect of the mining project but a problem that plagues Roşia Montană over and above the relocation process itself. If the RMGC project were to proceed, this problem would be solved, at least in part, though some residents are concerned that it will be for an unacceptably short term. If the project would be cancelled, joblessness would be a potentially worsening problem for those remaining in Roşia Montană, due to the lack of alternative tourist investments and the imminent cessation of all mining

26 See World Bank website: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/PROJECTS/EXTPOLICIES/EXTOPMANUAL/0,,contentMDK:20064610 ~menuPK:4564185~pagePK:64709096~piPK:64709108~theSitePK:502184,00.html

60 activities. Even land-for-land compensation would only benefit those households which rely on farming, but not those (still) relying on mining employment. In short, risks cannot be precisely delimited but reveal themselves as complex constructs intertwined with other historical factors in the social and economic fabric of local life. To conclude, the analytical neatness of the IRR model was not mirrored in the Roşia Montană case. The precise separation between risk categories is nearly impossible and the problem is further compounded by the lack of a unitary standard of risk evaluation by different stakeholders. Neither is it possible to distinguish a pre-project situation from the changes introduced by the project as all are part of an ongoing flow of broader or narrower processes of change. The third blind-spot of my application of the IRR model is its relative inattention to questions of power. It is usually assumed that risks are transparent categories that can be investigated scientifically and are accessible to scrutiny. However, my first visit to the field showed that once I set foot in Roşia Montană I was liable to be “read” in different ways by my potential respondents, as either “[siding] with the company” or “being against it”. Asking questions about what local residents have or stand to lose (in terms of income or properties) might have been quickly interpreted as taking the role of the company’s property assessors or “negotiators”. From an epistemological point of view, the entry into the field helped me shift the focus from narrowly defined risks to the broader category of stakeholders’ agency in the face of the risks (and opportunities) brought about by the project. Rather than assessing risks, it seemed more interesting, and theoretically apposite, to focus on the diversity of agentic processes in which locals and non-locals engaged incessantly. A detailed discussion of the interview questions which were meant to elicit this diversity is presented in the section entitled “Applying the research instruments”. In truth to the IRR model, I should note that the applicability of a given framework should not be sought in any mechanical fashion. The fact that the IRR model did not seem to fit in the case of Roşia Montană at the individual level does not reduce the usefulness of the model. In the case under discussion, the agency of the locals took its toll on the life of the

61 community as a whole. One dimension of the IRR model, which will not be explored in this work but is highly relevant for what has happened at Roşia Montană, is that of social disarticulation. This refers to the conflict between individual and collective wellbeing.

Entering the (Mine)field: the Politics of the Project

Michael Burawoy cautions that entry into the field “is often a prolonged and surreptitious power struggle between the intrusive outsider and the resisting insider.” (1998: 22). This researcher’s entry into the Roşia Montană field was certainly shaped by relationships of power (as will be detailed below), but of a different nature than those encountered by Western anthropologists exploring the non-Western world (Smith 2006). James Clifford (2004: 6) discusses the “unfinished colonial entanglements of anthropology and Native communities” in relation to Native communities in Alaska. In a more radical tone, Native scholar Haunani-Kay Trask directs her critique at anthropologists who are a part of “the colonizing horde, because they seek to take away from us the power to define who and what we are, and how we should behave politically and culturally” (Trask 1991: 162). No such cultural barriers – linked to the history of anthropological “involvement in empire as a geographical project” (Arnold 1996: 30) – applied in the case I was researching at Roşia Montană. As a “native” of Romania, there was no need to bridge gaps of race, nationality or language, although there were other cleavages (especially related to class, occupation and region) that surfaced with clarity in my interactions with the inhabitants of Roşia Montană and with the other actors meeting in this place. Not being a “foreigner” proved to be a definite advantage in gaining access to a population which had occasionally manifested its distrust to foreigners, especially Hungarians, who are known locally as opponents of the mining project (Szombati 2007). Mihaela and Horea, my hosts during my first field visit, questioned at one point the intents of a Swiss activist or of two French researchers who came to Roşia Montană in 2002 and 2004 – 2005, respectively. Professor Rainer Slotta of the German Mining Museum in Bochum visited Roşia Montană in 2002 and he also had the impression that “for foreign researchers it is somewhat difficult [to carry out research] since the population does not always welcome such visitors” (Slotta,

62 personal communication, January 5, 2006) 27. As I am fluent in Romanian, I also did not have to contend with the linguistic barrier and skirted the problems associated with the use of an interpreter (Borchgrevink 2003). Burawoy (1998) discusses four effects of power which manifest themselves in ethnographic research, namely domination, silencing, objectification, and normalization. Domination can go both ways in that the researcher can be dominating or be dominated in the ethnographic interaction. In my case, the problem of my domination over respondents was, in my judgment, of limited import, given that the power differential stemmed only from my “new middle-class” status (with higher cultural and social capital) than many of my respondents. On the other hand, due to the large compensations paid by RMGC for residents’ properties, as well as the income streams generated by growing numbers of visitors and activists to the Roşia Montană area, the income/wealth differences between me and my respondents were, in general, small or non-existent (in many cases negative). Shortly after my first field visit, I wrote down my first overall impressions regarding the “entry”. My expectation was that I would be entering an uneven and conflict-ridden minefield with strong and relatively inflexible supporters and opponents of the mining project. Seen from the outside, the field appeared to be uneven as the company and its supporters were the more powerful actors28. I also expected at least some apprehension and questioning of my intentions in Roşia Montană, summarized in the questions “which side are you on?” or “are you for or against [the project]?” The first impression was not borne out to any significant extent during my initial visit. In fact, the very circumstances of my contact with the people in Roşia Montană enabled a smooth entry into the field. In April 2005 I attended a small anti-RMGC rally in downtown Toronto which took place during the annual general meeting of Gabriel Resources. There I met a

27 Media accounts suggest that local police forces were advising residents not to talk to foreigners. On the other hand, police officers tried to intimidate foreign journalists and activists who, they claimed, portrayed the company in negative terms (Evz 2002b). 28 Some newspaper titles convey the prevailing mood of the early years of the Roşia Montană controversy (2002 – 2003): “Overt intimidations at Roşia Montană” (Evz July 12, 2003), “The war over gold draws to a close (silence and fear)” (Formula As, June 16 – 22, 2003), “Gold Corporation uses diabolic measures to make the moţi surrender” (Formula As, July 7 – 13, 2003).

Romanian woman (Silvia) who was the niece of a resident of Roşia Montană (Mihaela). After telling her about my plans to carry out research in Roşia Montană, I met Silvia again in Bucharest several months later. She suggested that I could find accommodation at her aunt Mihaela, who owned a house not far from the central square of Roşia Montană. At the same time, she introduced me to the setting I was about to enter by saying that things there were much more peaceful than they seemed. She further suggested that I should talk to both opponents and supporters of the project although she was a declared opponent of the mine. Based on this latter fact, my position in Roşia Montană could have been easily interpreted as that of a “project opponent” if Mihaela, her aunt, would have also been an outspoken adversary of the RMGC project. This, however, was not the case. Moreover, between 2002 and 2007 she hosted an RMGC director of the environmental department, a circumstance which lend support to the impression of peacefulness in Roşia Montană. Indeed, once I got there, the situation looked relatively calm. The only visible sign that “something was going on” were the company pick-up trucks – a fairly unusual car in Romania - which constantly wandered the village uphill and downhill along the central axis. On my first visit, an RMGC employee suggested, in a way paralleling Silvia’s temporarily assumed equidistance, that my information should come from two sources, namely the supporters of Gabriel Resources and from its opponents, Alburnus Maior. However, beyond this apparently democratic surface, my presence in the field did raise questions concerning my identity and interests there. In this sense, my entry into the field meant stepping into a minefield although, and this should be stated from the beginning, I was not physically threatened at any point throughout my fieldwork. But there were a number of more or less tense moments which revealed problems of dominating and being dominated in the field. Being the tenant of Mihaela offered me a rather equivocal position between the two sides in the conflict. For her own pragmatic purposes, Mihaela suggested that I should introduce myself as her “nephew” – which I did in most circumstances. Most of my informants reacted in a neutral-to-slightly positive way to this way of introducing myself, and none of them rejected a dialogue with me based on this

64 affirmed identity. Mihaela’s late husband, Cezar, was a mining sector chief29 and saying that I was the “nephew of Mrs. Cezar” offered a good reference, especially to former (retired) miners. In general, my statement that I was a neutral, scientific observer and that the University of Toronto, although located in Canada, had nothing to do with Toronto-based Gabriel Resources was enough to assuage most of the initial apprehensions. The first explicit question “which side are you on?” came from two female residents whom I met at the public library of Roşia Montană (2005). One was a library staff member and the other an elementary school teacher. After several questions and after explaining my “innocent curiosity”, they were willing to talk to me. Two years on, in 2007, Mihaela herself expressed her view that I work (covertly) for the mining company. Some other residents, which had become my informants in the meantime (2005 – 2007) thought likewise. The wife of a sympathetic key informant, with whom I kept in contact down to the present and who is a staunch opponent of the mine (Adrian), called me jokingly “the spectacled cobra”, in ironic reference to my glasses. After completing a structured interview in 2007, her father (Stefan), said that he thinks I work for RMGC because of a number of trust questions which I asked. Another informant and the local leader of Alburnus Maior said with reference to my repeated visits to some respondents that only company negotiators – those RMGC employees in charge of negotiating compensation packages with individual Roşia Montană house- and landowners – return to people’s doors. However, in general, there was a sense of acceptance of me being present in Roşia Montană and talking to both sides involved in the conflict, also probably because I mentioned from the beginning that I want to talk to “all sides”. After all, my host in Roşia Montană offered accommodation to several people working for RMGC (archeologists, water chemists etc.) but also to her anti-mining niece. In this sense, I could have counted, in her eyes, as just another such tenant; she wasn’t troubled at all by my presence. In fact, she was quite helpful with providing information and leads to approach other informants. My assumed dominant position as “RMGC supporter/employee” did not lead to any rejections and probably distorted

29 In Romanian “şef de sector”. The state-owned enterprise RoşiaMin consisted of 5 mining sectors.

65 respondents’ views only to a limited extent. When they wanted to criticize the company, these respondents did not shy away from using strong words. For example, Stefan named the company’s CEO (Alan Hill) a “killer”. Alan Hill had worked for Barrick Gold before coming to GR and was in charge of bringing into production the Bulyanhulu mining project in Tanzania (GR Press Release April 27, 2005). Barrick had bought the Bulyanhulu mine from Sutton Resources, a Canadian company, in 1999. The story that follows is controversial. Sutton was involved in the alleged killing of 50 Tanzanian miners who were buried alive in the pits, as the company’s bulldozers tried to seal the pits to prevent the miners from occupying them. Sutton and Barrick denied the accusations, but many questions remained unanswered (Thomas 2002: 10). The association of GR’s CEO with the Tanzanian killings may be fortuitous but it suggests that respondents were not disheartened by my assumed corporate-based dominant position to withhold their stronger views. In contrast, when company supporters questioned me or identified me with the project opposition, this was usually done in less friendly terms. Three company representatives asked me from the beginning for a letter of reference from the University of Toronto, two of them in a relatively unfriendly way (2005). Upon my second visit, in 2006, I provided them with the required letter and they did not inquire any further. However, in May 2007 and June 2007, there were two episodes in which company supporters tried to intimidate me and three research assistants with whom I carried out part of the data collection. The first occurred when I was taking some pictures of several allegedly illegal buildings which had been erected by a local business-man and chair of a pro-mining NGO [Pro Dreptatea]. I thought I was on a public road, when two young men approached me and asked why I was taking pictures on private property. Their unfriendly attitude diminished as I explained that I was not with Greenpeace and, as it turned out, I had interviewed the father of one of these men in the Archaeology department of RMGC a few months earlier. They only asked me to delete the pictures taken (without taking the camera from my hands). The second episode occurred several weeks later, during a tense moment taking place in the central square of Roşia Montană. On June 30, 2007, there were two rallies – one for and the other against the project – taking place at about the same time. The latter was occasioned by the opening of an alternative “information centre” (in

66 addition to the one of RMGC), jointly supported by the Soros Foundation and the Romanian Academy. The former rally was dedicated to a celebration of mining traditions in Roşia Montană. The same young man and his father called me and my three assistants, “greens” and questioned our presence in Roşia Montană. At some point I lost my temper and threatened that if they do not leave us alone, I will create problems for the company back in Canada (which I obviously did not intend to do). They left us alone and the only inconvenience was a slight feeling of insecurity which persisted over the next two weeks. Overall, the feeling of being dominated in the mostly covert conflict from Roşia Montană was stronger than that of my own domination over my respondents. Silencing, the second form of power in the relationship between researcher and informants is more insidious than simple domination. It refers to the unarticulated fear that what one may say or imply in a discussion with an outsider – especially in relation to the more powerful actors on the Roşia Montană stage – may be somehow used against their interests. Szombati (2007: 33) credits the company with the capacity to create “an emotionally charged, personal bond to its ‘stakeholders’” in which fear and hope become intertwined. While agreeing with this argument to a limited extent – because my interest focuses on the ways in which actors repeatedly “break free” from the affective shackles of the “Hegemon” (Szombati’s term) – it is important to recognize that RMGC managed to impose a climate of suspicion in Roşia Montană. For this reason, any detailed questions about material possessions or employment circumstances, which would have been necessary in assessing IRR’s eight impoverishment risks, could have been met with disbelief by my respondents (“are you, in fact, a negotiator?”) and effectively silence them. For the same reason, I also refrained from asking for their signature on the informed consent letter. The third and fourth effects of power, objectification and normalization, will be addressed in the fourth chapter. Although still related to power, these processes operate at a more abstract level and relate to the ways in which researchers conceptualize and communicate the results of their research.

The Selection of Respondents

During my pre-entry discussion with Silvia in August 2005, she provided me with a list of potential informants which could introduce me to “stakeholders’ views of the project” (my definition of the research problem): 1) Mihaela (her aunt, who became my host in Roşia Montană) 2) George (second degree uncle, the cousin of her father), declared anti-mining resident 3) The new residents of Miceşti (those who received compensation from RMGC and acquired new homes in a village adjacent to the city of Alba Iulia) 4) The guide of the mining museum (employee of Minvest, the state-owned company still active in 2005) 5) Cezara (extralocal activist) 6) Dorin (the “farmer”, former mining engineer) 7) The mayor of Roşia Montană 8) Franc and Bogdan – activists of Alburnus Maior 9) John Ashton (director of the Environment department of RMGC, the tenant of Mihaela) 10) La Bombă, the local bar. 11) Andrei Jurca – the chair of Pro Roşia Montană (pro-mining NGO)

This variety of stakeholders, variously located in relation to the project (for, against or obliquely30 for or against) was quite remarkable since it came from a declared opponent of the mining project. Even to an active opponent of the project, things could not be unproblematically sorted out in a Manichean way. This suggested that the stakes were highly variable and could (indeed should) be taken into account in comprehending the complex picture of actors’ views. Silvia implied that even the relocatees (now living in Miceşti) or the mining guide (still a state employee) could have something to contribute to the ongoing debate over Roşia Montană. In more or less conscious ways, it shaped my approach to the

30 The word oblique is a short-hand for situational motivations to take a specific stance in relation to the mining project.

68 selection of respondents. In short, my selection of respondents followed the three criteria of visibility: social, physical, and media. The single most important criterion that was used in the selection of respondents was that of social visibility, which was based on the assumption that virtually any resident of Roşia Montană as well as the different actors which “set up shop” and became involved in the struggle had a say and a unique point of view on what had been going on since the arrival of RMGC, and before. Because the mining company could not mobilize the eminent domain prerogative of the state – that is the right to expropriate owners for a project of “public interest” – any resident could and still can refuse to sell and, as a result, potentially ruin the planned mining project. The other actors which came from outside and acquired properties or became otherwise involved in local affairs can similarly lay claim to the future of the project. Furthermore, despite the obvious economic dimension of the acquisition program of the company, the circumstances (personal and social) in which different residents found themselves were likely to be quite diverse and their reactions and actions equally varied. From the first visit it was apparent that, judged simply from a physical point of view, people’s properties were immensely varied, from small apartments in socialist-era apartment buildings to large houses with tens of hectares of land. In addition, depending on the position of residents in the different areas of the project – the historical protected area, the industrial area (project footprint), the buffer area or the outside area of the project – I assumed that residents would hold specific views with regard to their relocation and the fate of the project in general. The residents themselves, whom I met during my first visit, pointed to internal differences within Roşia Montană, in terms of the propensity to accept relocation or not. The first criterion thus suggests that it is necessary to cast as wide a net as possible in order to understand a variety of agentic processes in which local actors (resident and “foreign” alike) are likely to engage. Based on this, the main groups of actors can be distinguished as follows: • The mining company (GR) and its Romanian subsidiary (RMGC), the NGOs supporting the project (Pro Roşia Montană [“For Roşia Montană”], Pro Dreptatea [“For Justice”], Sindicatul Viitorul Mineritului [“The Union for the Future of Mining”])

• Alburnus Maior, the Soros Foundation Roşia Montană (now Cultural Foundation Roşia Montană), the Romanian Academy • The state authorities in Roşia Montană (village council, mayor’s office, state-owned enterprise RoşiaMin) • The population living in Roşia Montană and its environs

This is a very crude distinction among the main stakeholder groups – in fact, each of these groups is a congeries of actors ; in order to identify more accurately the positions taken by individual actors in addition to those adopted by organizations, and the possible dynamic of these positions, I will use the other two criteria, of physical and media visibility. At the same time, to make the analysis more thoroughgoing even if less comprehensive, only the two main actors – the mining company (GR) and the opposing NGO (AM) - will be discussed in depth. The physical visibility of actors is important not only because the outsider will experience their existence and positions based on what she will see and learn while travelling to Roşia Montană. The physical visibility of stakeholders is important given that it is linked to the topography of Roşia Montană. What I called the “central axis” consists of the main road winding its way up the Roşia Montană valley and the central square and the streets radiating from it. The central axis bears the unmistakable symbols of Roşia Montană’s mining past (e.g. “hammer and pick” epigraphs on the houses), albeit with different pregnancy between the lower and the upper market place (see Slotta and Wollmann 2002: 221 – 55). Houses in other areas of the commune have a more ambiguous identity. At the same time, the central axis is the most urban part of Roşia Montană, which may conceal for the untrained eye the historical agricultural uses of the land within Roşia Montană (Pop 2002). The types of homes of different residents – e.g. 1960s apartment buildings or historical miners’ houses – and their one- or multi-generational relationships to the properties owned might also be a factor in accounting for differences in visibility. In this sense, residents living in different parts of Roşia Montană – distinguishable by their visual and structural appearance – may tell different stories than if one would assume that the topography is homogenous. The physical visibility of actors – whether

70 high or low – offers a valuable tool for identifying what in a political ecological context might be called “subaltern” identities or practices. Finally, the media visibility of different actors is important to understand the positions adopted by some actors as well as the changing alliances which link actors both locally and beyond the administratively defined space of Roşia Montană. As with the physical visibility of actors, it is important to analyze both those with high and with low media visibility. It is tempting to assume that the actors with high media exposure, RMGC and GR for example, are the “movers and shakers” of local politics in Roşia Montană, but this view is an oversimplification. The process of establishing local and extralocal alliances has altered both the visibility of what were previously eminently “local” actors and their stakes in the conflict over Roşia Montană. Media visibility is, in principle, a quantifiable factor, as one can record the number of “hits” returned by a search engine in a specific media outlet (e.g. the Romanian daily Evenimentul Zilei) or on the internet (e.g. Google). The intersection of the two criteria of visibility leads to a more detailed classification of the actors included in the analysis (see Table 2.1). All actors have a say in the complex unfolding of the conflict over Roşia Montană, even if some have higher visibility than others. In some cases, visibility may be linked to the level of power (defined, in Weber’s sense, as the ability to impose one’s will even against the resistance of others) yielded by different groups of actors. However, due to the contingent nature of the conflict, it is unjustified to take the higher visibility of some actors as a sign of their inherent superiority in shaping the final outcome of the conflict. For this reason, the main empirical contribution of the thesis is to emphasize the positions and agency of the actors who have a lower social and physical visibility.

Table 2.1 Overview of actors included in the analysis, classified in terms of physical and media visibility. Media visibility Physical visibility – High Low in relation to the central axis of Roşia Montană High Actors Data collection Actors Data collection Organizations: Organizations: GR / RMGC Orthodox church (regular religious service) Pro Roşia Montană (NGO) Roman-Catholic church (regular religious service) Unitarian Church (regular religious service) Document Viitorul Mineritului (NGO) Greek-Catholic Church analysis (press (regular religious service) No data releases, annual Pentecostal Church available reports, media (regular religious service) accounts) Alburnus Maior (NGO) Baptist Church Soros Foundation Roşia Reformed Church Montană (Cultural Foundation Roşia Montană) RoşiaMin (state-owned mining enterprise) Individuals: Individuals: Observation Cornelia (Gabriel In-depth Codrin, Cristofor (RMGC) during public Resources) interview meeting (February 2007) (December 2007) Alex (Pro Roşia Montană) Georgian, Alin, Anca, Paula In-depth Two in-depth (RMGC) interviews interviews (October 2006 & (October 2006 & 2007, February 2007) 2008) Adrian, Iulian (Cultural Mini focus-group with In-depth Foundation Roşia Sorana, Raluca and Miruna [Ad hoc] Focus- interviews Montană) (RMGC) group interview (October 2006 & (February 2008) 2007) Bogdan (owner) In-depth Luca (Pro Dreptatea) In-depth interview interview (September (October 2006) 2008) Dorin, Cezara, Sandu In-depth Matei (Pro Dreptatea) In-depth (Alburnus Maior) interview interview October 2006, (October 2007) September & October 2007,

Media visibility Physical visibility – High Low in relation to the central axis of Roşia Montană February 2008)

Ioan (Greek Catholic) Informal interview (February 2008) Low Organizations: Organizations Pro Dreptatea (NGO) N/A Romanian Academy Individuals 77 Structured - Residents of Roşia interviews (July Montană commune, of 2007 & May Abrud and Cîmpeni towns, 2008) and of Bucium commune [living at varying distance from the central axis of Roşia Montană] Individuals: Quotes in press Newly relocated 13 structured CEO and GR board releases or individuals from Roşia interviews (July members interviews Montană to Abrud, 2007 and May Câmpeni, Miceşti/Alba 2008) Iulia Filmmaker Documentary: Phelim McAleer Mine Your Own Business (2006) Filmmaker Tibor Kocsis Documentary: New Eldorado (2004)

Applying the Research Instruments

Different disciplines define ethnographic research – at least in terms of the length of stay in the field – quite differently. My own stay into the field of Roşia Montană adds up to three months over the course of four years (2005 – 2008) (for details, see Table 2.2). Apart from the first five-day research stay (September 2005) during which I became broadly familiar with the setting and ascertained people’s willingness to talk to me about their lives and about the project, during the subsequent stays I carried out 116 structured and in-depth interviews (90 structured and 26 in-depth interviews) with 110 different respondents.

By structured interview I mean a list of pre-defined questions (with open answers) which was meant to be carried out in a shorter timeframe than an in-depth interview (40 – 50 minutes) and be applied to a larger number of respondents (N = 89), scattered geographically over several villages/hamlets and towns (Roşia Montană – center village, Corna, Bunta, Gura Cornii, Bălmoşeşti, Ignăţeşti, Iacobeşti, Gura Roşiei, Cărpeniş, Vârtop, Bucium-sat, Abrud, Câmpeni, Miceşti/Alba Iulia). The structured interviews were carried out in May 2007 (8), July 2007 (67) and May 2008 (15)31. The interviews in May 2007 followed a preliminary interview schedule, which was subsequently revised and applied in modified form in July 2007 and May 2008 (full details below). The 67 interviews carried out in July 2007 were applied with the help of three research assistants from the University of Bucharest (Monica Costache, Miriam Cihodariu and Cosmin Stancu).

Table 2.2 Break-down of research stays in Roşia Montană (2005 – 2008) Time spent in the field Number of days September 2005 5 October 2006 6 May 2007 14 June 2007 4 June - July 2007 13 September - October 2007 16 December 2007 4 February 2008 12 May 2008 10 September 2008 6 Total no. of days 90

Rather than identifying my research as a full-fledged ethnography, it could be characterized, in less strict terms, as “ethnographically informed”. According to the Blackwell Encyclopedia of

31 The total number of interviews is 90, while the number of respondents is 89 because one respondent answered both the preliminary and the final version of the interview.

Sociology, “the term [ethnography] is used in a much looser way within sociology today, to refer to studies that rely on participant observation and/or in-depth, relatively unstructured interviews.” (Hammersley 2007). In fact, my research fits with all the features of ethnography discussed in this encyclopedia: • “People's actions and accounts are studied primarily in everyday contexts rather than under conditions created by the researcher”. My research took place “in the field” under conditions over which I had only very limited control. • “Data are gathered from a range of sources, including documentary evidence, but participant observation and/or relatively informal conversations are usually the main ones”. This feature applies in my case as well, although with the qualification of having done less observation and a larger number of formal interviews. • “Data collection is “unstructured” in the sense that it does not involve following through a fixed and detailed research design set up at the beginning”. This characteristic is also true of my research. Even the structured interviews left respondents considerable freedom to provide succinct responses or delve on specific questions. The length of the interviews ranged from 30 minutes to over 2 hours in length. The questions themselves were very general and received a variety of responses. • “The focus is usually on a small number of cases, perhaps a single setting or group of people, typically small scale, with these being studied in depth”. This applies only to some extent as I carried out interviews in Roşia Montană but also up to 70 km away in Alba Iulia. This would not count as multi-sited ethnography but I think this geographic sampling offered a relatively grounded insight into the processes taking place at Roşia Montană and in its surroundings. • “The analysis of the data involves interpretation of the meanings and functions of human actions and how these are implicated in local and wider contexts. What are produced, for the most part, are verbal descriptions, explanations, and theories; quantification and statistical analysis play a subordinate role at most”. This aspect will be detailed in the fourth chapter.

The main topics covered in the structured interview schedule, in its modified form, are the following: I. The context of life in Roşia Montană How do the people (from Roşia Montană and surroundings) describe their lives (individually and collectively)? How do they talk about their current lives in comparison to those of other times (past/future) and places (other communities)? One question in particular asked about residents’ opinion with regard to what is the most important thing about Roşia Montană that an outsider eager to learn about this place should know.

II. The risks and challenges of life in Roşia Montană These questions dealt with what unsettles the residents of Roşia Montană and with what “the problem” at Roşia Montană might be. These questions assumed that residents are likely to experience some level of uncertainty and stress in their lives, but the researcher did not suggest what the source of the stress might be and left it up to the interviewees to do so.

III. Roşia Montană and the proposed RMGC mining project This group of questions inquired about the place of the mining company and its proposed project in the collective and individual history of Roşia Montană.

IV. The possible risks of the Roşia Montană mining project These questions asked respondents about the environmental risks of the proposed project as well as about their trust in experts (in terms of available knowledge of risks and, implicitly, about the professional probity of risk experts).

V. Exploring the local reflection of extra-local constructions of the future Respondents were presented with two sets of predefined scenarios about the probable and the desired futures of Roşia Montană. These scenarios (10 statements for each probable and desired future) were drawn from public statements made by RMGC and the NGOs opposing the project (5 in each of the probable and desired futures). Although useful in itself, these

76 questions could have been more usefully applied in an in-depth interview because respondents tended to answer and comment only briefly on each of the pre-defined scenarios.

VI. Who will (and should) decide the fate of the project? These questions aimed to find out who, in the eyes of the respondent, has the legitimate power to decide about the project. It also left room for “supernatural” interpretations of the fate of Roşia Montană.

VII. Trust in people and institutions – both local and extra-local This section included a list of names and institutions for which respondents were asked to rate their level of trust (from 1 – “very much” to 5 – “very little”).

VIII. Socio-economic data This section included questions on the geographic proximity of the respondent to the project (whether in the project-affected area, outside of it or in the blurry “in-between”) as well as a (cautious) questions about the perceived monetary value of the respondents’ properties.

The in-depth interviews were used to elicit more elaborate responses on the past and future of Roşia Montană, but they also asked the respondents to comment on specific events (e.g. the decision of RMGC to lay off part of its workforce in December 2007). In the case of representatives of organizations or other media-visible stakeholders, I included questions about their current activities and cooperation with other organizations. In questions related to the past, I asked about the family history of the respondent (regardless whether he or she was born in Roşia Montană or not) and about the state of nature/landscape in the past as well as about the effects of previous economic activities on the landscape. Questions on historical economic and environmental risks were also included. The questions dealing with the future asked about how the respondent envisions this place ten years from now. I also inquired about the future state of the environment/landscape at Roşia Montană and the perceived need to restore it.

The in-depth interviews offered respondents the freedom to formulate their concerns or visions in elaborate terms. The questions about the past and those about the future were both meant to provide an indirect entry point for a discussion of the current conflict over Roşia Montană – but this did not happen in all cases. These interviews also allowed respondents to revel in their favorite stories or points of view. In carrying out these interviews, I did not strive to achieve the informational saturation of a given set of conceptual categories. In accounting for incessantly changing forms of agency, the idea of saturation appears counterproductive; the aim is, indeed, to probe the interview material for possible, emerging meanings and not limit it to theoretically predefined analytical categories. The secondary sources used in the analysis include national newspapers (Evenimentul Zilei, Adevărul, România Liberă) and weekly magazines, such as Formula As. This latter source offers the most extensive and in-depth media coverage of the Roşia Montană case. The journalists of Formula As have published no less than 436 articles, opinion pieces or letters on Roşia Montană between February 2002 and May 2011, which means an average of about four articles per month.

Because the questions in the interviews deal primarily with the place called Roşia Montană – in its various aspects, both individual and collective – the “objects” in terms of which actors think, plan or carry out their actions will be indentified as follows. Borrowing, for practical purposes, from Ted Relph’s (1976) phenomenological analysis of place experiences, I will classify the relevant aspects of agency in terms of the following categories. • Location – where (i.e. in relation to what geographical or historical frames of reference) do different actors place Roşia Montană and their actions? How does Roşia Montană become differently located in terms of the local/extralocal actor-networks established by actors? And, conversely, how are such networks destabilized in relation to location? • Landscape – how do different actors define and redefine the landscape in relation to the actor-networks that they establish? How can new interpretations of the landscape by other actors destabilize such networks?

• Community - how do different actors define and redefine community in relation to the actor-networks that they establish? What are the more potent (political) interpretations of community which can destabilize such networks? • Links to place: roots, homes, memory – what is the relevance of such links to places in the actor-networks established by different actors? How is rootedness reconciled with the mobility that actor-network building entails? • Another aspect that could be considered is the essence of place – how do the “essential features” (variously defined) of Roşia Montană figure in network building? How is this essence continuously challenged?

Analysis of the Information Gathered

The information gathered through interviews, as well as that provided by document analysis was used to explore how social actors diversify their cultural choices in the stream of contingencies associated with the Roşia Montană conflict. The aim is to show how actors with varying degrees of visibility are active in thinking, (consciously) planning and carrying out their individual or collective projects (broadly conceived as goal-rational or value-rational actions). However, attention will also be devoted to the unintended consequences of such actions (whether theirs or other’s) and to actors’ reflexive awareness of such consequences. Maybe the more elusive of the three components of agency, thinking will be assessed in terms of three categories: the awareness of the uncertainty / complexity of the situation at Roşia Montană, the musing over alternative interpretations or courses of action and the identification of surprise and paradox in one’s or someone else’s actions or intentions. No coding and no quantitative analysis of the interview material will be carried out, but rather theoretically informed inferences from the evidence collected.

Limitations of the Methodology

First, social visibility is a theoretical construct that undergirds the thesis and assumes that, in relation to the RMGC project, different actors can and do make their voices heard in discursive as well as in material terms. If this assumption is undermined, that is, if some actors might emerge at some future point as the “real” transformative agents, at the expense of others, the point of inquiring about the views and actions of a variety of actors becomes less relevant and possibly meaningless. Second, physical visibility is a methodological construct and refers to who I, as researcher, regard as a more or less visible actor in the conflict over Roşia Montană. In this sense, it carries all the advantages and blind spots of my field research experience. I obviously did not cover the whole geographic area of the Roşia Montană commune and I also did not exhaustively survey the degrees of physical visibility of actors. In this sense, this form of visibility is amendable to improvements and higher specificity by the inclusion of other actors (with high or low visibility), which I did not consider. Third, despite the length of time spent in Roşia Montană, I cannot claim to have truly grasped “what is really going on” in the field. My fieldwork resembles more a patchwork of insights gathered at different points in time, whereby the connections drawn between them can be plausibly defended only up to a certain point. On the other hand, even an extended stay of one or two years would have been – in themselves - insufficient to account for the uneven unfolding of the conflict. For example, the early-to-middle years of the project (2002 – 2003), were quite different from the later ones (2008 – 2009). A related methodological risk is that the information collected at Roşia Montană is an overrepresentation of agency, of discursive consciousness as opposed to practical consciousness, to use Giddens’ words. On their own, but especially in interaction with the researcher who was in Roşia Montană to find out what is going on with this project, people are likely to be “overreflexive” about the many changes going on in (and around) Roşia Montană. The question regarding “how life has changed since the arrival of RMGC” from the structured interview may give a good insight into people’s discursive preoccupation with the present.

The next chapter will shift the frame of the discussion from the specificities of the research experience at Roşia Montană discussed so far to a macro-sociological level. More exactly, the third chapter will outline the deeper structures in which the Roşia Montană conflict has taken shape over the years. This will entail a bracketing of the agentic processes that even these structures necessarily entail, in order to focus attention on the observable, individual-level agency that I became familiar with during my stay in Roşia Montană.

Chapter Three: Powerful Processes, Complex Interactions, Unpredictable Outcomes

Introduction

Imagine that a group of experts had been brought together in 1985 to discuss how the mining sector could contribute to sustainable development in Melanesia. It is exceedingly unlikely that anyone at the meeting would have forecast the outbreak of the Bougainville rebellion in 1988 and the forced closure of the Panguna copper mine in 1989. It is quite unlikely that anyone would have foreseen the internationalization of debate about the environmental impact of the Ok Tedi mine, let alone the Australian litigation against Broken Hill Propriety Limited (bhp) as the mine’s operator… (Filer and Macintyre 2006: 215)

The quote above is part of the introductory article of a special issue of The Contemporary Pacific entitled “Melanesian Mining Modernities: Past, Present, and Future”. Mining there takes place against the background of “lush tropical foliage, shimmering birds of paradise [the national symbol of Papua New Guinea], and crusty, ancient turtles [that] dazzle the eye as art” (Rosi 2006: ix). It involves a variety of groups – for example the Maimafu of the Eastern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea [PNG], the Ipili of the Enga province, the Telefolmin of West Sepik Province – all of which have different experiences with mineral extraction and its attendant problems. Colin Filer and Martha Macintyre point out that the anthropological studies presented in this special issue “challenge notions of unified interest or consensus at the local level, revealing ambivalence and contradictions” (2006: 221). There are, however, several themes which are common to these analyses, as well as to others not mentioned here, despite their different emphases. One of these commonalities is the problem of environmental degradation and the different measures (or lack thereof) to mitigate the environmental impacts of large-scale mines (Kirsch 2002). Another is the issue of development and the degree to which, to use Golub’s (2006: 288) expression, local populations are willing “to trade their mountain for development.” A further unifying theme is the involvement of environmental NGOs in complex interactions with indigenous populations

81 82

(West 2006). To these one could add several other commonalities, which make the experiences of mines and mining conflicts comparable, but hardly uniform. There is one further common denominator which is, however, substantially different from the preceding ones. This is the observation that in all the cases above, and in ones occurring in a variety of other contexts – all characterized by high complexity – there is a high degree of structural indeterminacy. The contingent intersection of macro-structural processes makes the trajectories of local processes unpredictable. The quote at the beginning of this chapter signals the impossibility of predicting the outcome of contingent interactions between processes which, taken each in isolation, would lead to very foreseeable outcomes; in the case above, this could mean, for example, a relatively linear and smooth expansion of mining in Melanesia. This chapter maps out – first theoretically and then with direct reference to the Roşia Montană case – the major processes thought to produce profound reorganizations of local lives in what are known as resource-dependent communities. The aim is to show that, while each process is clearly defined and powerful in itself (e.g. neoliberal investment policies), the interaction of several processes in a specific place can have unpredictable outcomes. While each of them would be sufficient to push the place down a narrowing path, several of these processes in interaction are likely to make the trajectory of place resemble a random walk with no predetermined endpoint. This chapter addresses the first research objective of the thesis, which is the argument that mining places such as Roşia Montană experience historically unique pressures and constraints imposed by worldwide processes of capitalist accumulation, uneven development and fragmentation. These processes are deemed historically unique for two reasons. On the one hand, they are considered to be more powerful with the advancement of economic globalization (for Eastern Europe, see Bandelj 2009). On the other hand, the interaction of multiple processes unravel the assumed fixity and predictability which have long characterized sociological conceptions of resource-dependent communities. With some exceptions, it was only over the last two decades that attention has been devoted to contingent processes which render such communities as potentially fluid, conflict-ridden or uncertain in their future trajectories (see Godoy 1985).

Mining in the Social Scientific Literature: An Historical Overview

In his Environmental History of the Twentieth Century, John R. McNeill (2000) wrote that “each year, humans move more earth and soil than glaciers, wind erosion, mountain building (plate tectonic uplift), and volcanoes combined.” Mining is one of the main earth shaping activities carried out by human beings and the sight of modern mines, especially open pit quarries, gives an impression of the profound physical transformations brought about by these activities. More importantly, mining is said to produce the valuable minerals and energy sources that made (and continue to make) industrial civilization possible. Mining and its products has thus been approached from a variety of viewpoints by sociologists, anthropologists, economists, geographers, geologists and others. This is not the place to provide a comprehensive account of these varied interests but some of the early contributions will be briefly illustrated. In the first decades of the twentieth century, sociologists were interested in the social conditions associated with mining and the lives of miners. For example, child labour and the harsh labour conditions in the Appalachian and Pittsburgh coalfields drew the attention of researchers. Not surprisingly, the labour unrest that had shaken mining areas in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century (for example the strikes of 1897 and 1902)32 were reflected in the early sociological literature. For example, Frank Warne (1903) explains the latter strike by pointing to the unsettling consequences of the “introduction of the cheap labor from southern and eastern Europe” into the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania (1903: 23). Analysts tried to figure out the sources of the “unrest of labor” (e.g. Walling 1904: 21) and predicted, not without a hint of satisfaction, the “complete organization of labor” as a resolution to the ethnic divisions within the mining workforce (Walling 1904: 31). Others, however, seemed more concerned about the prospects of a growing class struggle in America: “if one talks with the workmen at their homes one hears the grumblings of class struggle” (Commons 1908: 758). This early contributions paint quite vividly the subjective roots of social

32 For example, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, no less than twenty articles where published on mines or mining, mostly in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1900 – 1920, Jstor database).

84 change, by focusing on the unrest and grumblings of the working class which was becoming gradually aware of its interests as a class-for-itself. Subsequent analyses took a more deterministic stance with regard to the structural inflexibility of mines and mining towns. The workers’ agency and even militancy was largely neglected over the next several decades. In seeking to analyze the commonalities between mines and plantations, Edgar Thompson (1932) formulates the observation that “it is within the context of the world community and its economic and geographical co-ordinates that these two institutions [the mine and the plantation] can best be studied and compared” (1932: 604). These extralocal connections were not only recognized, but were sometimes intepreted with a political (or geopolitical) spin by early writers. Some of these analysts were geologists who voiced their views on the economic and political importance of natural resources in sociological publications such as the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. For example, some argued in favour of mercantilist policies which should discourage the export of raw materials (especially coal): “Let us keep our coal at home and with it manufacture whatever the world needs” (Smith 1909: 198). Writing on the verge of the Second World War, geologist Charles K. Leith drew the political implications of mineral possession in the following terms: Discoveries will doubtless here and there modify the picture somewhat, but the rate of discovery is falling rapidly, and it happens that much of the larger part of the world's mineral resources is under commercial and political control of the democracies, and therefore the defense of democracy and the defense of the mineral position more or less coincide (Keith 1939: 42).

It is instructive to note that anthropologists arrived somewhat later to the “bonanza” of mining research and have also produced fewer studies of active mines and inhabited mining towns33. Even if they devoted attention to mining somewhat later, their contributions proved to be very

33 The evidence for this assertion comes from a title search for the keywords “mine(s)” and “mining” in anthropology journals (56) included in the Jstor database. Between 1879 and 1979 there were 34 articles published, while between 1980 and 2011 there were 31 articles containing “mine(s)” and “mining” in their titles. Most of the articles from the first period and some of those from the second dealt with mining from an archeological point of view. In contrast, the mining keywords are more frequent in the sociological literature – more exactly in the 85 journals in the Jstor database (104 articles between 1895 and 1979) and xx between 1980 and 2011.

85 substantial. One need only recall June Nash’s famous ethnographic study, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines (1979). Over the middle decades of the last century, roughly between 1930 and 1970, sociological research on so-called “single occupational communities” mirrored the common wisdom of the discipline as a whole, that is, it focused on the deep structures that were assumed to characterize mining communities. For example, a number of researchers noted that such communities were remarkably similar across cultures (Leith 1996). Researchers have therefore been interested in identifying the structural features of such communities, which are thought to be constant because they are seen as responses to invariable physical or structural requirements. Edgar T. Thompson (1932) argues that the economic and social structures of the mining community are, like those of the plantation, essentially pre-given, because “not only is the mine a fixed point in the structure of the community, a nodal point in a sensitive vibrating economic system, but it functions as a more or less fixed division of labor” (1932: 607). In an early study of three iron mining towns (Hibbing, Virginia, and Eveleth), located on the Mesabi Iron Range of Minnesota (the main deposit of iron ore in the US34), Paul Landis (1934) applies Stuart Chapin’s (1925) theory of synchronous culture cycles to map out the cycles undergone by “the culture of the mining town” (Landis 1934: 256). His conclusion is that the empirical evidence gathered on the three towns fits neatly into a three-stage model which begins with a pioneer period (growth), is followed by a conflict period (maturity) and ends with a period of decay (Landis 1934). The fate of the mining town is thus, to a large extent, historically predetermined. Not only does the general trend of the life of the mining town pass through specific stages, but so do the more specific aspects of town life, while co-evolving along a predictable path. Landis distinguishes between several minor cycles arranged in a hierarchy from the physico-social realm – through the bio-social and psycho-social ones – up the level of culture rhythms. Although not principally concerned with the structural determinants of mining communities, other sociologists advanced similar conceptions about the “fixity” and predetermined nature of such communities. For example, in an essay dealing with the

34 Cited from Wikipedia (May 11, 2011); available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesabi_Range

86 question of the definition of community, Stuart Queen (1923) asks if one variant of community, the “company town” - that is a human grouping almost completely shaped by the cradle-to-grave organization of the omnipotent mining company - can be considered a community. His answer is negative because, Queen argues, the residents of such towns are not involved in the active pursuit of any sort of common aims. Queen (1923: 378) concludes that “there is no sign of initiative of any sort except on the part of the manager” and that “the whole atmosphere is depressing”. The same sense of the powerlessness of the residents of mining towns to exert even the slightest control over their lives is echoed by T. D. Stiles who writes that in such towns, companies have a “chattel mortgage on the souls of their employees” and that, as a consequence, “the lives of the workers and their families are lives of deadly routine” (Stiles 1923: 132). The next three decades apparently brought little change to this deterministic representation of mining communities and their residents in the sociological literature. Seymour M. Lipset and Rinehard Bendix (1951) were concerned to show that, rather than using people’s opinions as a valid point of departure in the study of any social phenomenon, researchers should focus instead on the common response of individuals to the shared exigencies of their position in the social and economic structures. As an illustration of their argument, Lipset and Bendix (1951) note “the similarity of labour relations in the mining industry of many countries” and seek to explain it in terms of the “nature of mining as an occupation” and “the unique structure of mining towns” (1951: 243). They depict the way of life in mining towns in terms of a high level of solidarity imposed by geographic and social separation: These workers are not integrated into the rest of society, that is, they usually live together and their occupations keep them apart from other groups, both spatially and socially. Since their work is dangerous as well as extremely vulnerable economically, they depend for their survival and precarious prosperity on a spirit of fierce solidarity (Lipset and Bendix 1951: 244).

Similarly, Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegel (1954) characterize miners as an “isolated mass”, a “race apart”, living “in their own separate communities” (1954: 191). This highly deterministic interpretation of miners as a “homogeneous, undifferentiated mass” leads them to downplay

87 miners’ individual initiative and purposeful activity because, presumably, “all do about the same work and have about the same experiences” (1954: 192). Gaston Rimlinger (1959) takes the isolated mass hypothesis of Kerr and Siegel a step further and asks whether the mining environment creates a strike-prone isolated mass irrespective of the cultural environment in which the miners are placed. Without disputing the fact that miners have certain universal characteristics – which reflect the influence of a peculiar (mining) environment – Rimlinger qualifies the isolated mass concept by claiming that “the inherent environmental tendency toward strike proneness may be counteracted or reinforced by sociocultural factors” (1959: 405). However, he seeks to replace the “isolated mass” idea with a similarly problematic concept, namely that of a “separatist group”, which uncritically perpetuates the assumption that the separation of miners from society is uniform across different societies and that this has predetermined social effects (e.g. high degree of homogeneity). Other authors underscored the same notion that mining towns are fixed and, as a consequence, their economic lifeblood runs through predetermined channels: “The tendency to geographical isolation of mining settlements, because of their fixity, is associated with an absolute dependence upon a single economic activity.” (Bulmer 1975: 61). Based on such an argument, these authors emphasize similarities between mining settlements in different societies, at different stages of economic development (e.g. Bulmer 1975: 61). Bulmer builds on Gluckman’s Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (1963) and borrows the latter’s argument that the work in African mines is organized “on the same principles as a gold mine anywhere”: labourers, foreman, manager (1963: 221). It is irrelevant, according to Gluckman, if the unskilled labour is European, African, or Malayan. Moreover, the “colour bar in Africa has its parallel in Europe in the struggle by trade unions of skilled workers against the dilution of labour.” (Gluckman 1963: 222). The universality of the organization of gold mines is an argument, in Gluckman’s interpretation, for the need to search for the ultimate causes of this organization:

…the Africans’ barracks at the Rand mines and an Alaskan gold-mining village are not the same. But, as we have seen, it is incorrect to deduce from this, as Malinowski does, that

one cannot dissect these real phenomena to show that they share some characteristics, just as a whale and a sheep are both mammals in some respects (1963: 224).

The influence of sociological positivism is obvious in these analyses of miners and mining communities. To some extent, it seems that the latter afforded sociologists a much coveted empirical illustration of the operation of Durkheimian social facts, that is external circumstances that closely shape the behavior of individuals. The potency of geographic, economic and social “imperatives” – isolation, economic vulnerability, and ironclad solidarity (or, at times, its opposite, intense individualism) – seemed to match the quest of mid- twentieth century sociologists for a confined, predictable, micro-world, in which generalizations would hold in mining communities everywhere35. Some sociologists applied Durkheim’s concept of mechanical solidarity to the study of underground coal mines as “encapsulated enclaves” (e.g. Vaught and Smith 1980). On the other hand, one may argue that the presumed separation of mining from the rest of society and the unique environmental and cultural influences operating in such “places and races apart” – to borrow Kerr and Siegel’s expression - may undermine the search for universal laws in such an obviously discontinuous space. The very predictability of life in mining communities, as seen by mid-century sociologists, stands out as an oddity in the overall make-up of a given society. It is perhaps for this reason that a newer strand of research on resource-dependent communities, which will be discussed in the next section, has began an inquiry into the broader interplay between internal and external (political economic) context that shapes the society and culture of mining towns36.

35 As the reference to Gluckman illustrates, anthropologists where similarly interested in this sort of generalizations. Another example is Hand’s “Folklore from Utah's Silver Mining Camps.” (1941) who addresses one of his opening remarks to “miners everywhere” (1941: 132). 36 See, for example, Bullard and Banks (2003: 292): “Mining towns have been a particular focus of studies that explore the dynamics of race and class in Papua New Guinea (Imbun 1995, Polier 1994), Indonesia (Erwiza 1999, Robinson 1986), Chile and the United States (Finn 1998), and Zambia (Ferguson 1999). The mining town frequently functions as a symbol and promise of modernity for local communities and workers alike, though residents all too frequently find themselves betrayed, cast aside, and disconnected from the processes of development and modernity that globalization promises (Ferguson 1999, p. 236)”.

Even more recent approaches to mining and resource dependency have tended to follow the “place apart” perspective of previous decades. Two studies of the mining town Kiruna of Northern Sweden, published fifteen years apart, begin with the claim that the town was created and maintained in existence “to serve the needs of the mining industry” (Lansbury and Breakspear 1995: 275). The first study, quote above, makes an optimistic argument about the favorable prospects of a mining town facing the inevitable closure of its mining industry but which nevertheless manages to weather this major challenge by establishing an alternative technological and scientific base. The authors outline the fascinating prospect of the metamorphosis of Kiruna into a high-tech computer and space-exploration arctic centre, a rather significant departure from the initial mining-dependent fate of the town. The second article (Nilsson 2010) addresses the equally fascinating reversal to mining via an expansion of operations under the current location of the town. However, rather than engaging with this highly variable (and expanding) historical trajectory of Kiruna, Nilsson reverts to the familiar representation of a mining population at the mercy of an all-powerful mining company. There is, however, a more modern emphasis in Nilsson’s work as he focuses on the workings of an ideological fantasy which “satisfies subjective needs” (2010: 441) but which ultimately creates uniform reactions in Kiruna’s population. For example, the author explains the inertia of the residents of Kiruna (“According to the interviewees, residents in Kiruna ‘know’ from experience that LKAB [mining company] has a great influence over the town’s development and future” (2010: 441)) in rather unenlightening terms: “you cannot criticize the hand that feeds you.” One may legitimately ask: do the employees of the European Space agency located in Kiruna, for example, see the matter in the same terms? Do the elders or the young residents have similar opinions? The case of Roşia Montană will be used to illustrate the complexity often found in a “mere” mining town. It shows that the term “mining community” can cover huge spatial and temporal variations in the effects of resource extraction on local lives and livelihoods. For example, over the course of its eighteen-centuries long history, mining at Roşia Montană has gone through changing property and extraction regimes which cannot be reduced to the simple dynamics of mining towns of the type discussed above or of “company towns”, defined

90 as “settlements completely owned, built and operated by an individual or corporate entrepreneur” (Porteous 1970: 127). Even in these cases, however, an analysis mindful of human diversity would probably reveal unsettling insights into the “culture of the mining town”.

Brief History of Mining at Roşia Montană: Changing Property and Production Regimes, Shifting Mineral Fortunes and Variable Survival Strategies

If one takes a glance at the 1800-year long evolution of Roşia Montană, the multi-layered history of this place becomes apparent. The “birth certificate” of Roşia Montană is widely considered a mining contract dated February 6, 131 AD, discovered in the eighteenth century in an abandoned gallery. It attests of a period of prosperity during the second and third centuries AD, followed by a long period for which there is little evidence of systematic mining activities (Slotta et al 2002). In 1346 there is documentary evidence of mining activities in the Cârnic Mountain of Roşia Montană, while in 1676 there were 132 hydraulic ore crushers in Roşia Montană, Corna and Bucium. Interestingly, these crushers were the property of local mine-owners (Slotta et al 2002). When the mining areas came under the administration of the Habsburg emperor, mining took off rather slowly in the beginning but intensified visibly during the eighteenth century. Mining was still carried out by private associations with support from the state, whereby the price of the processed gold was controlled by the fiscal authorities (Wollmann 1999). Roşia Montană experienced a period of prosperity in the second half of the nineteenth century, accompanied by significant urban growth (Pop 2002). The beginning of the 20th century saw the influx of Hungarian, French and Belgian capital and the introduction of more advanced mining techniques (e.g. electrically powered ore crushers) for increased efficiency. However, the lack of credit plagued the small-scale miners who were often forced to seek employment with the state or foreign enterprises (Wollmann 2002). After the First World War, the gold mines of Roşia Montană came under the jurisdiction of the Romanian state who introduced a variety of regulations and support measures for the four main categories of

91 mining actors in Roşia Montană: the state-owned enterprise, the large private mining company “Mica” from Brad, the smaller private companies and the small-scale mining associations (Wollmann 2002). However, even this relatively broad-based access to mineral resources did not ensure, by itself, general prosperity. An ethnographic account from the interwar period paints the bleak picture of poverty and destitution of some small-scale miners in Roşia Montană, created by both poorer ores and lack of credit (Suciu 1927). The year 1948 was a turning point in the history of this place. With “the nationalization of the means of production”, all private mines came under state ownership. The state became the only employer in the mining industry of Roşia Montană, but only several years after the nationalization. In the meantime (from 1948 until the early 1950s), some inhabitants of Roşia Montană sought employment in other mining areas (Sîntimbrean et al 2006) or in agriculture. In fact, not only in times of crisis in the mining industry but also during “normal times” did some residents of several hamlets surrounding Roşia Montană secure their livelihood by selling produce to the “miners” (Sanda, resident of Vârtop)37. In order to increase efficiency, the state-owned company (“Întreprinderea Minieră Roşia Montană” – “The Roşia Montană Mining Enterprise”) developed an open pit at the top of the Cetate Mare mountain, obliterating many of the previous historical mining works that had impressed foreign visitors since the eighteenth century (e.g. Müller von Reichenstein 1789). The 1989 regime change in Romania brought with it a progressive downsizing of mining activities and, for the first time in the documented history of Roşia Montană, a complete halt of mining activities in 2006. The early 2000s also witnessed the beginning of the displacement process of the population from Roşia Montană, the consequences of which have not yet crystallized. Based on this brief historical overview, it would be difficult to draw any neat conclusions regarding the “conduct [of miners] as the product of long-run forces which are embedded in present habits and institutions” as Rimlinger did for the Saar miners several decades ago (1959: 396). The history of Roşia Montană cannot be interpreted in relation to any inflexible set of historical forces. More exactly, Roşia Montană cannot be adequately

37 Sanda, a resident of Vârtop (part of Roşia Montană commune) put it this way: “They, the people of Roşia Montană, the urbanites, were concerned with their work [in the mines] and we were concerned with our work [in agriculture]”.

92 categorized according to existing types of resource dependent communities such as the one developed by Richard Krannich and Brett Zollinger (1997). Roşia Montană is neither a “sustained development” community nor a “declining community” given that the proposed Roşia Montană has not yet reached the stage of production, so that the respective problems of growth and decline are not yet applicable. It is also distinct from a cyclical development community as the eventual exploitation of the mine, which could ensure a new period of growth, is uncertain. Finally, it is not a transition community either, because Roşia Montană has not engaged in a transition from mining to economic diversification through tourism and recreation, as the concept of transition is used by Krannich and Zollinger (1997: 206 – 207). An interesting point of comparison with Roşia Montană is the exploitation of copper mines at Rio Tinto in the Huelva province, southwestern Spain. The history of this mining area goes back to the Bronze Age and the Copper Age (about 3000 BC), whereby mining activities were carried out first by the Iberians and Tartessans, later by the Phoenicians (800–600 BC) and the Romans (0–200 AD) (Salkield 1987). Between the fifth and fifteenth centuries mining operations were abandoned but were revived in the nineteenth century under British ownership, until the economically exploitable deposits were depleted in 1998 (Davis et al 2000). Rio Tinto was also the site of one of the oldest environmental protests, which was violently repressed by the army in 1888 (Martinez-Alier 2003: 205-8). Interestingly, one century later, in a controversy over the siting of a hazardous waste dump in a disused mine, activists mobilized the living memory of the ‘year of the shots’ 1888 (Martinez-Alier 2003: 206). Elements of the long history of a mining place where thus selectively resuscitated to address a risk conflict typical of the second modernity (Beck 1986). The discussion above should not be interpreted as an argument for extreme cultural relativism. It is my contention that mining communities are shaped by various political economic processes which cannot be simply written off in terms of a thoroughly idiosyncratic approach to mining places. The argument of this chapter is rather that, despite the operation of distinct large-scale processes, their complex intersections result in a network of various opportunity spaces which local actors are likely to actively seize, not always with foreseeable outcomes. In what follows, I will trace some of the macro processes affecting Roşia Montană

93 and point out the spaces of (structural) uncertainty in which, as will be detailed in the next chapter, the agency of actors can unfold.

The Political Economy of Resource Extraction

The general political economic, geographic and sociological arguments concerning resource- dependent communities tend to paint a rather bleak picture with regard to the human consequences of resource extraction. There are three distinct theories that address the problem of resource dependency, namely uneven development38, the resource curse thesis, and the theory of fragmenting development. A fourth, more encompassing approach that is also useful in understanding the structural positioning of the Roşia Montană case is David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession. This process characterizes capital accumulation in the period after 1970, in which the expanded reproduction of capital was replaced by the dispossession of what were previously common goods and universal entitlements (Harvey 2005). Harvey (2006: 43) explains the concept as follows: By [accumulation by dispossession] I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations…; conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labor power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession.

Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession encompasses a variety of processes that ran parallel to each other: commodification, privatization, conversion of collective forms of property rights into private property rights, expulsion of peasant populations and suppression of non-capitalist economic forms etc. The colonial or neocolonial appropriation of assets is part of the same broad process of dispossession which seems, on account of its all-encompassing nature, to be

38 I refer here to the sociological variant of uneven development rather than to its geographical interpretation.

94 fundamentally determinant for the fate of all resource-dependent communities. What happens, however, when the logic of dispossession is suspended for an undetermined period of time? While the weight of this process cannot be lifted overnight, and continues to shape the lifeworlds of such communities, its suspension does raise interesting questions about the way in which people deal with what Ulrich Beck (1986) called the activating “not yet event”. Before addressing such questions in the next chapter, the remainder of this discussion will seek to explain how the suspension came about. Each of the more specific theories mentioned above – uneven development, the resource curse thesis and fragmenting development - will be analyzed in turn, with reference to Roşia Montană, to show that all describe relevant and powerful processes whose effects are felt, however, only up to a certain point. The remaining part, the unexplained “residue”, is interpreted in this thesis as the realm of contingency and agency in which local actors can become historical subjects. The broadest framework of analysis is provided by world-systems theory as applied to the extractive sector via what is known as the (sociological) theory of uneven development. In brief, the arguments of the theory of the physical inevitability of uneven development under capitalism, which are relevant in this analysis, are twofold. First, the industrialized countries need to secure a growing supply of raw materials from all hinterland areas, both domestic and international (especially those located in the Global South), to ensure continued growth in productive activities. This leads to the continued expansion, into ever new territories, of the “oil and gas frontier, the aluminum frontier, the cooper frontier, the eucalyptus and palm oil frontiers, the shrimp frontier, the gold frontier, the transgenic soybeans frontier…” (Martinez Alier 2005: 11). Stephen Bunker underscores this idea by observing that uneven development responds, albeit not exclusively, to “immutable physical laws”. In addition to the laws of thermodynamics, these “physical laws” are those of the geological and climatological distribution of resources, and of resources with precisely specified characteristics, in a variety of ecosystems over the whole surface of the globe (Bunker 2007). This should not be read as

95 geographic or climatic determinism as the “laws” refer to the random location of such resources and, one should add, to the unpredictable results of geological exploration39. Another theory that also predicts the ever-accelerated use of resources is the treadmill of production perspective, developed in environmental sociology by Alan Schnaiberg and his colleagues. This theory is based on the idea that “consumption must increase at ever faster rates to offset the substitution of capital for labour in the production process” (Schnaiberg 1980: 228). John Hannigan (1999: 373) explains the term treadmill of production as the “inherent need of our economic system to continually yield profits by creating consumer demand for new products, even where this means expanding the ecosystem to its furthest limits.” These furthest limits should be understood both environmentally and spatially: larger amounts of resources of more diverse qualities and found at ever more distinct locations are need to ensure the expansion of the treadmill. Bunker (2005: 38) argues that, in its original formulation, the treadmill theory did not consider in sufficient detail “the ecological dynamics of how the treadmill relates to the spatio-material specifics of the global environment from which it draws its diverse raw materials.” The theory of uneven development fills this gap by alerting researchers to the emergence of new frontiers of resource extraction: one of the these frontiers is the Eastern part of the European continent. In the context of a global quest for resources, the spatio-material characteristics of Eastern Europe entered into the purview of extractive industries during the 1990s. The relatively rich mineral and energy resources of Eastern Europe began to attract investors to this area (Castells 1996: 136). In Martinez Alier’s terms, new raw materials frontiers were opened in the former socialist block, especially in Romania, Bulgaria, and other less-developed countries of the region (Berberoglu 2005). In the precious metal sector, for example, promoters or stockbrokers on the Vancouver Stock Exchange – historically known as a source of venture capital for high-risk investments such as gold mines (Naylor 2007) – set their eyes on the precious metal resources of Eastern Europe:

39 Geologists themselves sometimes refer to the discovery of significant ore bodies as “finding a needle in a haystack” (see the very interesting article by Trigger (1997) on uranium exploration in Australia).

“Overlooked,” “under-explored” and “under-estimated” are words often use to describe the Carpathian Arc, a prospective belt of rocks in Eastern Europe that some have likened to the Pacific Rim’s famous “Ring of Fire” (Danielson 2005: C1).

According to a Toronto-based mining consultant, the whole Carpathian Arc is highly prospective, especially for epithermal gold. However, the gold frontier in Eastern Europe begins to only gradually take shape and one cannot actually speak of a “mining renaissance” in Eastern Europe as the hopeful title of the article in the Northern Miner (Danielson 2005) seems to suggest. For now, or at least as of a few years ago, the “What? Gold in Europe?” attitude still prevailed among investors (Danielson 2005). Despite this, isolated moves to capitalize on the resources of this region began to be made during the early 1990s by Western companies and were followed by others in the late 1990s. By the late 2010s, the trickle of extractive companies has gained momentum, even if it hasn’t yet turned into a “flood”. The reasons, as will be shown, are manifold. Romania’s mineral sector will be used to illustrate this process of incomplete penetration of extractive industries into the former socialist block. One of the best-known early joint ventures between a regional Romanian state-owned mining company (the Romanian National Company for Precious and Nonferrous Metals or REMIN) and a foreign mining company (Esmeralda Exploration Ltd) was formed in 1992 under the name “Aurul” (Romanian for “gold”) and was located in the city of Baia Mare, in the North- east area of Romania. Interestingly, the joint venture was not designed to exploit new deposits but to reprocess the large piles of tailings left from the old mines around the city of Baia Mare40, which also restricted the development of the city’s metropolitan area (Argeşeanu- Cunningham 2005). The new processing plant was planned for a processing capacity of 2.5 million tons of tailings per year for extracting 1.6 tons of gold and nine tones of silver over ten to twelve years (Argeşeanu-Cunningham 2005). This was a modest mine by international standards. A few years later, in 1995, the Autonomous Administration of Copper [Regia Autonomă a Cuprului - RAC] organized a similar bid for leasing the tailings ponds in the mining areas of the Apuseni mountains (in September 1995), which was won by "Gabriel Resources Ltd" of

40 Baia Mare means the “large mine”.

Great Britain with headquarters in the Channel Islands (Ziua May 10, 1998)41. The object of the concession was changed progressively, and shifted from the evaluation of the tailings ponds to the exploration and exploitation of the mining areas managed by RAC Deva, (Ziua May 10, 1998), especially the Roşia Montană deposit located in the Western Carpathians (see Figure 3.1). Based on insider information, the owners of GR developed a much more ambitious exploration plan than Esmeralda, to assess the gold resources of the Western Carpathians. Their efforts were richly rewarded.

Figure 3.1 Location of the Roşia Montană deposit and town in Romania Source: Gabriel Resources website (2006)

41 References to the newspaper articles have not yet been included in the list of references.

In the first years of geological exploration at Roşia Montană, GR reported a continuous increase of the resource and reserve estimates42 of the gold deposit. In 1998 it reported between 31.1 tons and 62.2 tons of inferred resources of gold. In 1999 it announced 130.6 tons of measured and indicated resources (which are more certain than inferred resources), while the end of 1999 saw a further increase in the resource estimate to 202.2 tons. In 2000 the estimate was updated to 255 tons. Finally, in 2003, the company announced an impressive exploitable reserve of 329.7 tons of gold, which was subsequently (2005) adjusted downwards to 314,1 tons (GR Annual Reports 2005b & 2006b). For the first time in post-1989 Romania, a limited version of scale economies began to emerge in the extractive sector, offering support to Bunker’s contention that greenfield mining projects tend to be limited to large deposits, of which there are relatively few (Bunker 2005)43. The Roşia Montană deposit was identified as a “world-class” asset (GR Annual Report 2003b), not only by its promoters, but also by mining analysts. The Northern Miner – a Canadian mining journal - published an investment commentary on the deposit identified by Gabriel Resources (2002). The commentary cites analysts from Dundee Securities, Canaccord Capital and HSBC Securities which make various assessments on the opportunity to invest in Gabriel Resources, noting that the feasibility study reveals excellent economics. The analyst of HSBC Securities claims that "we continue to believe that a larger-scale, low-cost undeveloped asset like Rosia Montana could prove very attractive to the industry's largest producers, which now face the task of continuously improving their portfolio of projects." (Northern Miner, Mar 18/24, 2002). The fact that Roşia Montană put Romania on the global mining map is also indicated by the following quote from the International Speculator (2006):

42 Mineral resources are considered “those economic mineral concentrations that have undergone enough scrutiny to quantify their contained metal to a certain degree”. Mineral reserves, one the other hand, are those resources which are known to be economically feasible for extraction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_resource_classification). 43 Although gold at Roşia Montană has long been exploited, even through an open pit mine, the area can be compared to a greenfield in terms of the global mining industry. The scale of the proposed mine dwarfs all previous operations as the proposed RMGC mine is projected to have an annual throughput of 13 million tons of ore, while the state-owned mine at Roşia Montană had a throughput of only 0.580 million tons (Sîntimbrean et al., 2006: 39; RMGC 2006b: 5).

Make no mistake; large, well-defined gold deposits like Rosia Montana are extremely rare and exactly the sort of thing resource-hungry major mining companies are likely to buy at a substantial premium (Casey 2006).

In fact, Roşia Montană is not the only project being planned in Romania. According to recent media accounts, there are about 21 mining areas for which eight foreign mining companies hold exploration or exploitation licenses. All 21 concessions are located in eight counties in Western Romania (see Figure 3.2) (Evz, June 24, 2010). The mining renaissance announced several years ago in the Northern Miner might be on its way.

Figure 3.2 Mining concessions in Romania (2010). The numbers shown refer to concessions in each county [Roşia Montană is located in Alba county). Source: Evz June 24, 201044.

44 Map available at: http://www.evz.ro/detalii/stiri/vestul-tarii-luat-la-ochi-de-cautatorii-de-aur-892169.html

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The premises for a mining boom in the precious metals sector of Romania seemed to be provided by the unprecedented increase in the price of gold, especially over the last decade (see Figure 3.3). When Esmeralda Exploration initiated the Baia Mare project, the gold price hovered below $400/oz. Now (May 2011) it exceeds $1500/oz and it is small wonder that investors have flocked to this area. However, even at its low level, gold mining seemed a profitable venture. Solveig Argeşeanu-Cunningham (2005) analyzes the reasons for which Romania became interested in exploiting its noble metal resources in the early 1990s. First, gold could be used to stabilize Romania’s volatile economy and become a steady source of foreign exchange while providing employment in mining areas where state-owned enterprises were undergoing restructuring and downsizing. Second, the exploitation of gold was expected to deliver geo-political benefits in response to the pressure to improve Romania’s economy and its global position, also in view of the high aspirations of the Romanian state to join the European Union. Third, Romania also had a bad environmental record and the new technologies for processing the tailings were considered opportunities for environmental clean-up. The history of the mineral sector in Romania since the emergence of Aurul did not, however, parallel the more or less steady climb in the price of gold shown below. Despite the tremendous growth in investors’ interest and exploratory activity in the country over the last decade, no single project has come into production after Aurul. The reasons are complex and will be discussed in this and in the subsequent sections. I will start by describing the gradual withdrawal of the Romanian state from the mining sector and then point to the economic and political premises of a future, foreign-owned mining industry in Romania. Although the global search for resources and the drive to develop large deposits is well supported both theoretically and empirically (at least as a prevailing trend), there seems to be a hiatus between the past and the present of mineral industry development.

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Figure 3.3. The increase in the world gold price since 1992 (the year of the Aurul joint venture at Baia Mare) Source: goldprice.org45

Roşia Montană: From Tight Integration to Laissez Fair

Mining was essential for the socialist economy of Romania, both as a provider of coal (Kideckel 2004: 44) and of precious metals (Matley 1971: 125; Baron 2006). After the nationalization of the means of production in June 1948, the role of the state in the extractive industry was consolidated further than it had been before, through the creation of a Ministry of Mines and Petroleum and of several specialized bodies as part of the first Communist-led government of Romania. The law on the control of production, processing and circulation of precious metals (638/1946) was modified in 1947 to include the requirement that within 15 days following the extraction of precious metals, the producer had to sell them to the National bank, which acted on behalf of the state (Baron 2006: 50). Even a “police for precious metals” was created at the same time (Baron 2006: 51). The Ministry of Mines and Petroleum was reorganized to assume

45 Graph available at: http://goldprice.org/gold-price-history.html#20_year_gold_price

102 new responsibilities with regard to the “rationalization and planning of production”, “investments and decisions for the setting up of new enterprises” and technical and vocational training and research (Baron 2006: 48). The socialist state was not only the owner of all economic assets, the manager of all economic activity, but also the only employer and also the sole provider of local amenities, infrastructure, and social welfare (Zamfir and Zamfir 1999: 35, 37) and even of ‘alternative’ employment for the miners’ spouses (e.g. in the coal mining region known as the Jiului Valley). The paternalist state was not only ubiquitous but also quite benevolent. Miners enjoyed higher wages, compared to workers in other branches of the economy, and could benefit more easily from (state-sponsored) accommodation (Larionescu et al. 1999: 4 - 5). This was not simply the result of pro-mining attitudes of the socialist leadership, although miners were a symbol of the working class, but rather hard-fought concessions obtained by the miners over serveral labour struggles. Miners are well-known for their high propensity for labour conflict (Kerr and Siegel 1954). The hotbed of mining militancy, in Romania, was the Jiului Valley. In 1977, a strike by the coalminers there was a serious enough challenge for the regime that the authoritarian leader Ceauşescu was compelled to come to the valley and address all the demands which included shorter working hours, improved safety, better provision of foodstuffs etc. (Larionescu et al. 1999: 4 - 5). This tight integration between the mining sector and the state came to an end in 1989 with the collapse of state socialism in Romania. The first step in the loosening process was the withdrawal of the state from the mining industry as part of the wider move of privatization and down-sizing of the extractive economy during the 1990s. In official terms, the state decided to either privatize or abandon mining activities altogether because these were considered inefficient and loss-making. In 1998 industry minister Berceanu presented a mining reform programme. In this document, it was acknowledged that the absence of reform in the mining sector had created huge losses for the state budget and was, at the same time, a social problem due to the monoindustrial development of mining areas throughout Romania (including Roşia Montană). According to media accounts (Ziua December 28, 1998), the state had to finance the mining sector with over $4 billion between 1991 and 1998, and despite these subsidies, the lives of miners and mining communities have not been improved at all.

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The national problem (waste of financial resources) emerged therefore in direct connection with the local problem of monoindustrial development. The state decided to reduce losses by scaling down its operations, closing down the most loss-making enterprises and laying off its workforce. In the future, mining towns were to follow unspecified “alternative” development options (Ziua December 28, 1998). This approach was in agreement with the outlook of the international financial institutions which shaped Romanian industrial policy after 1990. In fact, the reform of the mining industry took place under the auspices of the European Union and the IMF (Financial Times, February 7, 2003). The World Bank was to provide the expertise and the financial means for alleviating the social effects of mine closures (Larionescu et al. 1999: xx). The common wisdom that prevailed during the mid-1990s among Romanian state officials was that mining had to be fundamentally restructured. In most cases, this restructuring involved mine closures. In a report released in March 1998, World Bank experts in Romania summarized the effects of state subsidies on the mining sector by pointing out the following deficiencies: the exploitation of marginal deposits; financially risky activities; inadequate technologies; and the use of an outsized workforce. They also highlighted the inadequacy of existing regulations which have encouraged the continued exploitation of inefficient mines (especially underground) despite the decline in the demand for coal. Moreover, it was argued that these regulations have prevented private investors from offering both investment capital and modern technology in order to improve the efficiency of the mines (World Bank report cited in Larionescu et al. 1999: 7 - 8). It is important to outline the specific conditions under which the withdrawal of the state took place in the late 1990s. First, the state gave up its role as shareholder and manager of mining enterprises but was willing to co-finance some of the private investments in the mining industry if these would provide employment to those who had become redundant. This financial commitment was, however, quite limited, given that the fund for the reconstruction of disadvantaged mining areas represented only 20% of the reduction in subsidies resulting from the mining reform (Ziua December 28, 1998).

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Second, the most decisive step taken to open the former mining area to foreign investment was the creation of “disadvantaged zone”-status for monoindustrial mining areas. In the case of Roşia Montană, this official designation was issued in October 1999 and offered financial incentives for private investors (GR PR October 25 & December 15, 1999). Third, the state was willing to develop the local infrastructure to attract the much- touted investments and to manage loans from the World Bank for projects aimed at the reconstruction of mining areas (Ziua December 28, 1998). On the other hand, the reform programme proposed six strategies for ensuring the economic survival of individual miners. These strategies included both passive and proactive measures, such as financial compensation for 3 – 4 years after being laid-off (the most widely used measure), small incentives for redeveloping the closed mines or for the development/expansion of alternative family businesses. Local labour offices were put in charge of offering counseling and vocational training for the re-qualification/retraining of former miners. The latter were also advised that they can find employment with the companies in charge of carrying out the mine closures (Ziua December 28, 1998). In sum, the strategy of the Romanian state for restructuring the relatively large mining sector of Romania46 was either to close down the mines or to create the conditions for attracting foreign investments in the mining industry. At the same time, for the tens of thousands of laid-off workers the state envisioned individual coping strategies, by encouraging non-mining activities. In other words, the state separated the fate of the former miners from that of mining towns, seen as economic units. The results were often dismal, as the following account from a major coal producing area in Romania – the Jiu Valley - suggests:

After the fall of the Party-state, however, unemployment in the Jiu Valley rose and the region became a pariah for investment as well as an embarrassment for the nation itself, viewed both as an iconic example of ‘regressive’ opposition to democratic reforms and of embattled unionists advocating unrest to stop the withdrawal of the state from the economy (Friedman 2007: 422).

46 In 1995, the mining industry in Romania employed 190.000 workers, who had a total number of approximately 600.000 dependants (Ziua December 28, 1998).

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However, not all mining areas proved to be “pariahs for investment”. Even in their last years of state ownership, some mining companies were still making profit (Ziua October 23, 1998 cited in Larionescu et al. 1999: 9). There were, however, significant regional differences. For example, even within the same state-owned autonomous administration for copper mining in Deva, Romania, there seemed to be wide differences in profitability between different mining areas. Whereas in some areas of the Brad branch of the RAC Deva, the production of one kg of gold required three times its value on the market, other areas (including Zlatna, Roşia Montană, Baia de Arieş and Abrud), received fewer subsidies despite having a somewhat higher productivity (Larionescu et al. 1999: 45). As a result, several gold producing areas awakened the interest of foreign investors. A report released by the World Bank office in Romania on the restructuring of the mining sector (March 1998) draws attention to two foreign private investors which have been active in forming joint ventures with the Autonomous Administrations (RACs) in Deva and Baia Mare (cited in Larionescu et al. 1999: 46). These were Gabriel Resources, which created the “Roşia Montană Gold Corporation” and “Esmeralda Exploration” which created the “Aurul” mining company. The report mentioned that the companies were “small” but given their combined investment of $12 million, they seemed to represent a hopeful sign for the generally bleak situation of the Romanian mining industry. From the point of view of its post-1989 history, Romania does not have the profile of a raw materials exporter. Despite the mineral potential – especially in the precious metals sector – the mining industry was not revitalized by foreign investment as the official rhetoric claimed. The explanation for this seems to lie in the fact that the first large private investment in Romania was none other than the Roşia Montană project. As long as this project did not reach the production stage – in this way showing the Romania’s mining sector was investor friendly – it kept the other investors in waiting. Seen from a macro perspective, the Roşia Montană mine proposal seems to stand at the intersection of two powerful processes, working at cross- purposes, that have reached an unstable equilibrium: the economic pressure to develop the gold deposit meets a hesitating political will to approve the mine. Doug Casey from the International Speculator explains this peculiar situation as follows:

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So it's not the geology but the politics of trying to build a mine in the face of environmental opposition that has GBU [Gabriel Resources] selling for about $30/oz of gold in the ground, versus a more typical $100/oz for the kind of resources it is known to possess.

The political will to re-develop the mining industry through foreign investment is not as obvious as the recent literature on the role of hosts in attracting FDI suggests (Bandelj 2009). The following section will analyze the economic and political context in which resource extraction was prevented so far from taking off. This, however, might change in the years to come.

The Economic and Political Case for Roşia Montană: Between Neoliberalism and Nationalism

The literature dealing with capitalist diversity in Eastern Europe highlights the operation of certain leading sectors which tend to predominate in the political economy of each country. Béla Greskovits defines leading sectors as “major industry groups that share factor-intensity, product character, and significantly contribute to exports” (2005: 113). He distinguishes four types of leading export sectors by the intensity of the physical and/or human capital required in production: heavy-basic sectors are intensive only in physical capital (with examples that include agriculture, mining or metallurgy); heavy-complex sectors are intensive in both physical and human capital (e.g. car manufacturing); light-complex are those sectors which are intensive in human capital but not in physical capital (e.g. electronics production); finally, light- basic sectors have low levels of both physical and human capital intensity and involve mostly unskilled labor (e.g. textiles or furniture manufacturing). Based on this classification, Greskovits identifies the leading sectors of each European country, including Romania. In 2003, the dominant Romanian exports were light basic (46 per cent of total exports) and heavy basic (27 per cent). Greskovits (2005: 114) thus identifies Romania as Europe’s “clothing (sweat)shop”, clearly distinguished in its export profile from “heavy metal” Bulgaria, “VW country” Slovakia and “general electric” Hungary.

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In a subsequent analysis, which included the Visegrád countries47, Slovenia, the Baltic states (but not Romania and Bulgaria) as well as three countries of the Community of Independent States (CIS) (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia), Greskovits and Bohle (2007) draw a much sharper distinction between the first group of Eastern European states and those of the former Soviet Union. The latter are compared to the “least advanced countries in the world” due to their reliance on the export of natural resources (2007: 101). In contrast, the Visegrád states and Slovenia produce some of the same complex export commodities as those produced in the advanced economies of Western Europe. Romania and Bulgaria would presumably fall somewhere between these two extremes. The relevant conclusion for the present analysis is that during its post-1989 economic trajectory, Romania has not excelled in heavy-basic exports such as minerals. The extent to which it can develop its heavy-basic export sector is an open question that cannot be settled in advance. However, it is worth inquiring into the “possibility spaces” of the future of mining in Romania. Two development scenarios can be advanced if one assumes that the mineral bounty of Romania will not remain unexploited. In each case, I will seek to explain how the structural pathways of the future are not pre-determined but are shaped by complex interactions. The two scenarios are distinguished by the level at which the future of mining is projected, that is either the national or the regional. Each scenario has not only its bright part, namely income streams for the state as a result of royalties and dividends from mineral exploitation, but also its negative side: the so-called resource curse and fragmenting development. The first scenario, in which mining becomes a dominant export sector of the national economy, is based on the assumption that several extractive industries would need to be developed apart from the mining of precious metals, to count Romania as a primary commodity producer. Given the low endowment of the Romanian economy with human and technological capital to produce complex commodities for export (see Greskovits 2005), the heavy-basic path of development might actually be chosen in addition to the light-basic one. During the recent economic recession, there were voices in the Romanian media that indicated mining, and the Roşia Montană project in particular, as a possible “super-project” for

47 These include Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

108 revitalizing the Romanian economy (Romania Liberă June 2, 2009). Moreover, the government programme 2009 – 2012, approved by the Romanian Parliament in December 2009 mentions under its “energy and natural resources” chapter the provision that the government will carry out a “national strategy for the development of non-energetic mineral resources and the re- evaluation of the Roşia Montană project” (Government of Romania 2009)48. In December 2009, the minister of the economy, Adriean Videanu, stated publicly that he “wants this project started as soon as possible” (Evz, 18 December 2009). The political will seems to be present, but two years after these explicit intentions to develop the Roşia Montană mine, the project has not yet been approved. This heavy-basic pathway may seem highly appealing under crisis conditions, of the sort that have plagued Romania over the last three years. However, for taking a path of economic growth based on the exploitation of minerals, Romanian leaders would need to openly embrace neoliberal policies through which to attract foreign mining companies. The reason for this is that the concentration of investment in mining is more often than not the result of neoliberalizing policy changes which have been observed in various contexts, for example in Central Asia and South America (Bebbington et al. 2008a). Such changes are, indeed, underway, as witnessed by the recent proposal to amend the Romanian mining law in order to facilitate the access of investors, and especially of the developer of Roşia Montană, to the land required for their projects. More exactly, there are several amendments to the mining law which are meant to streamline the process of receiving the different approvals needed for mining projects (urbanism, environmental and archaeological discharge certificates) and which also simplifies the expropriation procedures for the population residing within the project footprint (Dumitraş 2011). According to Romanian legislation, the environmental permit for the new mine can only be issued at the conclusion of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) review process. This process began in 2006 and is still ongoing as of late 2011. The environmental impact study was carried out by the project developer (RMGC) and was submitted to the Romanian Ministry of the Environment in May 2006 (an approximately 5000-page long document). The company was

48 Available at: http://www.gov.ro/capitolul-17-energie-si-resurse-minerale__l1a2074.html (Romanian only).

109 subsequently required to organize public consultations, which took place in August 2006. Of these, 14 were organized in Romania and 2 in Hungary – the latter due to the potential transboundary impacts of the project, which are regulated in the so-called Espoo Convention. After the consultations, about 21,000 concerned citizens and organizations sent comments to the ministry of the environment and forests (MoEF), all of which RMGC had to address in an annex to the EIA report (roughly 5600 questions and the responses to them, for a total of about 13,000 pages). The EIA review process continued with the MoE until September 2007 when the procedure was suspended by the environment minister due to an invalid urbanism certificate required for the EIA. The certificate was legally challenged by opposing NGOs and annulled by the Cluj Tribunal in July 2007. After having obtained a new urbanism certificate in 2010, RMGC saw the recommencement of its EIA review process by the MoE in September 2010. The review process is ongoing as of September 2011. The uncertain progression of the EIA review process is also linked to the polarized political reactions that the Roşia Montană project has engendered over the last decade or more. While looking back at the “political” trajectory of the Roşia Montană project over the last fifteen years, it appears that is was a much checkered history. In historical sociological terms, it resembles a random walk of political and institutional support for foreign mining companies rather than a consistent endorsement of foreign direct investment (FDI) in mining. The successful bid of GR for the gold-bearing mining areas administrated by RAC Deva (1995) occurred under the leadership of former president Ion Iliescu and his Social Democratic government (1990 – 1996). The way in which this bid took place is obscure as the event was not recorded in the press releases of Gabriel Resources (which begin only in 1999) and the media reported about it, in largely critical terms, only three years later (1998)49. The bid itself is surprising because the Iliescu regime is known as the promoter of a national capitalist strategy of transformation which largely excluded foreign capital (Gowan 1995). However, given that the Aurul joint venture was formed during the same time, it appears that foreign gold mining companies enjoyed some sort of exceptional treatment. The joint venture

49 The validity of this observation may be limited by the use of internet-based archives of newspapers, rather than the actual hardcopies.

110 between GR and RAC Deva, called Euro Gold Resources (Gabriel Resources 65%, Minvest Deva 33.8% and three minority shareholders 1.2%), was established in 1997 under the Ciorbea Government (1996 – 1998), a rather heterogonous alliance of right-wing parties which pledged, however, to follow a neoliberal economic strategy (T. Keil and J. Keil 2002). The minister of industry, Radu Berceanu, of the Democratic Party is known as an early supporter of the Roşia Montană project. In general, however, the Roşia Montană mining project went through periods of political support and relative disgrace on the part of different parties and political leaders which zigzagged without any clear direction. A comprehensive overview of the numerous instances in which Romanian leaders have publicly supported or opposed the Roşia Montană project is beyond the scope of this analysis. To provide a sense of the polarized political climate around the Roşia Montană project I will cite some of the best-known positions taken by top leaders of the Romanian government and major opposition leaders. The purpose of this overview is to suggest that one cannot discern a consistent political position in Romanian national politics with regard to the Roşia Montană project. One would be hard pressed to indentify a prevailing neoliberal or nationalist position, or any other coherent political orientation, that could be seen to guide the political elites in dealing with this case. In March 2000, Radu Berceanu (Minister of industry) and Mihail Ianas (President of National agency of mineral resources) stated that the (right-leaning) Romanian government “fully supports” the development of the mining industry by foreign mining companies, including the development of the Roşia Montană mining project (GR Press Release March 31, 2000). After the Social Democrats came to power in the fall of 2000, the minister of economy and commerce, Dan Ioan Popescu, stated at a meeting with trade unions in September 2003 that “he believes in this project and supports it” (Ziua September 10, 2003). However, only a few months before (June 2003), Prime Minister Adrian Năstase had declared that "the RMGC project involves serious social and environmental risks and is not a priority for Romania”. He stated that he does not wish for Romania to become a modern colony as a result of this project, suggesting a strong nationalist stance. (Greenpeace, 2006; Toader in Ziua 2003). On

111 the other hand, a Romanian parliamentary commission, chaired by social democratic leader Alexandru Sassu, elaborated a favourable report on the RMGC mine by saying that “the project will provide significant benefits to Romania and its economy, [including the] revitalization of the Romanian mining industry” (GR PR July 7, 2003 ; Ziua April 27, 2004; Ziua October 11, 2004). Shortly thereafter, Năstase criticized the report as “vague” and argued that the project itself involves “serious social and environmental problems" (Greenpeace 2006). The report, which has not yet been published, has had no identifiable impact on the approval of the project (as of May 2011). The right-wing Democratic Party showed, despite its initial (2000) endorsement of Roşia Montană, a similar ambivalence towards the proposed mining project. On a visit to the historic mining town in the summer of 2003, future presidential candidate Traian Băsescu stated that “A misguided political decision, an environmental demagogy, could condemn a whole area to poverty. […] PD [Democratic Party] will have to take a political stance on the first private investment in mining. When we will decide that the Roşia Montană investment should not be abandoned, we should be able to justify it.” Surprisingly, although the Democratic Party came to power in December 2004 it has not explicitely endorsed the RMGC project until five years later when it included it in its Government programme (2009). So far, however, the Ministry of Economy and Commerce (the successor of Ministry of Industry) has not taken any concrete steps to push the RMGC project forward50. To make matters more complicated, international actors also became involved in the conflict. The Hungarian minister of the Environment and Water Management said in August 2002 that he intends to activate the Espoo convention (on transboundary environmental impacts) against the RM mine (Greenpeace 2006). A few months later, Caroline Jackson, chair of the Environmental commission of the European Parliament, confirmed that Rosia Montana is a serious problem with regard to Romania's EU accession. (Greenpeace 2006). After a visit to Roşia Montană of four European MPs, Jonas Sjostedt of the European United Left party in Sweden said:

50 For example, the ministry’s website includes no reference to the RMGC project.

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The government should bear in mind that, once an EU member, [Romania] will be one of the foremost mining powers of [Europe]. […] If this project goes ahead, violating European laws, Romania will face difficulties in its accession (as cited in Popescu 2003b).

One year later, a visit by a different group of European MPs concluded that the mining project is, au contraire, highly desirable: There is a company which offers this [environmental] guarantee, with an alternative [form] of exploitation, which is much better. People need to understand that RMGC has, based on what we saw here, one of the most sustainable programs of economic recovery.” (Nelly Maes cited in Marcu, 2004).

Contradictory interests at the national and European levels ensured that the Roşia Montană project remained on different political agendas, but without receiving a decisive endorsement or rejection from any decision-maker. For reasons that will be probably become apparent after the conflict will have reached a resolution, even project opponents such as Hungarian political leaders did not take a politically decisive stance against the project. For example, Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany offered Romania increased investment, at a joint news conference with PM Năstase, if the neighbouring state stops the controversial gold mining project. At the same time, however, Gyurcsany has also said that it would be ‘sinful and wrong’ for Hungary, which joined the EU in May 2004, to veto Romania’s 2007 accession if the mine goes ahead (Wood 2005: 4). Perhaps the most spectacular political alliance created in Romania to oppose the RMGC project was that between two leaders of a right-wing nationalist Romanian party and a Hungarian ethnic party51. In February 2007, two senators from the Great Romania Party (Gheorghe Funar) and the Democratic Union of Hungarians (UDMR) in Romania (Peter Eckstein Kovacs) introduced a law bill for debate in the Romanian Senate to ban the use of cyanide in mining. This would have effectively cancelled the RMGC project, while it would have had only minimal impact on the existing state-owned mines using cyanide52. The bill was delayed in the

51 These two parties are generally seen in Romanian politics as irreconcilable “enemies”. 52 The bill, which aims to amend the mining law of 1998, reads: “Mining activity based on cyanide technologies is prohibited at any stage of gold and silver extraction and also at any stage of wastes processing and enrichment. This prohibition also applies to the use cyanide compounds in any percentage as well as to its use in combination with other methods for waste processing and enrichment.” (Cyanide free Romania).

113 specialty committee of the parliament and still not been included on the Senate’s agenda (2011). In striking similarity, the proposal to amend the Romanian mining law so as to remove the legal obstacles against the Roşia Montană mine was advanced by two MPs belonging to the leading party and the main opposition party. The not-yet-clear economic and political interests regarding the Roşia Montană thus run across the visible political divides. There have been widespread rumors that UDMR opposes the Roşia Montană project because it supports the position taken by Hungarian politicians, who are staunch opponents of the mine. In September 2007, environment minister Attila Korodi (UDMR) suspended the approval process for the Roşia Montană project invoking an invalid urbanism certificate. Three years later, however, the process was resumed under the leadership of another environment minister, Laszlo Borbely, who is also a member of UDMR. So far, however, no official statement regarding the environmental evaluation has been released. In conclusion, the promoters and supporters of the RM project have not seemed able to mobilize sufficient political clout to push it forward towards production. Deep uncertainties regarding the fate of the mine, and of Roşia Montană, persist. However, below the visible level of political statements lies the realm of what Beck calls subpolitics. The role of the local NGO Alburnus Maior and its strategic litigation tactics (Kühnle 2009) and the key position of courts which enabled the annulment of key authorizations for the project also had an important role to play. “While the façades remain intact, quasi- governmental power positions arise in the research laboratories, nuclear power plants, genetic factories, editorial office, courts and so on.” (Beck 1999: 66). The subpolitical realm appears to display a dynamic of its own in challenging political and economic interests related to the Roşia Montană mine. It is quite remarkable, furthermore, that despite the claims of widespread corruption in the Romanian juridical system, several regional courts stepped in as key players in derailing the smooth development of the mining project.

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Roşia Montană: The Beginning of the Resource Curse for Romania?

If Romania were to take the heavy-basic path, it would certainly be exposed to the risks of the so-called “resource curse”. This, at least, is one of the dominant arguments in the social scientific literature on mining. The resource curse thesis has its origins in economics, but has made its way into sociology and other disciplines. Neoclassical economics assumed that mining plays an important role in development because it converts mineral resources into outputs that can be either directly consumed or converted into other forms of capital that increase future outputs in other sectors (Davis and Tilton 2005). Against this view, that reached its heyday during the 1950s and 1960s but is held by some even today, the resource curse hypothesis posits that “the exploitation of mineral wealth [is] far from a sufficient condition for sustained economic development” (Davis and Tilton 2005: 235). In its classic formulation by Auty (1994), the resource course theory can be stated as follows:

The mineral economies have underperformed compared with countries of a similar size and level of economic development which lack the mineral bonus. This is because all too often, the rents from the mineral resource were used to evade the need to compete internationally in manufacturing (and in some instances, in agriculture also) (Auty 1994: 12).

Among others, well-known economists such as Nobel-prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard- economist Jeffrey Sachs have recently devoted sustained attention to the resource curse problem. The Revenue Watch Institute (part of the Soros-funded Open Society Institute) has released a series of publications fostering transparency and accountability of governments and corporations. The second volume entitled Covering Oil (2005) includes Stiglitz’s thoughts on how to transform natural resources from a curse into a blessing. He observes, revealing a sociological insight that is seldom found in mainstream economics, that resource-rich countries are also marked by large inequalities (Stigliz 2005: 13). Economists are concerned with this unexpected outcome of resource bounty because, while the latter have helped to raise living standards, they have failed to set resource rich countries on a path of sustained growth (Humphreys et al. 2007).

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Anthropologists and sociologists interested in the natural resource sector have adopted this concept to describe the effects of resource dependency, while in other cases they have advanced alternative, and more radical concepts such as that of “addictive economies” (Freudenburg 1992). However, in contrast to economists’ focus on the national state, these researchers have devoted attention to subnational entities, such as regions (Pick et al. 2008). Communities and localities faced with specific curses have also been analyzed in the activist literature (see Bebbington et al. 2008). Filer et al. (2006) distinguish the effects of the resource curse not only in economic terms but also in political, cultural and environmental terms. From a political point of view, the curse involves an intensification of conflict between actors at the national (or even the international) level who are in competition with each other in order to gain access to the resource rents generated by the extractive industry. As Glenn Banks (2008) cogently explained, the resources to which the curse refers are not always or even “simply” mineral resources. Citing the case of Melanesia, he argues that “social relationships, identities and land are the things that matter in Melanesia, and to believe that conflicts of any kind, even ‘resource’ conflicts, can be primarily about anything else is an illusion (Banks 2008: 31). A single-minded focus on legally defined resources is also inappropriate at Roşia Montană since not all local actors recognize the ownership of resources by the state. A group with a distinct position on the ownership over mineral rights at Roşia Montană is represented by those who were dispossessed of their mining rights by the 1948 nationalization and now claim their rights back (Formula As August 21 – 27, 2007). In cultural terms, the curse can mean the development of unrealistic hopes and expectations, by different actors who might expect “windfall” benefits from mining, when it is uncertain to what extent such benefits will accrue among different social groups. The theory of fragmenting development (to be discussed below) also raises questions about the notion that mining benefits countries, regions or even localities as wholes. What can be a benefit for some in a mining community can be a disappointed hope for others in the same community or in neighboring localities as the case of Roşia Montană shows.

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Finally, in environmental terms, the curse involves diverse forms of long-term damage done to the natural environment, which may offset the short-term economic benefits received by a minority of the affected population (Filler et al. 2006). The famous case of the Ok Tedi mine is a case in point. The resource curse took its toll on the environment in Romania (and several neighboring states such as Hungary and Serbia) with the famous accident at the Aurul mine near Baia Mare. A breach in the dam of the tailings pond of the Aurul plant occurred on January 30, 2000, releasing 10,000 cubic metals of slurry containing cyanide and heavy metals into waterways in Romania, Hungary and Serbia (Argeseanu Cunnigham 2005: 99, 105). The reaction of the European Union was swift and it framed the problem in regional or trans-boundary (rather than national) terms. The European Commission vice-president Loyola de Palacio said that "this is a true European catastrophe." (AFP February 11, 2000 ). The Baia Mare accident also prompted an expert meeting which drafted the so-called “Berlin- Declaration on Gold Mining Using Cyanide Process” in 2000. A few years later, the “Protocol on Civil Liability and Compensation for Damage Caused by the Transboundary Effects of Industrial Accidents on Transboundary Waters” was signed by 22 states on May 21, 2003 at the Environment for Europe Ministerial Conference in Kiev, Ukraine (Antypas and Stec 2003). All these legislative and expert-driven processes, and others which followed throughout the early 2000s sought to render cyanide-based technologies for gold extraction unacceptable, at least in the European space. As such, they created difficulties in the development of the Roşia Montană mining project, but none of them appeared decisive. In part as a result of sustained demands from environmental NGOs and some MEPs concerned about the RMGC project, in May 2010 the European Parliament approved with overwhelming majority (488 votes in favour and 48 against), a resolution to ban the use of cyanide in mining. The resolution was subsequently rejected by the European Commission. The pathway towards the Roşia Montană mine has not been irrevocably blocked – through the adoption of a ban on cyanide – which makes its fate still uncertain.

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Living with Another Curse: Fragmenting Development at the Subnational Level

If neoliberal globalization is viewed as a process of worldwide, profit-oriented competition, it is important, at the same time, to recognize that it is essentially contradictory, heterogeneous and restructuring in its effects. This is the view advanced by German geographer Fred Scholz, who posits as the outcome of this process a trend towards fragmenting development. At the local end of the local-to-global continuum, the process of fragmentation integrates some actors within networks of information and commodities while others, although sharing the same physical spaces, are excluded from such networks (Scholz 2004: 5 - 6)53 . This creates different and shifting groups of winners and losers (or pseudo-winners). In terms of the argument advanced here, and with reference to transnational extractive regimes, fragmenting development will take regions and nations apart and integrate some places within extralocal regimes, while excluding others. This creates a potential chasm between those who take part in development and those who are excluded from it altogether. Waack (2004) applies Scholz’s theory to RM and reaches the conclusion that the mining project at Roşia Montană imposes a stark choice on this place. In Scholz’s terms, it can either become a globalized place, by becoming dependent on an extralocal centre of power and only ephemerally integrated into a network of investment and information or, in case the RMGC project fails, it can slip into the new periphery, which is excluded from any investment and, consequently, from any development opportunity (Waack 2004b: 98). Fragmenting development at Roşia Montană also sets the stage for understanding the process of resettlement of the local population. Given that RMGC has so far acquired properties on a “willing buyer, willing seller” basis, it has offered local residents the option to leave Roşia Montană, with a certain amount of compensation, or not. This “negative” right – that is to refuse relocation - has accrued due to the inability of the project developers to mobilize the eminent domain prerogatives of the state. As a result, RMGC has not used

53 This is a fairly liberal interpretation of Scholz’s theory. For Scholz’s (2004: 1), globalization is fundamentally shaped by global competition and appears, in the sense, to be somewhat deterministic. Furthermore, for Scholz, place is not “any place”, but refers to spatially concentrated activities which separate internally connected social, economic, political and cultural aspects from the outside. Illustrations of places considered in this way are free production zones or investment promotion zones in the Third World (Scholz 2004: 4).

118 expropriation although it does not exclude its use in a small number of cases where no agreement can be reached with the local landowners (RRAP 2006). For RMGC to be able to use the state as an expropriating agent, the proposed project would have to be declared a project of “public interest” which would require, in turn, the adoption of a specific law in Parliament. Due to historic reasons, and the still living memories of willful expropriations during the socialist regime (McAleer 2001), no political leader has so far put forward a proposal to declare the RMGC project of “public interest”. This has left a space of indeterminacy for those residents of Roşia Montană who are eligible, according to RMGC criteria, to sell their land. Fragmenting development means, however, that the space of indeterminacy is not uniform. The residents of Roşia Montană whose land is not eligible for compensation might be condemned to immobility for the very same reasons that the other residents are “free” to move. If the project will be implemented, the market value of the properties in the immediate proximity of the project might fall still further and effectively tie residents to the land.

Conclusion

The above discussion has aimed to show that no degree of (apparent) dependency on natural or, more generally, economic resources precludes a certain extent of structural indeterminacy. The simple assumption of natural resource dependency is rendered problematic by the Roşia Montană case. Inferring that such dependency shapes the personality and behavior of residents of natural resource communities is highly problematic as it ignores the fact that change does take place even in apparently unchanging single occupational communities. One of the early studies which show how technological change can reveal a space of unexpected agency even in a highly structured situation is Cottrell’s essay “Death by Dieselization” (1951). Although not concerned with a mining town but rather with a railroad town, Cottrell draws the implications of a specific change in the technology of transportation – the introduction of the diesel locomotive after the Second World War in the US – on the local life of a town whose raison d’être was the servicing of steam engines which pulled the trains along a 80-mile canyon across the desert. With the introduction of the diesel engine – which did not require such

119 frequent a servicing as a steam engine – the town was sentenced to “death”. The reactions of the residents of Caliente (the fictitious name of the town) deviated from any sort of rational acceptance of the impersonal workings of the market. They expected that the railroad company continue to spend in Caliente or at least reward with increased income those forced to move:

Confronted by a choice between the old means and resultant "injustice" which their use entails, and the acceptance of new means which they believe will secure them the "justice" they hold to be their right, they are willing to abandon (in so far as this particular area is concerned) the liberal state and the omnicompetent market in favor of something that works to provide "justice." (Cottrell 1951: 364 – 5).

Cottrell brings to light the fact that even in single-industry places, the reactions of people facing radical changes in the economic basis of their lives can be quite varied and, indeed, unexpected. He skillfully suggests how the tension between technological change and cultural expectations is played out in the lives of those who embraced the codes of “sound” community life. “Men [who] built their homes of concrete and brick” and laid the “water system in cast iron which will last for centuries” (Cottrell 1951: 358-9) – that is those conforming most closely to cultural expectations – were hit the hardest by the introduction of diesel locomotives. Their reaction was, thus, not commensurate with the introduction of simple technological fix but assumed a wide variety of strategies to restore a vague but powerfully felt notion of “justice”. The assumption that informs my focus on agency at Roşia Montană is well summarized by Sharon Hays: “Structurally transformative agency, in other words, is made possible under particular historical circumstances - when portions of what were once deeper social structures become particularly malleable and provide occasion for significant collective refashioning.” (Hays 1994: 64). Despite favorable geological conditions and interest on the part of mining companies in Transylvania, a liberalized mining sector in need of investment, a general even if hesitant political acceptance of neoliberal reforms and the likely prospect of a heavy-basic path of economic development, the Roşia Montană project did not take off. The reasons for this stem from a variety of sources, including Romania’s EU accession process, less-than-obvious and changing political considerations on the Romanian, Hungarian and European scenes, the

120 disastrous outcome of the first Romanian-foreign joint venture in the mineral sector (the Aurul plant in Baia Mare), among others. The search for analytical clarity should not, however, obscure the micro sources of opposition which also prevented the development of the Roşia Montană. It is to these that I now turn. The interpretive framework that will be used in the following chapter considers how actors responded to the contingencies encountered in their interactions in Roşia Montană, while bracketing in the meantime the agentic nature of these contingencies. I should probably end this chapter by warning the reader that what will follow in the next chapter is an inquiry into a broad space of agency which allows for a plurality of identities, relationships and problematizations – that are likely to entice the researcher to imagine the world as highly malleable. But this is the case only while it lasts. This period might come to an end, sooner or later, if Roşia Montană is set on a narrowing path with the eventual approval and commencement of the RMGC mining project. In characterizing my approach to the Roşia Montană case I could reinterpret Machiavelli’s distinction between ailments that are, in the beginning, “easy to cure and difficult to understand” and ailments which later become “easy to understand and difficult to cure.” (cited in Wallerstein 2007: 381). While various forms of agency are still able to express themselves at Roşia Montană and are bewildering in their complexity because the fate of the mining project is uncertain, what might come after the project is eventually approved is a clear structural repositioning of Roşia Montană as a mining place, but one in which agency will be significantly reduced.

Chapter Four: Dynamic Choices and Emerging Contingencies at Roşia Montană

Introduction

The world is perceived from untold numbers of perspectives, from the ideologies and myths of various nationalisms, ethnicities and class and religious traditions, through countless inflections of status and taste, through to variegated and changing discourses of sexuality, education, family, gender, morality and so on and so forth. Each of these is full of connotations, condensations, displacements, imagined symbolisms and chains of equivalence and difference, of emotional resonances and anxious ambivalences that play havoc with any notion of corporate or any other agents having a direct line to their own objective vested interests (Stones 2001: 186).

The above quote provides an appropriate introduction to the analysis of agency at Roşia Montană. It conveys the complexity, dynamism, unpredictability and richness of human action in a setting such as Roşia Montană which is, in turn, a highly complex historical and geographic structure. This chapter incorporates the key analytical contribution of the thesis. It aims to map out the agentic processes taking place in and around the Roşia Montană mining project using actor-network theory, also known as the sociology of translation. This mapping exercise takes advantage of the fact that the story of the Roşia Montană mining project has been played in slow motion over the last few years and it thus reveals with greater clarity how various actors tinker diligently with what have long appeared as relatively inflexible structures. To use the language of ANT, all processes of translation – of variable linkages between different interests – taking place in Roşia Montană are still in the making. From an analytical point of view, this is a welcome empirical case. If the initiators of a given translation would manage to impose their construction on the world, that is, if interests would materialize in new constraining structures

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122 then “all translation [will end up] solidifying actor-worlds. Successful translation quickly makes us forget its history” (Callon 1986b: 28). What might be but a fleeting moment in the longue durée of Roşia Montană, is of great consequence for our appreciation of human agency:

The notion of translation recalls all the work and the consent that was granted, that was needed in order to achieve the seemingly natural order, where each element relates with the others (Callon 1986b: 28).

As Jóhannesson rightly argues, for actor-network theory, “the emphasis is on the work inherent in networks” (Jóhannesson 2005: 135; emphasis in original). It is the variable element, the thinking, deciding, musing and choosing – and the often unpredictable consequences of these processes - which are important for understanding the story of agency at Roşia Montană. These processes of translation are riddled with tensions and the playing out of tensions is apt to shed light on interests, dreams, projects, and identities that would remain invisible in the grand play of the political economy of mining. “A social order reveals itself in the way it responds to pressure” says Burawoy (1998: 17) in outlining his extended case method. But the same may be said of events in which pressures and forces become visible because contingent events prevent them from running their full course. The natural order of a process such the accumulation by dispossession is sometimes suspended and this suspension offers insight into the many ways in which this naturalness could have run astray. In short, the argument of this chapter is that the translation process initiated by GR upon its arrival in Roşia Montană, which was meant to transform the heterogeneous reality of this place into an orderly, profit-yielding project, has generated a variety of reactions and new translations which have spawned a broad category of actors. These included residents of Roşia Montană with various and variable interests as well as organizations and different interest groups on the local scene. Agency is revealed not only because the RMGC translation is incomplete, but also because all the other translations, initiated by “large” or “small” actors, have not reached their conclusion yet. Alburnus Maior has delayed the project but has not yet stopped it once and for all. Some residents have left Roşia Montană – thus giving the mining project right of way – but not all of them. The landscape of Roşia Montană has remained

123 largely unchanged but distinct areas within it have undergone degradation or, on the contrary, rejuvenation. There are several distinct ways to depict the translations carried out by different actors. One is the historical approach preferred by Callon and Law. The focus is on the ways in which the four moments of translation, known as problematization, interessement, enrollment and mobilization (Callon 1986a), generate reactions from other actors, which can either take the form of acceptance, rejection or, more often than not, ambivalence (Smelser 1998). In this sense, one translation emerges from the other in a generative process. The other approach is actor-driven, in that the different translations are depicted as they are articulated by different actors. This second way to depict translations is useful in the case of complex articulations between different actors. The third possibility is to trace translations following a pre- established framework, such as Relph’s (1976) properties of place outlined in chapter two. The analysis of translations undertaken here combines all three approaches, but uses them at different levels of generality. More exactly, I use Relph’s analytical framework at the most general level in order to identify the broad dimensions within which agency manifests itself in relation to place, by focusing on location, landscape, community, rootedness and home places. The additional dimension of place mentioned by Relph – the temporal aspect of place – will not be treated separately but will be considered in terms of the unfolding of translations over time, that is, by tracing the history of translations. Within each translation I will point out the role of different actors in engendering new translations. It is important to justify my use of Relph’s phenomenological perspective on place as a way to avoid possible misunderstandings. From a pragmatic point of view, the characteristics of places which he outlines provide a convenient way to systematize an otherwise bewildering variety of “agentic processes” as I have observed them in Roşia Montană during my fieldwork (2005 – 2008) and afterwards. Relph’s framework is used bearing in mind the author’s own justification of its usefulness:

…while complexity and variety of scale may well be desirable qualities in terms of our experiences of places, when it comes to trying to understand place as a phenomenon these

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same qualities present major stumbling blocks. There is, however, one possibility for clarifying place. By taking place as a multifaceted phenomenon of experience and examining the various properties of place, such as location, landscape, and personal involvement , some assessment can be made of the degree to which these are essential to our experience and sense of place.

This is not, however, an uncritical borrowing of concepts from the geography literature. Relph’s (1976) notion of the essence of place comes very close to the point of view advanced in this thesis, as it puts the emphasis on human intentionality:

The basic meaning of place, its essence, does not therefore come from locations, nor from the trivial functions that places serve, nor from the community that occupies it, nor from superficial and mundane experiences - though these are all common and perhaps necessary aspects of places. The essence of place lies in the largely unselfconscious intentionality that defines places as profound centres of human existence (Relph 1976: 43).

In the remainder of the chapter I will show how the mundane characteristics of places, which appear unremarkable as places follow a path-dependent evolution, are suddenly cast in a new light once there is a change in each of these characteristics. In what ways do actors seek to change the location of a place and what are the consequences? What do actors make of a landscape that is threatened and threatening without actually being changed? How does a community change when its members follow different trajectories of displacement? What do actors make of the private and personal places when they change homes? How do actors experience rootedness and the meaning of home places? These are the groups of questions that will guide the following analysis without aiming to find definite answers. The agency of actors at Roşia Montană is proliferating and ramifying, constantly renewing alliances without reaching an endpoint. At least, at the time of the collection of the interview material discussed below and a few years later, no crystallization of a new structure was visible.

Roşia Montană on the Move: the Ambiguities of Relocation

Relph (1976) discusses location and position in physical terms and cites the example of a ship or a gypsy camp which may constantly or frequently change their location without ceasing, for

125 this reason, to be places. He argues that “location or position is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of pIace, even if it is a very common condition” (Relph 1976: 29). The concept of location will be used in a broader sense here to refer to the geographic, historical, political or administrative setting to which a place is linked by more or less durable ties, often in complex ways. Location is, of course, a relational concept, referring to the relative position of place which is susceptible to be transformed by the agency of actors – hence my interest in the problems of locating and relocating Roşia Montană. Callon and Law’s sociology of translation is critically linked to displacement, that is, to processes of relocation: “Translation cannot be effective, i.e. lead to stable constructions, if it is not anchored to such movements, to physical and social displacements” (Callon 1986b). Movements can occur at different levels, however, and giving a sense of these different levels will reveal, it is hoped, the complexity of agentic processes occurring at Roşia Montană. Location can be conceived, for example, in relation to the information pool which people use to make sense of their surroundings. Joseph Tainter contends that, in the new peripheries incorporated into the larger economy, there is a disjuncture between the pool of information which is substantially local and the extent of their economic relationships, which are greatly extended beyond the local level. People know quite a bit about each other, but not very much about what is going on at other scales (Tainter 2007). This claim is not supported by the data collected in Roşia Montană, which shows that the problem of location is more complex at the local scale. In this context, the local is conceived in terms of a concentric circle view of scalar hierarchy, moving from the innermost circle of the body – via the local, regional and national - to the outermost circumference of the global (Herod 2010). Of 82 interviewees from Roşia Montană and the surrounding areas, more than half (45) indicated the response category that Roşia Montană is known “all over the world”, rather than only in Transylvania, Romania, or Europe. As part of the structured interview, some of these respondents offered some comments about why they think Roşia Montană is so widely known. Six of them explicitly drew a link between the proposed project and the opposition it has engendered, on the one hand, and what they consider to be a heightened awareness of Roşia Montană in the last few years, on the other. The information pool of the residents of Roşia

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Montană and those living in the proximity, or of those relocated from Roşia Montană, is anything but local. Letitia explains that people all over the world have heard about Roşia Montană because of “this project. [which has been discussed] on cable television and via satellite. Those opposing it [have been more visible], they’ve even gone to the Hague court of human rights [against] the company.” There are, however, two kinds of responses that people tend to emphasize when discussing the location of Roşia Montană. There is, on the one hand, the Roşia Montană embroiled in the RMGC controversy, as the six respondents above illustrate. While this extended awareness can be seen as something positive, it is not without its problems. Ecaterina, a relocatee who moved to Cluj Napoca, conveys some of this ambivalence in an in-depth interview with her:

Before the [company] came to Roşia, maybe one quarter of the residents of Cluj Napoca knew about this place. And now everybody knows. This is the positive side of Roşia Montană, the fact that it became [widely] known. The painful aspect of it is that, if [the project] is not stopped, Roşia Montană will disappear. But there is Alpha and Omega, beginning and end.

This is the paradoxical side of Roşia Montană – what makes it known, on a world-wide scale, is also what will make it disappear. On the other, there is a more or less self-conscious “eternal Roşia Montană” rhetoric. Flavia, a resident of Bălmoşeşti, a village in the lower part of the Roşia Montană valley says that “there is only one Roşia Montană”, while Mihaela echoes the views of her late husband that Roşia Montană is the “navel of Romania”. George, a local poet from Roşia Montană, proudly points out the there is a plaque in Roşia Montană celebrating 1850 years of documentary existence (131 – 1981 AD). Given this proof of permanence of Roşia Montană and the centrality of the Ţara Moţilor in Romanian history (Waack 2005), these respondents seem to imply, should be enough to make Roşia Montană known “all over the world.” In understanding the problem of the relocation of Roşia Montană one needs to consider the efforts of social actors to displace it from its path dependent setting and the consequences of this process. For this reason it is useful to broach the question of location from a historical perspective – more exactly the history of the RMGC mining project. The

127 sociology of translation involves paying attention to the primum movens (Callon 1986a) – the first actors who thought it possible to render Roşia Montană radically different than it had been until their “arrival” in this historical mining area. Relocation is very radical process, but one that also balances precariously between the obstinate effort of some actors to enroll other actors and actants in its project and the propensity of these other actors to “act otherwise”, as Giddens put it in his definition of agency.

Choosing the Actors: the Initial Relocators

In carrying out empirical research based on the sociology of translation, there is an analytical need to start with a specific actor or set of actors (Callon 1986a) in order to account for the evolution of a given translation, regardless whether it is successful or unsuccessful. In Archer’s terms, the moment in which actors “escape” the relative constrains imposed by structural factors and begin to interact with each other in refashioning their worlds, is highly important. The first practical problem that a study of actor-networks needs to address is, then, whose actor network should be re-constructed first? ANT theorists respond by pointing out the fundamental role played by scientific researchers and practitioners (engineers, managers) in contemporary society:

More than any other kind of actor, technologists may be sometimes endowed with the capacity to construct a world, their world, to define its constituent elements, and to provide for it a time, a space, and a history (Callon 1986b: 21).

On the other hand, sociology in general tends to privilege the perspectives of those who have to bear the consequences of various technological interventions in the world (e.g. Bell 1998). The literature on ecological distribution conflicts in particular tends to give voice to the actors who resist or challenge various forms of environmental and social injustice. Much of what we know about the fate of local communities in their confrontation with extralocal development interventions comes, in a growing number of cases, from local voices raised in resistance to such interventions. As one instance of such resistance, Michael Cernea (2008) talks about the

128 growing political opposition to forced expropriation and displacement in the developing world, which has emerged as a “formidable social movement” (Cernea 2008: 24). In the same vein, Susanna Price (2009) argues that “NGOs have demonstrated the ability to empower local lives and to create alternative discourses of development” (2009: 278). Locally based or grassroots movements have, indeed, achieved growing visibility over the last two decades and this process has not failed to attracted the attention of scholars. This visibility has been achieved, in no small measure, through strategic alliances between rural grassroots organizations and urban NGOs, based both in the South and the North. The emergence and effects of such resistance movements has been explored in settings as diverse as Peru (Muradian et al. 2003; Keenan 2004; De Echave 2005), Ecuador (Kuecker 2007), and Latin America in general (Gordon and Webber 2008), Turkey (Arsel 2005; Çoban 2004), Romania (Kalb 2006), Papua New Guinea (Banks 2002), USA (Peña 2003) and worldwide (Colley 2002). Some authors attach considerable importance to such resistance movements by seeing them as the representation of a deep chasm between local communities with variegated knowledges and ways of life on the one hand and the violent intrusion of “hegemonic globalization” (Escobar 2004: 18), on the other. Arturo Escobar is the foremost theorist of place-based social movements. Through his extensive research on the Black communities of the Colombian Pacific region, he has come to view these movements as “subaltern strategies of localization” which are based on a strong “attachment to territory and culture” (Escobar 2001: 161). To use Castells’ terms, in the confrontation between the homogenizing space of flows and the space of places as repository of culture, the latter is a privileged locus of theoretical resistance (Escobar 2008). Relatively little attention has been given to the other side involved in ecological distribution conflicts, the actor against which opposition and resistance are so often mounted, namely the (usually foreign) mining corporation. Chris Ballard and Glenn Banks note in a review of anthropological research on mining (2003: 290), that “the figure of ‘the mining company’ lurks monolithically and often menacingly in the background of many anthropological accounts of communities affected by mining operations”. The authors review

129 some of the studies dealing with mining corporations under two headings “Laboring within the Corporation” and “Mining discourses”. An exemplar of the first line of inquiry is Ricardo Godoy’s (1985) first review of the anthropological mining literature in which anthropologists are encouraged to pay attention both to the “geological and economic infrastructure of the firm/industry as well as their […] sociopolitical and ideological dimensions” (1985: 211). With regard to mining discourses, some authors have sought to “dissolve the enterprise as a singularity” (O’Neill and Gibson-Graham 1999: 19) by showing that even within the beacon of rationality and order – the multinational corporation – a variety of enterprise narratives continuously threaten to destabilize its functioning. More recently, researchers have sought to compare communities’ and companies’ perceptions on a range of issues that figure frequently in the study of distribution conflicts, such as economic, social and environmental impacts and the companies’ expected contributions to development (Garvin et al. 2009). A similar, though more sophisticated approach is taken by Horowitz (2011) who uses the sociology of translation to account for the shifting and conflict-ridden relationships between an indigenous protest group in New Caledonia on the one hand, and urban-based, environmentalist grassroots organizations, a human rights lawyer, the mining company and the provincial government, on the other. Horowitz’s article expands ANT by analyzing the power dynamics which show how translations are successful or are suppressed, and how the success or failure of their alignment shapes the alliances created by these translations. The basic insight offered by Horowitz, which shows the relevance of actor-network theory for studying ecological distribution conflicts which bring together in dynamic interaction a variety of actors, is the following:

This tension between a desire to achieve one’s aims, and the necessity of working with those who do not share them, makes alliances, and the power they entail, tenuous, fluctuating, and at constant risk of collapse (Horowitz 2011: 5).

As is common in the literature dealing with conflicts over natural resources, Horowitz begins the analysis with the grassroots environmental organization and its relationships to the

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Kanak indigenous protest group (Rhéébù Nùù), or, more exactly, with how the former sought to translate the latter. Translation means attributing “an identity, interests, a role to play, a course of action to follow, and projects to carry out” to another entity (Callon 1986b: 24). All the aforementioned approaches, whether employing actor-network-theory or not, begin the analysis with the discourses of social movements. In order to adequately account for the agency of actors at Roşia Montană , one needs to take one step back and pay attention to the pre-discursive elements of translation as they have been put forward in the history of the project. The history of the project begins with the translation put forward by the project developer, the mining company Gabriel Resources. This methodological choice is not meant to privilege the point of view of the “powerful” company against the “less powerful” perspective of the local community. I do not seek to reverse the predominant “traditional” focus of some anthropological or sociological research on the life worlds of “subaltern groups” and the activities and networks which “empower people and build ‘counter-hegemonic blocs’ against neoliberal globalization” (Kumbamu 2009: 348). The activities and networks of local actors are important, even crucial, to an understanding of the diversity of their choices but, I would argue, they are more clearly revealed if one begins the analysis with the agents that make the agency of the locals more visibile. To the extent that the RMGC project is conceptualized as translation, as a network in which each point is, itself, a simplified network (Callon 1986b); as a set of processes of problematization, interessement, enrollment and mobilization that are open and revocable (Callon 1986a); and as a world of heterogeneous elements, both social and non-social (Callon and Law 1997) one can readily see how the agency of even the “least powerful” actors can be consequential. It is not simply that the translation of the project developers is “better” or “more efficient” but rather that, through neither fault nor merit of its own, it is the more complex. It is complex not by design but by outcome, as the translation of the RMGC project engenders a variety of other translations in a ramifying construction. The analysis below takes translation further than Horowitz’s approach, by considering not only social actors but also a

131 variety of non-social actors which are inseparable from the actor network of the human agents.

The First Alliances in the Gabriel Resources Actor-World

In tracing the history of the RMGC mining project it is important to distinguish between a build-up stage of the mining project and a second, conflictual stage, characterized by confrontations over the project. The build-up stage is not as innocuous as the term may suggest as it does not refer to a mere preparation. On the contrary, it involves a radical attempt to relocalize Roşia Montană in a spatial and historical sense. This attempt is largely carried out, however, at a pre-discursive level, in which the political lines of the conflict have not yet been drawn. This fact makes the translation approach a better choice than the more conventional theories, such as framing. Agency manifested at this level would remain invisible to the eye trained to identify explicit discourses. The transition from the build-up stage to the confrontational stage is prompted by a series of surprises which require a revision of the initial translation. The actor network of GR – that is its attempt to define the other actors and their interests - encounters a variety of responses from those it wishes to enroll in its project. These responses range from outright rejection to more or less oblique compliance with the requirements of the developers. The importance of the actor-world surrounding any technological project is a basic assumption of the sociology of science, technology and society: “[any] particular technical object cannot be understood without considering the fact of its concomitant actor-world” (Callon 1986b: 23). As the translations increase in complexity and engender more or less elaborate reactions-translations of other concerned actors, it is useful to systematize this ramifying web of translations by referring to different stakeholders. The build-up stage of the Roşia Montană project took place roughly between 1995 and 2000. This initial stage is characterized by a lower degree of heterogeneity of the GR actor network compared to the confrontation stage. The first stage is also more consensual than the second stage. The first stage may be said to take advantage of the structural indeterminacy of the macro-structural context – the regulatory hiatus that followed the withdrawal of the state

132 from the mining sector. The agency of the project developers thus encounters a relative structural void which it can fill with its own translation. In terms of the research problem, this is the first illustration of how actors capitalize on a contingent event, namely the availability of accessible resources in a sector in which competitors were virtually absent. The first moment in Callon’s (1986a) analysis of translation is the so-called problematization, which includes, the definition of actors and the establishment of Gabriel Resources as an “obligatory passage point.” In other words, the project developer needs to identify the actors that can be (at least potentially) involved in the actor-world of GR and how GR can become indispensable for the future interests of these actors. GR needs, first, to define the actors with which it will seek to establish alliances in order to develop its mining project – Callon (1986a: 6) call this the “interdefinition of actors”. Some of these definitions are explicit, while others are less so, but none of them is political at this stage. GR’s regular press releases commence in February 1999, almost three years after the registration of the company in May 1996 (Ziua May 10, 1998). Three categories of actors are identified clearly in the first press statements of the company, as this excerpt from a February 25, 1999 press release by GR illustrates:

The focus of Gabriel's exploration program has been on Cetate and Gauri where, based on the results of Gabriel's work reported on November 30, 1998, Resource Service Group, a highly regarded Australian exploration, mining and resource consultant, estimated a total Indicated and Inferred Resource of 16.2 million tonnes of ore with an average grade of 2g/t Au (1,000,000 ounces Au) and 14 g/t Ag (7,500,000 ounces Ag) amenable to low-cost open- pit mining. The estimate was based on a total of 3,754 meters of reverse circulation and diamond drilling from hole RMRD001 through to RMRD024 and 6,121 meters of underground sampling.

Three main actors can be distinguished from this single quote, whereas additional information from the press releases confirms that they are the main ones. The first “actor”, in fact an actant, are the geological structures “Cetate” and “Găuri” from which samples have been extracted – using a specific drilling method - which allow an estimation of gold resources with a given average concentration and a specific tonnage. The second actor is the exploration and mining consultant Resource Service Group (in this case), but also a whole network of

133 geological and mining experts which include an “independent laboratory” (carrying out metallurgical tests) based in Salt Lake City, Utah, a laboratory in Roşia Montană operated by Analabs Pty Ltd, an “independent company based in Perth, Australia”, and Bondar-Clegg, “an independent Canadian laboratory” (GR PR February 26, 1999). The third actor is only hinted at in the quote above. The previous and subsequent press releases, however, identify this actor unambiguously. This third category of actors refers to all those who are potentially interested in the fact that the above-mentioned gold reserves are “amenable to low-cost open-pit mining”. These are, of course, the potential investors. In a move resembling the British RAF’s effort to create a network around a new military aircraft project by drawing in its closest allies (Callon and Law 1988: 287), GR begins by “mobilizing those who [are] most ready to play the role allocated to them in the scenario”. Consequently, the initial transactions of GR shares – as one of the essential mechanisms for mobilizing other actors - are private placements in non-arm's length transactions with companies owned indirectly by the owners of GR. For example Albion Holdings which was partly owned by Frank Timiş, the first chairman of GR (GR PR March 9, 1999) purchased shares of GR in the hope, it seems, to boost investor confidence in the new mineral find. These operations are needed to establish investor confidence in the new company as it gradually assembles its actor network. Gabriel Resources Ltd. acts thus as an obligatory passage point for certain gold-bearing mineral resources (defined as exploitable mineral concentrations), geology/resource exploration companies (which benefit from exploration contracts) and potential investors. A short parenthesis needs to be made here. It is important to underscore once more that I do not embrace Callon and Law’s (1997) argument about “perfect symmetry” (Callon 1986a: 13) between social and non-social entities. To turn Callon and Law’s argument (1997) on its head, I think that materials “[are] active only when they are mobilized by flesh and blood actors” rather than on their own. But this does not mean that materials are necessarily passive. To anticipate the subsequent analysis of the transition from the build-up to the confrontation stage, it is important to underscore the role of surprises created by non-social entities. It makes no sense to “ignore biophysical contingencies”, on the contrary, one needs to take its prompts seriously (Murphy 2004: 251) in order to understand the course of action taken by purposeful

134 actors. Raymond Murphy (1994: 254) defines natural prompts as “the influence of nature's dynamics on conceptions, discourse and practices, without claiming the latter are determined by those dynamics”. There are, however, other actors for which GR also plays the role of an obligatory passage point but which are not identified in the same way as the other three elements of its actor-world. In this sense, Callon’s approach (1986a; 1986b) should be extended by recognizing that constructing a network of actors can also silence certain definitions, as will be shown below. The initial problematization of the GR project included investors, geologists and the gold deposit in all its geological characteristics. However, the problematization left out of the definition the state-owned enterprise RAC Deva. This was a heavily subsidized enterprise of the Romanian state. One learns about the definition of this actor from indirect sources, situated outside the translation process itself. According to media accounts, RAC Deva announced publicly, in the national daily Adevărul dated September 5, 1995, its intention to enter into a partnership with a foreign partner to "process the tailings containing precious metals from old tailings ponds in combination with gold-silver ores at Roşia Montană and Gurabarza Brad" (Radu 2005). However, one day before this announcement, RAC Deva apparently organized a bid for leasing the tailings ponds in the mining areas of the Apuseni mountains and the winner of the bid was "Gabriel Resources Ltd" of Great Britain with headquarters in Channel Islands (Ziua May 10, 1998). Bearing in mind the above, it is important to ask: when does translation begin? Can we distinguish a before and after the translation? Callon (1986a; 1986b) and Callon and Law (1988) answer this question indirectly by indicating that it is usually one or several texts (reports, articles or plans) which, so to speak, set the translation in motion. But is what comes before the translation irrelevant? Callon (1986a: 6) says that where the initiators of a specific actor network came from and why they acted the way they did is of little concern to the researcher. From my point of view, just how the actor came to initiate its actor network is important because it reveals a basic characteristic of translations: their fallibility. The drive to develop the Roşia Montană deposit was not inevitable. What came before the translation is as

135 contingent as what comes during the translation. The presence of a gold deposit and a government willing to accept foreign investors in its inefficient state-subsidized mining sectors set the stage, albeit not a firm one at all. To revert to Giddens’ metaphor, what was needed to begin the new story of the mining sector in Romania was for GR to enter the scene and take up its role, which was also not well defined from the beginning. However, the actor itself was precariously assembled after many failed attempts. The initiative of the founder of GR had many twists and turns which could have ended it in ruins. Frank Timiş, the first chairman of GR had tried his hands at several business after emigrating from socialist Romania to Australia in the 1980s. He was also convicted three times for heroin possession with the intent to sell (Globe and Mail October 28, 2010). The first gold mining ventures that he helped start up (between 1992 and 1995) - Morwest Holdings Pty Ltd, Riverdale Mining, Timiş Corporation, Carpathian Investments and Pneumatic Systems International Pty Ltd – all ended up in failure. In 1995 Timiş founded Gabriel Resources NL which won the bid for the exploitation of the tailings owned by RAC Deva. This company was, however, itself in serious financial trouble and it was only a new company – Gabriel Resources Ltd. that actually entered the “Roşia Montană saga” (Hotnews, June 23, 2005). In other words, there were many possibilities of failure before a more or less solid actor could put forward a plan that would initiate the building up of the GR actor network around what was later to become “Europe’s largest gold deposit”.

Interessement or the Movement from Absolute Space to Abstract Space

The construction of the GR actor network was, in its build-up stage, relatively consensual. It involved entities that were not likely to disagree among themselves – rock samples and ore bodies, geologists, investors and, even if somehow left in the shadows, the administrators of RAC Deva. They were locked into place with relative ease – the search for an exploitable gold deposit channeled their energies in the same direction. A “simple solicitation” (Callon 1986a: 9) was enough to interest geologists, investors and the administrators of the state-owned enterprise. With the ore bodies, however, the mechanism was somewhat more complicated.

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Callon skillfully explains the moment of interessement in a way which preserves its etymological meaning, that is, of being interposed54:

To interest other actors is to build devices which can be placed between them and all other entities who want to define their identities otherwise. A interests B by cutting or weakening all the links between B and the invisible (or at times quite visible) group of other entities C, D, E, etc. who may want to link themselves to B. (Callon 1986a: 9)

This description mirrors perfectly the way in which the Roşia Montană deposit – the geological configuration of gold-bearing rocks - was integrated in the emerging actor-world of company owners – investors – geologists. This integration was achieved by actively severing, in a complex succession, the links which had previously located Roşia Montană in the geographic, mineral, economic and administrative contexts of Romania. First, the joint venture in which GR partnered with RAC Deva was established in June 1997 under the name “Euro Gold Resources” in the city of Deva, in the western part of Romania. GR became the owner of 65% shares, while AA Deva was left with the remaining 33.8%. According to the contract, Euro Gold Resources was granted the exclusive right to explore and exploit the areas managed by RAC Deva, including Rosia Montana and the Bucium complex (Bucium Tarniţa, Bucium Izbita, Bucium Rodu, Bucium Corabia, and their tailings). Furthermore, RAC Deva was required to "make every effort to secure the mineral exploration and exploitation rights in favor of Euro Gold, ensuring the exclusive operation of Euro Gold, by virtue of its administrative right" (Ziua May 10, 1998). With these moves, GR managed to reduce the capital of the state-owned enterprise in Euro Gold from 100 to less than 34%, thus significantly reducing the stakes of the Romanian state in the Roşia Montană project. At the conclusion of the pre-feasibility study (December 1999), which was paid for by GR, the link between the Roşia Montană deposit and the Romanian state was diluted still further, as GR acquired 80% of the shares of Euro Gold, while the state retained 19,3% (GR PR December 15, 1999). In 1999/2000 RAC Deva was renamed Minvest

54 According to the American Heritage Dictionary, to be interested is: to be between, take part in : inter-, inter- + esse, to be. [http://www.answers.com/topic/interest]

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Deva while Euro Gold Resources received its current name, Roşia Montană Gold Corporation (RMGC). The economic separation of Roşia Montană from its national context was further promoted by a decision of the Romanian government to declare the Roşia Montană - Bucium and Zlatna mining areas as “disadvantaged zones”. For GR, this meant a ten year exemption from corporate income tax, VAT and customs duties (GR PR October 25, 1999). In October 2000, the mining license was transferred from Minvest Deva to RMGC whereby, as “titleholder, RMGC [had] the exclusive right to conduct mining operations at Rosia Montana” (GR PR October 25, 2000). Not only were the links with the national economy progressively weakened, as foreign investors appropriated what had previously been a public asset, but ties at the local level were severed as well. In April 2001, the Roşia Montană local council issued a revised Land Use Plan for the commune. This consisted of a General Urbanistic Plan and related regulations (the "GUP") and a Territorial Planning Plan (the "TPP"). According to GR “the GUP and TPP collectively modify existing land usage within the Rosia Montana Borough to specifically incorporate and authorize the development of Rosia Montana as a large scale open pit mining operation” (April 25, 2001). Furthermore, according to media accounts, the bid won in 1995 by RMGC had the effect of preventing other investors, such as Placer Dome, Noranda and Esmeralda, from entering into association with RAC Deva (Ziua May 12, 1998). What all these steps amounted to was that during the first six years of the build-up of its project, GR had managed to interpose a variety of obstacles between its asset and all those who might use or possibly covet it. All these steps taken by GR and directed towards the “freeing” of Roşia Montană from its previous political economic context were aimed at creating what Henri Lefebvre calls an “abstract space”. The French geographer describes abstract space as “formal and quantitative” and as a form of space that “erases distinctions, as much as those that derive from nature and (historical) time as those which originate in the body” (Lefebvre 2004: 49). Once space is abstracted from its original setting, it is divided up into real estate parcels of different value

138 and it can be quantified (as a certain number of gold ounces, for example) to make it available for exchange in the market. The gold-bearing ores of Roşia Montană were thus linked to abstract “shares” that could be bought and sold without the buyers and sellers having to worry about commitments, perceptions or other use-values associated with the original space. In Lefebvre’s terms, the absolute space had become an abstract space (Molotch 1993). The newly created abstract space became one of pure exchange-values. Up to this point, the interessement of the Roşia Montană deposit could have been equally well be described by Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession concept. The process of wrenching abstract space from absolute space proved to be, however, full of contingencies. As with any technological project, it encountered at some point unexpected outcomes and surprising processes that had run parallel, albeit in a concealed way, to the main project. Given the complex intertwining of social and natural factors – of which the technologists themselves might not always be aware – “things often fail to follow the expected path” (Gross 2006: 176). Indeed, the translation of GR was ripe to meet with surprises which forced it to engage in problematizations which were vastly more complex that what it encountered during its build-up of the mining project. Simmel summed this up by saying that:

as soon as the human-made work is completed, it not only has an objective being and an individual existence independent of humans, but it also holds in its being ... strengths and weaknesses, components and significances, that we are completely innocent of and which often take us by surprise (Simmel 1998, as cited in Gross 2003: 47 – 8).

With this observation one reaches the limits of the possible political economic interpretation of the Roşia Montană case. The process of accumulation did not continue in the expected direction and I was compelled to look for a different vocabulary for understanding what actors do when things do not work in the orderly fashion envisioned by political economic theory.

Expanding Translation and the Role of Surprises

In early 2000, it seemed that GR’s translation had met with considerable success in building GR as a powerful actor-world, with the company as the obligatory passage point for a group of

139 actors with broadly similar interests in exploiting the Roşia Montană gold deposit. However, the very notoriety of the emerging Roşia Montană affair and the radicality of the abstract space it sought to erect in this historic mining area attracted the attention of unacknowledged actors which had lurked in the shadow of its actor world but now were about to raise their voice. The smooth network-building of GR in the build-up stage was challenged by a series of contingent events. The first was an article published in the National Post under the title "Gabriel's Romanian mining plans face chance of ending in ruins: Archaeological protest" (April 6, 2000). The author cites Horia Ciugudean, director of archaeology at Romania's National Museum of Unity in Alba Iulia who praises the archaeological richness of Roşia Montană: "The place is a very, very rich archaeological find." In an interview published in Formula As (July 1 – 7, 2002), Ciugudean indicates one of the reasons for the archaeological value of Roşia Montană: “in very few places in Europe can one descend and follow the footsteps of miners who lived [almost] 2000 years ago, as it happens in Roşia Montană.”The article also mentions that in 1999, a team of German and French archaeologists unearthed 20 altars bearing inscriptions to Roman gods. This discovery prompted some archeologists to call on the United Nations to include Roşia Montană on its World Heritage list. From the point of view of social agency, this reaction would come as no surprise, as it testifies to the tendency of actors to diversify cultural choices by imagining alternative values and uses of the historic Roşia Montană. On the other hand, GR reacted swiftly to what it identified as “certain statements recently made in the Canadian press.” According to a press release dated April 10, 2000, GR was “not aware of any evidence of ‘ruins [that] now lie beneath the town of Rosia Montana’, as suggested by a recent press article”. If this was actually true is debatable, but this is the first instance of organized protest which confronted the RMGC project and compelled it to revise its translation process. The new actors who had emerged on the scene also forced their way into the actor-world of Gabriel Resources. The latter was compelled to act by considerably enlarging its actor network. No longer were geologists, investors and share prices the defining elements of the GR actor network. Grudgingly, the archaeologists and their finds, including

140 galleries and various Roman-era monuments, had to be accepted within it in order to deal with them effectively. In this way, the temporal/historical dimension of Roşia Montană (in addition to the spatial one) entered the translation process. These new and problematic actors had to be, in turn, interdefined. The almost immediate reaction of GR was to redefine itself from a resource company into a “socially responsible member of the community” (GR PR April 10, 1999). It sought to reinvent itself as a passage point not only for a relatively consensual group of actors as in the build-up stage but for a world of actors that was considerably more complex. The archaeologists’ surprise was only the beginning of a series of unexpected occurrences which threatened to unravel the carefully erected translation from the build-up stage. Phelim McAleer was the Financial Times correspondent in Bucharest in March 2001, several months after GR announced that it would need to relocate part of the town of Roşia Montană (October 19, 2000). GR had commissioned Planning Alliance of Toronto, a community planning company, to develop a resettlement action plan for the residents of Roşia Montană who would have to move to make way for the new open pit mine. Planning Alliance was to experience some rather uncommon reactions from the residents of Roşia Montană. Because it promised to “listen to local concerns” but was not actually prepared to see a bewildering variety of concerns, the company was taken by surprise. This is how McAleer describes the situation encountered by Planning Alliance and GR on the ground in Roşia Montană:

Relocation is fairly common in the mining industry. Usually, it is a simple matter of talking to local representatives, consulting families and organising their move to the newly built accommodation they have chosen. Many of Rosia Montana's houses have pit latrines, irregular water supplies and no electricity. Gabriel Resources expected that the villagers would be only too glad to move. But they were not. […] As it discovered at Rosia Montana, outsiders can sometimes find those concerns difficult to grasp - and even harder to deal with (Financial Times, March 9, 2001).

The article goes on to identify the possible reasons for which the population from Roşia Montană did not unhesitatingly embrace the relocation options suggested by the community planners of Planning Alliance. The challenge, according to McAleer, was to build trust in an

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“unusually suspicious community” in which it proved difficult to identify “a shared history and leaders”. GR built a “model house” – one that would show the would-be relocatees how their new homes would look like - which became, according to PA’s project director, the focal point of a community which until then had no focal point. The important fact is that the actor-world of GR had to be enlarged by still a further step. The “community” became part of the translation process and, as it happened with its history, it also had to be provided with a definition. Furthermore, there is evidence of a new surprise which happened in April 2002, (and many times since then), once the local residents’ opposition against the RMGC project became visible. Stephanie Roth, a Swiss activist who came to Roşia Montană to help the resident opponents of the mine, describes the third significant surprise that GR encountered in assembling its actor network. The words of Eugen David, the leader of Alburnus Maior are reproduced by Roth verbatim to convey the satisfaction of the “local David” successfully confronting the “corporate Goliath”55 (2002):

'Then, in early April [2002], RMGC announced a four-day public consultation - one day for each region to be affected. I think they hoped no one would show up, and they could tick that off as some sort of approval. Well, we showed them differently, didn't we?'

But not only was RMGC shown differently, the show staged by the opposing residents might have been a surprise for the representatives of GR. Zeno David, “toothless Mircea”, Aurel Mantea, Zeno Cornea (Roth 2002) entered in a rather unexpected way the world of spectacle, the “economy of appearances” (Tsing 2000) to make a statement that probably caused the shares of Gabriel Resources on Toronto stock exchange to tremble somewhat:

You should have seen their faces. We took them completely by surprise. It was heaven. While the delegation was trying to start the consultation, Vup from Bucium pulled out an old battered suitcase on which we had written the words "adios" and "bon voyage" (Roth 2002).

55 More than a play upon words, this is a frequently evoked metaphor in Roşia Montană (see New Eldorado documentary by Tibor Kocsis, 2004).

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This shift between the two stages of translation, between the narrow technical build-up of the project and the much broader confrontation over the project is also reflected in the corporate discourse of GR. In an interview which I carried out in September 2005, an RMGC spokesperson argued that “the project is extremely simple, with the exception of the social component” and that the cultural barrier will be overcome once the first wages will enter into the miners’ pockets (Andrei, Roşia Montană information centre). Similarly, in introducing a new management team for RMGC in 2004, the former CEO Richard Hill remarked on the need to change the name from “Community Development” to “Community Relations”: “Really, we do not develop the community, the community is there to run itself with its elected representatives” (April 2004 GR podcast). Both of these statements suggest a reluctance to engage with the full implications of broadening the GR actor network, which would amount to opening the floodgates to a variety of actors with diverse claims. In support for this statement, is the following quote from the Annual Report of GR for 2002: “The RAP helps protect RMGC against unanticipated or exaggerated claims from individuals who do not have eligibility for resettlement or relocation benefits”. These observations point to a very interesting implication of the notion of diversifying cultural choices: once it is opened to contestation, the actor network of even a powerful actor becomes permeable to claims from far less powerful actors. This processes, in turn, has unexpected consequences which cannot be adequately theorized in political economic terms. To return to the problem of the enlarged actor-network of GR, after five years the relation with the “community” was approached quite differently by the representatives of the company. Eric Reguly of the Globe and Mail cites CEO Jonathan Henry who admits that GR should have put more emphasis on the non-technical aspects of the mine: “It was a very strong project technically, but there was no point building the world’s best gold mine if the local population doesn’t realize the benefits of it.” His use of the past tense is revealing for the changed emphasis which the new problematization of the “community” issue brought into the translation. Finally, a different sort of surprise, that was first in temporal order but nevertheless highly significant for the translation process carried out by GR, was the Baia Mare cyanide spill.

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Some Hungarian politicians compared it to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (Schwabach 2000) and in this politically charged way it entered the actor network of GR. The “environment” thus became a sour point in this emerging network, which had to constantly defend itself against the charge that it will be a second and much larger Baia Mare. Actor network theory is very useful for the present analysis because it can accommodate an additional layer of complexity. So far, I have argued that, forced by a series of surprises, GR had to enlarge its actor world by recognizing and including additional actors, such as the “community”, the “environment”, the vocal opponents of the mine or archaeologists and their archaeological artifacts. With no doubt, GR had to expand the bounds of its network by including the social, cultural and environmental aspects of its Roşia Montană project within the translation process. However, this did not amount to more than an inclusion of a “bundle of black boxes” (Callon 1986b: 34). In other words, GR sought to simplify the actors involved as much as possible, in order to reduce the “infinitely complex world” (Callon 1986b: 29) to a manageable set of actors. For example, in order to contain with the community problematique, it commissioned a study to show that what characterizes Roşia Montană is “gold and cold”, thereby suggesting that the raison d’être of this place is gold mining and that other economic activities (such as agriculture) are impracticable due to the cold climate (Planning Alliance 2002). The archaeological problem was itself contained by GR via the concept of sterilization. This involved a cultural review of the Roşia Montană site conducted by the Ministry of Culture, which would remove any artifacts that may be recovered with the aim of displaying them in the appropriate Romanian museum. However, GR averred that “this review was not designed to preclude or prevent the development of a new mine at Roşia Montană” (GR PR April 10, 2000). Finally, to assuage environmental concerns, GR decided to add a cyanide destruction circuit to its process plant so as “to better accommodate the winter climate at Roşia Montană” (GR PR February 25, 2003). This means that not only other actors but also environmental contingencies or prompts – such as unusual amounts of snow or rain – had to be taken into account. The Baia Mare accident occurred, incidentally, in January 2000, after a heavy rainfall had melted the already existing layer of snow found on the tailings pond.

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However, “such simplifications will be maintained so long as other entities do not appear which render the world more complex by rejecting the reality represented by these simplifications as an impoverished betrayal” (Callon 1986b: 29). Simplifications work, in other words, to the extent to which the entities involved, the actors which GR accepted and redefined in its network, do not reveal themselves as problematic actor-networks susceptible to change (Callon 1986b). So far I have shown that the agency of the developers of the Roşia Montană mine has taken concrete form through the actor-network that it sought to erect to make the mine possible. Complex technological objects do, however, exhibit a dynamic that is not entirely under the control of their initiators, as Simmel recognized long ago. Moreover, sometimes this dynamic is unleashed even when the object – a new open cast mine – is still at the stage of possibility. By radically altering established patterns of social reproduction , a host of other actors become interested in fashioning the technological object – that is Roşia Montană as a future mine – according to their own interests. In response, the initial actor renews the efforts to achieve its goals and consequently includes and simplifies the contesting actors as part of an enlarged network. This is the meaning of the profound shift in location that GR achieved at Roşia Montană. Structural constraints were loosened to such an extent that an initially feeble actor was able to convert the emerging contingencies into opportunities but also risks. The processes that followed from that point on were the result of complex struggles among a growing variety of actors. The objects of contestation became all those that make up the experience of place discussed by Relph: location (in the physical sense), community, landscape, and the rootedness and meaning of home places. Each will be explored in turn.

The Ambiguities of Relocation: Individual Experiences at Roşia Montană

My research in Roşia Montană cannot lay claim to any sort of statistical representativeness. The 110 respondents interviewed in Roşia Montană and its surroundings (including some relocatees in Miceşti/Alba Iulia) are not taken to speak for the “community” of Roşia Montană or even for a part of it. On the contrary, these individuals speak about themselves and about

145 the community in a given place, at a given time, with a specific set of knowledges and attitudes, part of which they convey, in conscious or unconscious ways, to this specific researcher. What is important, from the point of view advanced here, is the understanding of these respondents as complex networks that can be reduced to coherent “actors” only by a process of simplification. Thus, the research findings presented below aim to open the “black boxes” of actors’ lives, by revealing their networked character. Methodologically, I cannot claim to offer an unbiased picture of these networks, but only a lesser degree of simplification. It is also important to bear in mind that the account below is only a snapshot of a continuously changing translation. For the successful construction of an actor world, Callon claims that the elements which compose it have to “render a sequence of events predictable and stable” (1986b: 31). The resettlement operation that was supposed to be “a simple matter” of negotiation and physical relocation (McAleer) turned out to be vastly more complicated. The process took longer and had unexpected outcomes. Even if GR augmented the initial capital in order to acquire all properties needed for the commencement of the mine by 2004 (GR Annual Report 2003b), nine years later56 GR still had not completed the relocation of the Roşia Montană community. In its socio-economic survey, Planning Alliance (2002) had asked residents whether they want to “resettle” (i.e. have a new house of built for them by RMGC at one of the two resettlement sites “Recea” or “Piatra Albă”), “relocate” (receive monetary compensation to buy a home at a location of their choice) or are “undecided”. The attempt to define the interests of the community in terms of three choices and set a time frame for relocation proved, in hindsight, to be unrealistic. In his research, Pascaru (2007) discovered that the residential choices of the people from two villages of the Roşia Montană commune, namely Corna and Bunta, were quite varied. In addition to specific locations where residents might want to resettle, he also included the category “refuse to leave” which was, apparently, not a possible answer in the Planning Alliance survey. This more sociological approach yielded the following results (see Table 4.2).

56 At the time of this writing (2011).

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Table 4.2: Residential choices of 77 inhabitants from Corna and Bunta

Choices Frequencies Undecided 15 Village in the area57 3 Town in the area 2 Village outside the area, in Alba county 14 Town in Alba county 19 Village in another county 3 Town in another county 10 Another country 1 Refused to leave 9 No response 1 Total 77 Source: Pascaru 2007: 97 Assessing choices is, to some extent, an artifact of the methodology used to collect the data. By allowing residents to choose from a wider variety of relocation options yields a more realistic picture of what individuals want. But choices are never isolated occurrences but rather part of networks. In what follows I will point to the role of individuals’ choices in the actor network of GR. The company sought to determine the relocation of all those residing under the project footprint. The end result was a virtual maze of relocation situations that residents opened up in the orderly relocation plan of the company. From the point of view of the residents of Roşia Montană, the relocation offers of the company were both a source of risks and of opportunities. For some, the mining company became the guarantor of mobility, physical and perhaps also social, enabling them to leave an area legally and socially “disadvantaged”. For other, GR threatened to enforce expropriation measures, as a last resort, on those residents who refused to sell (RRAP 2006), thus exposing them to the risks documented by Cernea (1997, 2000) in so many parts of the Global South. Instead of a three-fold definition of the options available to residents, as in the Planning Alliance survey, my research in and around Roşia Montană revealed no less than eleven relocation situations in which the residents of Roşia Montană found themselves at the time of

57 “Area” most likely refers to the area of Roşia Montană and the towns of Abrud and Câmpeni.

147 the interviews (2007 – 8). Without being exhaustive, the eleven clusters suggest the complex interaction of choices and resulting unpredictability of outcomes in the relocation of residents. The networks described below have resulted from my effort to identify actors with high or low physical visibility, or with different gradations between the two. They link together residents of Roşia Montană with their specific interests, hopes and fears, resources and commitments. These different configurations are not the result of circumstances in which residents have found themselves simply due to the interessement of GR – the interposition of a given compensation between residents and their properties - but show the active choices of the residents. Maybe the most interesting categories of actors are those that appeared to directly betray the GR translation (see Figure 4.3). Two types of alternative translations, which certainly overlap to some extent, are created by those residents who have not yet sold their properties to the project developers (braces C and D in Figure 4.3). Some are willing to offer them for sale under terms that they consider favorable, while others are unwilling to sell them under any circumstances. Of course, there are different ways in which residents in both categories weigh their choices and the latter tend to form a continuum rather than a sharp distinction between willingness and unwillingness to sell. For example, Iulia was a poor pensioner living by herself in the Corna valley and suffering from schizophrenia. She was offered 1.450 billion lei (the equivalent of $58,000) at the time of the interview (July 2007) but claimed that she expects an increase so that she can buy a house in Alba Iulia and receive an extra amount equivalent to $80.000 USD to buy an apartment for her son. She says that she would not leave with less than $160.000 USD, in total. Iulia’s comments point to an important aspect of translation, namely that it is not always the product of individual actors. Olsen (2009: 368) suggests that we should also think of agency in post-individualist terms: we have to pay attention to the “mute ‘we moment’ of decision or change” that happens in the family rather than in the inner forum of any one individual. Individual actors thus reveal their networks and the unpredictability of choices which do not stem from one mind at a time. The fact that a poor and sick pensioner can make strategic

148 plans, at least once in her life, in the face of a well-resources mining corporation suggests that the local space of agency has at least some empirical bearings. Those who have not sold their properties and were unwilling to sell them (at the time of the interview) (denoted as brace D in Figure 4.3) represent a group of actors for whom the interessement strategies of GR seem to have failed, at least for a while. In other words, instead of interposing compensation packages between these residents and their Roşia Montană properties, GR has witnessed a refusal by these actors to have their links with place severed. Relocation failed in their case. Instead, they have actively sought to forge new links with actors beyond the place and create their own networks – for example that clustered around Alburnus Maior – which is now establishing its own alliances beyond Roşia Montană. A similar but also competing network is that of the Cultural Foundation Roşia Montană/Soros Foundation. The leaders of the two organizations – Dorin (Alburnus Maior) and Adrian and Iulian (FCRM) and several resident members of these organizations are identified as the staunch opponents who have repeatedly and categorically claimed that they will never sell their properties to RMGC. Their highly visible location in Roşia Montană and activist status connects them to extralocal revenue and information flows, via tourists, activists, researcher or political leaders who regularly visit Roşia Montană. A recent example of this was the visit of several tens of activists from “Reclaim the fields” at Roşia Montană. This provides further evidence for the networked character of actors. Another set of translations with strong destabilizing potential for the plans of GR are those of the residents who sold only part of their properties in Roşia Montană. Six respondents had sold some properties but retained ownership over an additional land surface ( Sebastian, who now lives in Miceşti/Alba Iulia) or a house (Georgiana, who co-owned two houses but sold only one of them) and thus managed to align58 their translations in more favorable terms with those of GR (braces E and L in Figure 4.3). They obtained some level of compensation – which enables them to become upwardly mobile or at least “resist” an unacceptable lowering of their living standards – but have maintained a bargaining chip, thus extending their participation in

58 Horowitz (forthcoming: 7) defines alignment as the “process of making competing translations compatible.”

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GR’s actor network beyond what the company would have wished. Translation becomes treason, not by withdrawal as in Callon’s case (1986a), but by a form of continued involvement which prevents GR from completing the relocation of Roşia Montană.

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Câmpeni - 3 structured(July 2007 & May 2008)

Abrud – 5 structured (May 2008) A Micești/Alba Iulia– 3 structured (May 2008) Yes ( 1 3 ) Cluj Napoca – 1 structured & 1 in-depth (May 2008, one

Yes (2 4+10) respondent)

Bucium - 1 s tructured (July 2007) Already B relocated? Roșia Montană centre– 6* structured (May & Where to? July 2007) & 8* in-depth (October 2006 – May Abrud (1) 2008)

Corna – 1 structured interview (July 2007) Alba Iulia (2)

& 1 in- depth (October 2007) Yes Sold? N (1 2 + 1 ) Arad (1) Bunta - 3 structured (July 2007)

Bălmoșești- 2 structured (July 2007)& Piatra Albă (4)

1 in-depth

Roșia Montană centre– 12* structured (May & July

2007) & 1 in-depth (October 2007)

Yes Corna - 6 structured (May & July 2007)

Eligible for (2 7 +1) compensation? C Bunta - 2 structured (July 2007) (affected area) N (33+9)

Gura Cornei – 5 structured (July 2007) Willing to sell?

Bălmoșești – 2*** structured (July 2007)

Roșia Montană centre– 6 structured & 7 in-

N (6 + 8 ) depth (October 2006 – September 2008) D

Roșia Montană centre- 1 structured (May 2007)

Sold in Yes - 3 Gura Cornei - 1 structured (July 2007) E part (5 ) Abrud - 1 structured (July 2007)

Willing to sell Roșia Montană - 2 inn-depth (October 2007) L

remaining Uncertain 2 Micești/Alba Iulia– 1 structured (May 2008) property?

Bălmoșești - 1 structured (July 2007)& 1 in-depth

(February 2008)

Proximate & 7+ Iacobești - 2 structured (July 2007) G willing to But... Ignăţești - 2 structured (July 2007) sell ( 7+1) Vârtop - 2 structured (July 2007) No Affected area 4+5 Roșia Montană centre- 4 structured (July 2007)& I but no 5 in-depth (October 2006 – February 2008)

ownership (4+5)

Cărpeni ș - 1 structured (July2007) Not proximate

(9 9 Abrud – 5 structured (July 2007 ) H

Câmpeni - 2 structured (July 2007)

Bucium – 1 structured (July 2007)

Proximate bu Bucium – 2 structured (July 2007)

uncertaini 7 J

willing (7 Vârtop - 5 structured (July 2007)

Uncertain if 1 Gura Roșiei – 1**** structured (July 2007) K eligible (1

Figure 4.3 The relocation status of 110 residents and relocatees of RM and the types of interviews carried out Source: data collected in Roşia Montană

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There are additional ways in which individual actor’s choices interfere with the plans of the project developers. One category of translations that are represented in brace E but is considerably larger is that of the so-called cottage owners. Residents of Roşia Montană have sometimes attracted the irony of the Romanian media given their eagerness to “exploit” the company. In this way they resemble that very unlikely situation of the Ipili population that managed to extract substantial benefits from the mining industry (Golub 2006). Such a scenario of evolving choices that reverse the common wisdom of the political ecology literature could hardly be conceptualized in terms of an unproblematic accumulation by dispossession. In the case I am analyzing, some inhabitants have been called “the billionaires of Roşia Montană”. Below is a description from a Romanian national daily, which the reader should obviously take with a grain of salt:

In order to squeeze the largest possible amounts from the Roşia Montană Gold Corporation, which wants to exploit gold using cyanide, the locals have planted fruit trees for which [the company] has paid handsomely and they have built cottages for which they have received as much as for villas (Jurnalul National July 12, 2008).

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Figure 4.4 New structures mushroomed during the “cottage frenzy” (“cabaniada”) of Roşia Montană (2006 – 2007), erected by residents interested in obtaining additional compensation from GR Source: personal photographs

A concrete case of “profiteering” is that of Matei, a wealthy resident of Roşia Montană. He is a successful businessman and the chair of the NGO “Pro Justice” which supports the RMGC project. He was born and raised in Roşia Montană and is the great grandson of a merchant who produced wine in the area of Blaj (a historic town in Alba county) and used to trade it with the miners of Roşia Montană. His ancestor eventually married a resident from

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Roşia Montană and bought mine shares. It seems that he has inherited the entrepreneurial spirit of his great grandfather although Matei has never worked in the mines. Instead, he has worked as a driver and now has a construction company which has worked for RMGC. Among others, he has built the access road to the Piatra Albă resettlement site. Although formally enrolled in the GR actor network, on closer inspection he reveals a destabilizing potential for the GR translation. Matei has errected no less than four two-storey high apartment buildings on his property although the general urbanism plan (PUG) prohibits any new structures which are not compatible with the mining project. But he is not the only one who has sought to capitalize on the real estate market inadvertently created by RMGC. Dorin claims that there were no less than 200 wooden cottages built in 2006 - 2007 in the Roşia Montană and Corna valleys (Jurnalul Naţional June 7, 2007). In more or less veiled terms, some residents claim that they expect additional compensation for these buildings. These structures have no foundation because, as local wisdom has it, lacking foundation means that they do not require any building authorization. In this way, the wooden cottages, sometimes even in a rough state, become opportunities for profitable real estate transactions. For example Vasile, a resident of Corna, claims that he has already sold a cottage and a piece of land to RMGC and with the compensation has bought an apartment in Alba Iulia. They have not sold their “old house” yet [2007] and his father expects an offer from the company. In other cases, some of the residents who have already sold their properties to RMGC have formed “joint-ventures” with those still owning property in Roşia Montană by investing in such wooden cottages in hopes of receiving additional compensation for these “new” properties. The uncertainties besetting the fate of the project make such speculations seem realistic for some of the locals. Pareto’s class I residues – the propensity for combinations and innovation - have found a new and fertile ground in this old mining town. Refusing compensation or refusing to leave Roşia Montană, that is betraying the definitions and interessement used by GR, are not the only ways in which actors reveal themselves as complex actor-networks. Translations can also be betrayed at later stages in the relocation process. To mobilize the support of an actor means, according to Callon and Law, to displace that actor and reinsert it into a different context. In the case of Roşia Montană, the mobilization of relocatees is ultimately successful when they are definitely relocated – when

154 they are made to move out and keep out of Roşia Montană. But this endeavor on the part of the company has problematic outcomes even for those who have sold all their properties to the project owners. Some relocatees have become famous for their habit to return to their former living place and this topic has been eagerly and skillfully seized by the media. The weekly journal Formula As has dedicated several extended articles to the topic of “the return of the displaced”. In somewhat dramatized accounts, the enduring unhappiness and longing of those who left Roşia Montană enticed by the offers of GR is vividly presented. Such descriptions are very useful inasmuch as I have not managed to interview former residents of Roşia Montană who have returned to their former living place. One of the stories told by Formula As reporter Bogdan Lupescu (2006) is that of the “şuster” [from German Schuster, i.e. shoemaker] Zlaszki Coloman. At 70 years of age, Coloman has been one of the leaders of the Catholic community in Roşia Montană and a man with warm feelings for his village. One day, however, he sold his house to RMGC and moved to Zlatna, a nearby former smelting town. Lupescu describes how, since his departure, Coloman returned ever more frequently to Roşia Montană:

He wanders from house to house and gathers the shoes of the locals and then goes to Zlatna, to repair them. He charges very little, sometimes nothing. He comes to Rosia, gathers the shoes in silence and disappears for a while. After some time, he returns and gives back the shoes, ready-made (Lupescu 2006).

Another case described by Lupescu (2006) in his article entitled “Longing, as for death” is that of Silvia Plic. Together with her daughter, Terezia, this 70-year old woman sold her house to RMGC and moved to the nearby town of Abrud. Her son, Ovidiu, wanted to stay in Roşia Montană. After less than one year spent in the little house which Terezia and Silvia had bought in Abrud, the mother decided that she cannot stay in the town anymore. She wanted to move back, to Roşia Montană. In the meantime, Ovidiu had adapted the former stable (which had not yet been sold to RMGC) to make it inhabitable. In fact he built an extension to the stable, for his mother, and he and his family agreed to occupy the “upgraded” former stable. In a reversal of the Biblical story of the wandering son, the son accepted his mother back. Silvia Plic’s former house is only 50 m from her new residence and she sometimes goes there, in Lupescu’s words, to take her former home into her arms, and press her face against the pink lime.

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Choices are not always the matter of opting for the best possible outcome for the individual. During my own interviews with relocatees I talked to a family living in Câmpeni who expressed regret that they moved out of Roşia Montană. They had no plans to actually return to Roşia Montană but in expressing their feelings about the relocation they used the mirror image of those who stayed. Lazăr Cornea begins his response to the first interview question (what should someone interested in Roşia Montană learn first about this place?) in the following way:

There is a physician in Roşia Montană who came there 51 years ago and he still does not want to leave. […] Those who came there, stayed there. Even a dove returned to Roşia Montană […] As long as I shall live I will regret my departure [from Rosia]. I cannot get used to life [here, in Câmpeni]”.

A bit later he adds:

When I came in front of my apartment building before my departure, nobody knew what was going on in my soul. Of those who left, 70 passed away. Everyone lives under tension and nobody can feel like you.

The psychological costs involved in the translation alignment in the case of the Cornea family seem to be anything but negligible. Even in instances of near-perfect compatibility of translations between GR and the relocatees, when the interests of the two parties seem to overlap, the ideological subtext of GR’s translation is sometimes challenged. The actor does not follow the role blindly but can, even through her discourse, imply the possibility for change. The case of Ecaterina – which illustrates this claim - will be discussed in the section on rootedness and care for place. Several other examples show that making choices regarding relocation can be a painful process. Maria, who relocated from Roşia Montană to Câmpeni, claims that she was against the mining project because they did not offer enough compensation for her property. Even at the time of the interview (May 2008), she thought that she had some unfinished business with RMGC because the company still owed here, on her own account, about $10,000 USD. At the same time she also hopes that those opposing the project will succeed in securing a great future for Roşia Montană, a town for which she still has warm feelings. While accepting the

156 mechanism of interessement used by RMGC – the compensation for her property – she cannot be considered a supporter of the translation developed by GR. She informs and advises those who have not yet sold their properties to “keep their price” when negotiating their properties, because the company is very cunning, in her view. Some of the resident actors who made choices compatible with the interests of the company found themselves in unusual situations. This refers to those residents who have sold their properties to RMGC but still live in Roşia Montană waiting for RMGC to complete the two resettlement sites (Figure 4.3, brace B). The Recea site, near Alba Iulia, was eventually inaugurated in the summer of 2009 but the Piatra Albă site is still in the planning stage59. It is perhaps this group, whose translation alignment is interrupted and incomplete, that bears most fully the consequences of the uncertainty surrounding the fate of the mining project. Petru, a resident of Bălmoşeşti, has sold his property to RMGC for a house that the company promised to build at Piatra Albă. The alignment of his interest with that of the company was anything but an easy choice: “You have my word that I cried with my wife at night, it is very difficult to make a decision, you don’t know where to go, you don’t know anyone.” The incessant feeling of uncertainty was the price he had to pay for the alignment which compromised his desire to leave the area: “I cannot get used to living in another area”. Apparently this is the reason he chose Piatra Albă as his preferred resettlement site – given that it would be only a few kilometers from his current residence. I asked him if he would not get used to Piatra Albă? “I don’t know what to say, I am not sure about anything… until I see”. The incomplete nature of the GR relocation in the case of these residents appears as a source of psychological stress. Similarly Gabriel, a resident of Roşia Montană who has sold his property to RMGC but who continued to stay in his “old” house at the time of the interview (May 2007), stated that the most important thing that anyone inquiring about Roşia Montană should know is “uncertainty, at the moment.” Asked if he would advise a friend or relative to come to Roşia Montană he answered that it is better for them to stay where they are because “things are uncertain here”. However, with the completion of the Recea resettlement site in 2009, he

59 Details at www.piatraalba.eu (Romanian only).

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moved to the new location. For individual actors, thus, the expanding uncertainties of the project are a reversible process. There are also cases of less dramatic but potentially effective challenges to the displacements that GR needs to clear the way for its project. The most visible instance of this is the new church that was erected in Roşia Montană between 2008 and 2010. This Orthodox church is located in the RMGC-defined protected area of the commune and was built by volunteers with help from GR and the local council. GR claims that all buildings in the protected area will be unaffected by the new mine and for this reason it supported the church building project. Pavel, one of the masons involved in the construction of the new church was available for an interview at the end of his working day at the church. We met at 10 PM and he explained that he has sold his property and will move to Recea but he still wants to return from time to time to the newly built church. He seems a sturdy and hard-working person who genuinely volunteers his time and energy to build the new church. Choices can have unexpected outcomes. In whose translation does the new church fit? According to a GR spokesperson, the church should be there where people are. But Pavel may actively undermine this translation because churches benefit from a special symbolism among Romanians and especially among miners (Suciu 1927). Even if placed in the protected area, the new church will be exposed to the risks of the large-scale mine as will be literally within a couple of hundred meters from the planned open pit of Cârnic. Finally, agency does not mean only destabilization of the GR translation. Sometimes actors align their translations with those of GR for their (perceived) mutual benefit. Such is the translation of those residents who have sold their properties to RMGC and have moved out of Roşia Montană at the time of the interview (see figure 4.3, the set of interviews in the brace marked with “A”). GR’s definition of their desires was apparently successful as they have conformed to the role assigned to them. They have given the project “right of way” by selling their properties and they have also refrained from engaging in any oppositional activities against the project. They have accepted, in the ANT idiom, both the enrollment and mobilization (displacement) of GR’s translation process, whose ultimate aim is to remove the residents from their former Roşia Montană properties.

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The interviews that I carried out among some relocatees reveal this near-perfect alignment between interests. “Life is very good in Câmpeni – we are very satisfied with the house we purchased. We lived well in Roşia Montană but here we live even better” said Mirela while sitting comfortably on the shaded terrace of her newly acquired property in Câmpeni (2007). Horatiu, an older respondent from Abrud stated: “Things have been much better since I moved to Abrud [in 2002]. Life is easier […] and better living conditions. To move from an apartment of 37 m2 to a house of 210 m2 and still have some money left is no mean feat”. Alfred, a young relocatee from Abrud also lauds the “improved living conditions; [we] have water, more stores when you go shopping”. His mother adds: “We got quickly used [to life here]. We moved, we now live in the city.” These instances could be interpreted, in Szombati’s terms (2007) as a form of hegemony that offers a source of hope. Such choices are still part of the diversifying strategies pursued by individuals when coping with contingent environments even if they would appear as blind conformity to the requirements of the company. Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) approach to agency offers a useful way in which to conceptualize even these instances of apparently unimaginative conformity as moments of active choice. They define agency as a process of social engagement, that is informed by the past and also oriented toward the future, as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities. The advancement from a lower rural position to a higher, urban one enabled by the compensation paid by RMGC requires the reactivation of unique cultural traditions. During my stays in Roşia Montană I repeatedly encountered the urban pretensions of many Roşia Montană inhabitants; “people [here] are different from those elsewhere… we are civilized people”, says Mihaela who owns a house on the main road of Roşia Montană60. A number of them saw the relocation as a way to recoup some of their former status as “gold miners” or “imperial miners” (Iacob Formula As 2009).

60 This aspect of community life in Roşia Montană has been documented during my field research but is also found in historical sources. Some of the historical accounts of past wealth and urban sophistication are those of the Austrian traveller Krichel and of the Romanian-Albanian writer Dora d'Istria . Krichel travelled in 1827 – 1829 through the Apuseni Mountains and described the houses, which were “like palaces”, of some Romanians living in Roşia Montană. He writes that the “first beautiful house, built in a remarkable style, belonged to Gritta Gheorghiuţ, mine owner in the area.” Krichel also mentions Barbura Samoilă in whose house “no prince would have been ashamed to live” (Sîntimbrean et al 2006: 99). Recent journalistic accounts include Iacob (Formula As, June 6 – 12, 2009).

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This extended discussion has aimed to show that there is a potentially unlimited number of ways in which actors’ choices coalesce in more or less durable configurations or translations. Some of them have foreseeable outcomes in terms of facilitating or obstructing the advancement of the mining project. Other configurations, the majority in fact, are ambiguous as social actors leave open the possibility of making one further move (or act otherwise) to either support or betray the plans of others. To conclude in ANT terms, the GR actor network is one which precariously balances a multiplicity of other networks. Each of these has, in turn, a greater or lesser potential to destabilize the GR actor world. The physical removal of people from Roşia Montană has not been completed. Some seem determined to resist, whatever the cost. Others may align their choices with the plans of the company only conditionally. Others return periodically to Roşia Montană and help keep this place alive. As of September 2010, the CEO of GR stated at the Denver Gold Forum61 that there are 265 properties still to be acquired, of which 155 are under the project footprint, with a total land surface of 300 hectares. As troublesome as it may seem for those sociologists who look for the deep, determining causes of human life, it is the argument of this thesis that the outcome will depend on how the variable configurations described above will play themselves out. However, the minutiae of these micro-level interactions would have to be considered in terms of local and more structural contingencies that may either simplify or preserve their complexity.

Landscapes as the Focus of Human Choices

Relph (1976: 31) sets place in relation to landscape, arguing that the “importance of particular associations of physical features, both natural and man-made, in defining place, cannot be denied”. Taking this argument further, in an empirical direction, will provide the grounds for exploring the relationships between Roşia Montană and the physical and human-made nature of this place in the translations of different actors. Relph’s brief statement on “place and landscape” will be qualified by the observation that the physical appearance of a place is not

61 Details available at: http://67.192.21.189/Theme/Gabriel/files/DGS%20Sept%202010%20final%20ppt%20pres.pdf

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immediately given in the actors’ experience but is the result of complex ideological constructions, linking environmental discourse with the everyday experiences and contexts of action in which agents are involved. Agency is manifested through discourses but is not limited to them. The argument of this section is that in a similar way in which the relocation plans of the project developers were continuously challenged by the varied choices of human actors, the experience of landscapes is equally fluid. Framing theory goes some way in illuminating the stakes of the conflict over nature at Roşia Montană but it does not reveal the place of human agency in understanding landscapes. Discourses related to the environment reveal both historical and geographic variation. The historical transformations have been the focus of environmental historians such as William Cronon (1986), environmental sociologists (Barry 1999, 2007 and Mol 2010), linguists (Herndl and Brown 1996) while the spatial variations have been explored by social anthropologists (Ingold 1993), among many others. In the section dealing with place and nature, I will focus on one type of discourse which is pertinent for the Roşia Montană case, which deals with the perceived state of the environment in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Despite the relative abundance of scholarly and media sources on the post-socialist environmental legacy, environmental sociologists are probably less familiar with the discourses which it has engendered. In what follows afterwards I will deal with the Arcadian and environmental justice discourses which form the (sometimes precarious) background of the anti-mining activists’ actor world. This precariousness is not strictly related to the project opposition but is the inevitable underside of any innovative process of translation. This will be further problematized by the attempts of the project developers to construct a new discourse of environmental doom – a reversed Arcadia – through which to discredit the opponents of the RMGC mining project. Consistent with the theoretical aim of the thesis, attention will be devoted to the initiative and definitional innovation of actors, alliance-seeking and building, enrollment and mobilization, both displaying different degrees of effectiveness and the omnipresent “risk” of treason, of partly thwarted translations. Discourse can be seen as both a resource and a constraint for the capacity of agents to act. It is a resource because, as Horowitz (2011) has shown, the establishment of discourse

161 coalitions is of vital importance in the establishment of successful alliances and ultimately in the general process of translating interests and worldviews. According to Maarten Hajer (1995: 65) discourse coalitions consist of story-lines, actors who utter these story-lines and practices in which the discursive activity is embedded as part of a “common political project”. They are a constraint because the utterance of story-lines limits the possibilities of expressing alternative views.

Contradictory Discourses of Eastern European Environments

Unlike the approach in the previous section, where the agency of actors was the focus of interest from the beginning, agency will be explored here against the background of preexisting discourses of Eastern European landscapes. This is justified by the fact that the problem of nature at Roşia Montană emerged first of all discursively, as the movement against the Roşia Montană project gathered momentum by employing powerful images of the impeding environmental degradation. There were, however, two types of contradictory discourses – a more widespread one of environmental doom and a more restricted discourse of little known Arcadia. Before outlining the processes of translation carried out by actors while employing elements of these discourses, I will describe the discourses in turn. The view that during the socialist-era state-owned industries were highly polluting was one of the deep-running narratives about the socialist environmental legacy in Western media and in the academic literature. Some call them “myths”, suggesting that they are inaccurate and totalizing views of a reality that was far more uneven than is generally thought (Pavlínek and Pickles 2005). There is a familiar line of arguments in this respect, the best known examples of which are probably Feshbach’s Ecological Disaster: Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime (1995), Feshbach and Friendly’s Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege (1992), and McCuen and Swanson’s Toxic Nightmare: Ecocide in the USSR & Eastern Europe (1993). A more recent contribution to the literature on socialist era depredations of the environment is Auer’s Restoring Cursed Earth (2004). These books, especially the one by Feshbach and Friendly, present “one nightmarish fact after another” and almost numb the

162 reader (Mote 1994: 136) leaving an impression of utter hopelessness with regard to the state of nature in this part of the world at the end of several decades of socialist rule. In a more sober tone, the Scientific Centre on Environment Policy in Berlin pointed out that between 1970 and 1985 the share of environmentally harmful sectors of industry in the GDP increased in the countries of Central Europe while these same activities (e.g. cement production, iron production, energy production) were declining in the developed countries (Kerekes 1993: 141). Bever (1993[1990]: 90) characterizes environmental degradation in Czechoslovakia and in Eastern Europe in strong words, calling it “pandemic and extreme.” Longtime observers of environmental conditions and policies in Eastern Europe note the severe air and water pollution during socialist rule (Kramer 1983) which left a political “legacy of profound neglect and indifference towards the environment” (Kramer 2005: 292). One of the characteristics of this perspective on the socialist environmental legacy is its focus on environmental hotspots. Copşa Mică, Zlatna, Baia Mare in Romania, Dessau-Bitterfeld- Wittenberg in Eastern Germany or the “black triangle” at the border between Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany have been the focus of media attention during the 1990s especially due to the heavy air pollution. Writing in the Minneapolis’ Star Tribune (1993[1990]: 52) after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Byrnes describe the environmental conditions in a town located in Eastern Germany:

But come to Espenhain and believe. You can't help it. The map says Espenhain is a small town just south of Leipzig, but it looks like it has been transported to Dante's Inferno. It's noon, but the sky is so dark that the streetlights have come on in front of the red brick factory that stretches for blocks along the main street of town. The building is run-down, with broken windows and a yard littered with rubbish. Chimneys sprout from the roof, a forest of them, tall and short, narrow and wide. From every chimney smoke pours out, sometimes in small wisps, sometimes in thick, rolling plumes. Next door is a power station with four great cooling towers, cauldrons that send steam boiling upward and an unnatural rain misting downward. White smoke, gray smoke, black smoke, sulfurous orange and yellow smoke - it fills the sky over Espenhain with a permanent poisonous cloud. The smoke gets in your eyes and makes them water. Soon you have to take your contact lenses out; you can't get them clean. The smoke gets into your throat and makes it raw. It fills your mouth with a nauseating, acidic taste; water is undrinkable.

Descriptions of ‘ecocide’, ‘toxic nightmare’ and ‘ecological disaster’ used in connection with central planning economies in Eastern Europe also set the stage for prescriptions that a

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“market approach will help the environment” (Sheehan 1992). According to this point of view, the enactment of stringent environmental laws would “choke off” foreign investment. Moreover, in the past, because they kept out western technology, environment-polluting technologies were allowed to continue. The conclusion is, therefore, straightforward: allowing the free market to regulate the interactions between economy and the environment would lead to an optimal combination between environmental protection and economic growth. The ideological implications of these proposals cannot be easily overlooked. Portraying the level of pollution in the former Soviet block as substantially higher than in the capitalist Western world could only imply the superiority of the free market in contrast to the state- controlled economy. For example, Thomas DiLorenzo (1993) uses the argument that “pollution in the communist world was far, far worse than virtually anywhere else on the planet” to dismiss the possibility of sustainable development, which he labels “environmental socialism”. This invites, in other words, the invisible hand of the free market to solve the ills of the socialist environmental legacy. To put matters into historical perspective, one should always carefully consider the European experience of industrialization in order to better judge the relevance of such discourses. In their environmental history of the Ruhr area, Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Thomas Rommelspacher (1992), describe the environmental conditions in this heavily industrialized area of Western Europe and bring to light the earliest forms of what Beck (1986) was to call “organized irresponsibility”. In the late nineteenth century, complaints of pollution from specific sources by residents of the Ruhr valley were rejected by the local courts because of the impossibility of demonstrating that it was this specific plant that had deleterious effects on the plaintiffs’ health or property (Brüggemeier and Rommelspacher 1992). Because pollution was general, no one source could be held accountable for its harmful emissions. The title of the book, "Blue Sky above the Ruhr," was, in fact, a political slogan in West Germany during the 1960s, initiated by Social Democrats to publicize the dust and dirt of the Ruhr area. The skies above the Ruhr did not begin to be cleared until the government decided to subsidize the coal and steel industry and thus to reduce the number of plants and quantity of harmful emissions, and to revegetate polluted soil (cf. Weber 1996). This historical parenthesis was meant to suggest that neither the free market nor state interventions guarantee, by themselves, the

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protection of the environment in either the East or the West. However, it is important to bear in mind that discourses espousing the virtues of the free market in curing the environmental ills of Eastern Europe have played and will likely continue to play an important role in decisions concerning environmental clean-up, as the Baia Mare case illustrates once more. It was most likely this kind of reasoning that motivated the joint venture between Esmeralda Exploration of Australia and the Romanian state-owned REMIN to form the Aurul S.A. company in 1992 in Baia Mare (Argeseanu Cunningham 2005). In contrast to many developing countries, where such projects are carried out in greenfields, the situation in Eastern Europe was deemed so environmentally unsustainable that the new mining project was touted as an environmental clean-up measure (Argeseanu Cunningham 2005: 203). Eight years later, the dam that broke releasing contaminated effluents in the waterways of several countries also released information that had previously not been available in the Western media. The environmental conditions in Eastern Europe seemed to be direr than many would have imagined. Together with a BBC film crew, George Monbiot (2000: 2), went to Baia Mare in the aftermath of the January 2000 disaster and discovered that this “devastating spill was among the least of the region's problems, a minor component of a permanent public health catastrophe.” On the other hand, Phil Mcnaghten and John Urry (1998) contend that not only was Eastern Europe dotted by various forms of environmental damage, but also that those living in this part of Europe were more or less blind to the their polluted environments. In conclusion, I would like to paraphrase Feshbach and Friendly and their memorable maxim that as Soviet bloc “broke down, it also opened up” (as cited in Mote 1994: 135). Ironically, as Monbiot (2000) aptly put it, it was the “lethal combination of the legacy of state communism and the arrival of unregulated capitalism” that revealed to the greatest extent the environmental devastation left behind by state socialism. At the same time, this “opening up” was more complex than just the discovery of a pre-existing environmental reality. The interaction of the penetrating market forces with extant condition also entailed surprises that ran counter to the dominant narrative of Eastern Europe as “polluted lands” (Kratochvil and Simons 1990). Some writers revealed unexpected oases of unspoiled or “virgin” nature, that caught the imagination of Western publics. In the midst of destruction, travelers to Eastern Europe discovered landscapes that few would have expected on the grey side of the Iron

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Curtain. Monbiot (2000) says at the beginning of his article on Baia Mare that “the dam burst in the middle of one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth. The forested foothills of the Carpathians sweep down to plains divided into tiny plots, where peasant farmers still plough by horse”. The Tisza, the river which flows through Northern Romania, much of Hungary and Serbia and empties into the Danube in the vicinity of Novi Sad, was severely polluted by the Baia Mare spill. However, before the disaster struck, the Tisza hosted “impressive biodiversity” and was the home for over 60 species of fish as well as endangered bird and mammal species (Harper 2005: 225). Several scholars have noted that the kind and scope of environmental degradation was very uneven across Central and Eastern European countries and within each national territory. According to Pavlínek and Pickles (2005: 241), environmental hotspots coexisted with areas of ‘pristine’ nature and the latter accounted for an estimated 30% of the region. Rare species and unique ecosystems survived in CEE in part as a result of the efforts of Communist governments to endorse environmental protection as state policy (Costi 2003: 291). Other authors argue that, in fact, “the bulk of the continent’s natural wealth, including the last great areas of wilderness and cultural landscapes” are to be found in Eastern Europe (Beckmann and Dissing 2005: 136; see also Stanners and Bourdeau 1995: 177 – 179, 23862; Novac and Auer 2004: 99). The idea that not all of Eastern Europe was environmentally degraded surfaced in some corners of the Western media as well. For example, Vanessa Gera (2002) of the Charleston Gazette quotes Paul Csagoly, a spokesperson of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Hungary:

I think it was a myth that communism was terrible for the environment. Communism concentrated people and industry, and then you got the smokestacks and chemical spills. This is what the West took photos of. But outside of those concentrated areas, the land was nationalized and left alone.

Others embarked on voyages throughout the Eastern periphery of Europe, eager to discover mythical landscapes of almost Hollywoodian proportions. Amanda Hemingway (2005) recounts her riding holiday in Transylvania as a visit to the fabled land of Narnia. Her words

62 It is important to note that the argument in the Dobříš assessment (Stanners and Bourdeau 1995) is not as strong as Beckmann and Dissing (2005) seem to suggest.

166 suggest admiration for the undisturbed nature that she found in the vicinity of Şinca Nouă, South-Eastern Transylvania in 2005:

…the beauty and the quiet " the huge quiet that was always there, behind wind-murmur and leaf- murmur, behind the soft thud of hooves on earth, the jingle of a stirrup, the piping of a bird. The quiet of the first forests before men came, before cars and planes and all the noise and rumour of the modern world. There are few places in Europe where such quiet still reigns, and surely none more lovely (Hemingway 2005: 10).

But not only did the Eastern Europe landscape include more than just pollution hotspots, the post 1989 transition brought significant changes to the state of the environment in this part of Europe. First, the collapse of industrial production and the shift away from heavy industries resulted in a ‘clean-up by default’ (Pavlínek and Pickles 2005: 243). The gradual, even if hesitant and uneven, implementation of environmental regulations and changes in production improved the state of the environment in Eastern Europe (Costi 2003: 294). What are the implications of these opposed representations on the state of nature in Eastern Europe for the case at hand? The conflict over the Roşia Montană mine emerged in a cultural space dominated by an early and more widespread discourse of environmental doom in Eastern Europe and by a more recent and less widespread discourse of little known “Arcadian worlds” to be found on the Eastern fringes of Europe. Discourse is here defined as “a specific ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorizations that are produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities” (Hajer 1995: 44). In the case of Roşia Montană, however, it was the Arcadian discourse that emerged first and, interestingly enough, was followed at several years’ distance by the discourse of environmental doom, put forward by the project supporters. This dynamic of environmental discourses is highly consequential for the understanding of actors’ agency proposed here. The Arcadian discourse has been theorized under different names by various authors. Carl Herndl and Stuart Brown (1996: 12) call it the “poetic discourse”, which they define as “the language we use to discuss the beauty, the power, and the emotional value of nature.” According to them, the power of this discourse stems from the rhetorical notion of pathos, or the feelings that the discourse is able to bring to life in the audience.

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Interestingly, the emergence of environmental politics in post 1989 Romania is strongly linked to the use of the poetic discourse. Probably the best-know instance of poetic discourse in the conflict over Roşia Montană was the acceptance speech given by Stephanie Roth when she was awarded the Goldman environmental prize for grassroots activism in Europe (2005):

Bună seara de la Roşia Montană - good evening from Roşia Montană! […] Imagine yourself living in a small town surrounded by small farms somewhere here, in America. Then, one day, a foreign mining company comes to your doorstep and tells you that you have to leave your home because it will be bulldozed over to make way for a commercial mine. And with it, your neighbourhood, where your best friends live, your church where you were baptized, your school where you play, learn and did much more...it will all be gone.

The discourse drew the listeners into a scenario that was put before their eyes in powerful terms: your life in a small and quite town, which could very well be in America, is suddenly disrupted by a foreign mining company. The succession of events is carefully orchestrated to grab the attention of the audience and heighten their emotions: the company first comes to your doorstep, asks you to leave your home, threatens to remove it with the bulldozer and with it the whole neighbourhood, school and church. Such an appeal has no parallel in Romanian environmental politics for the obvious reason that the movement to oppose the Roşia Montană mine was the largest manifestation of environmental activism since the fall of state socialism (Kühnle 2009: 1). At the same time, Roth’s speech reveals the articulation of an alternative translation of the Roşia Montană mining project, one which contrasts the quietness and small-scale character of the Roşia Montană area with the intrusion of a powerful and malevolent foreign company. Translations do not occur in a vacuum but presuppose certain discursive logics in which they can anchor themselves and which they help transform in the process of anchoring. Even if Roth’s discourse might sound familiar in Western activist and academic circles, it was a radical innovation in the context of Romanian environmental politics. Existing research on Roşia Montană has emphasized the strategic approaches adopted by the “Save Roşia Montană” opposition movement and especially the use of “Europe” as an ideological and legal construct to oppose the RMGC translation of Roşia Montană (Ban and Romanţan 2008, Kühnle 2009, Parau 2009). Less attention has been devoted to the discourse which has accompanied the

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opposition to the RMGC project, especially by Alburnus Maior and its resident and non-resident representatives which have enjoyed a high media and physical visibility (see Table 2.1). The focus on discourse is important in the context of this thesis because it brings to light once again the problem of multiple and ambivalent choices which face actors at different points in the translation process. All authors mentioned above agree with the view that the strategic choices made by the anti-mining activists as well as the favorable contexts in which they have deployed their legal and rhetorical strategies have ensured the (at least) temporary success of the Roşia Montană campaign63. As Parau (2009: 130) cogently put, “suing the state in its own courts over environmental issues was unheard of before Roşia Montană.” As successful as this “strategic litigation” approach proved to be for the anti-mining campaign (Kühnle 2009: 58), it should not obscure the ambiguity that was built into the anti-RMGC translation along the way. Legal challenges to what are perceived as environmentally dangerous projects are not direct reflections of the values underlying the struggle. An early and very pertinent example is provided by the case of Native Hawaiian opposition to a geothermal project on the "Big Island" of Hawai'i (Edelstein and Kleese 1995). The authors argue that major handles for blocking the project are anything but specific to the value systems of those affected. Because the values of the Native population and those of the project developers are, as Martinez-Alier (2009) calls it, incommensurable, in order to succeed, the legal challenges need to employ those cultural and political levers which enjoy legal recognition:

Illustrated is that indigenous impacts are round pegs in a rational field of square holes; they need to be related to the common cubbyholes of the broader culture if they are to be understood and supported (Edelstein and Kleese 1995: 29).

The focus on discourse and its relation to processes of translation is important because, as Hajer (1995) argued, discourse is a broad category of thinking the analysis of which has to begin by asking the fundamental question: “what is the nature of the problem in the first place?” There is no simple answer to this question and no unitary answer. Environmental

63 Some authors, however, give up the usual scholarly caution and leave the impression that the anti-RMGC campaign has been an unqualified success (e.g. Kühnle 2009), when in fact the outcome of the conflict is far from definitive (as of 2011).

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discourse should not be seen as one coherent whole but as a construct whose coherence is often precarious, as it is traversed by ambivalence and uncertainty. With reference to the Roşia Montană case, the translation advanced by Alburnus Maior as an alternative translation to that of RMGC – in discursive terms, a different reading of the same reality – involved the simultaneous construction of an Arcadian discourse and of an environmental justice discourse (Hannigan 2006). Before concluding this section, however, it is important to justify the focus on discourse in dealing with the translation advanced by AM. Unlike RMGC, which has commenced its translation process at a pre-discursive level – in what I have called the build-up stage of the mining project – AM has focused from the beginning on the discursive articulation of its translation. The intrinsic value of Roşia Montană and its environment, history and community (the Arcadian view) has been translated alongside the questions of rights and entitlements of local citizens in opposing the RMGC project (the environmental justice discourse). Before analyzing the moments of the AM translation of Roşia Montană I will discuss in more detail the discursive background in terms of which AM constructed its actor-world and what later proved to be its problematic actor-network.

Translating Arcadia: The Enchantment of Roşia Montană

Donald Worster refers to Arcadia as the “ancient dream of reanimating man’s loyalties to the earth and its vital energies.” (1995: 9). This is a romantic, pastoral view of life, based on the mutual caring of each for each or, as Gary A. Fine puts it, a view of "nature green in tooth and claw" (Fine 1997: 74; emphasis in original). There is a strong affinity between the Arcadian and poetic discourses (Hannigan 2006). As with the poetic discourse, the Arcadian view emphasizes a combination of the experience of nature’s beauty and the ascription of intrinsic values to nature (Buijs 2009). Nature is seen as a source of experiences of the sublime (Cronon 1996) and this fact makes it valuable and worth preserving. Roth’s acceptance speech quoted above appeals to the emotions of the audience but it does not do so in an exclusively nature-centered way. The Swiss-born environmentalist exclaims passionately that Roşia Montană “has flowers and rivers and families and so much

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more. This is what we fight for. It’s about life, it’s about colors, it’s about people, it’s about rights and justice”. She skillfully blends elements of the Arcadian discourse with those of environmental justice. However, the Arcadian worldview is unmistakable in the discourse of Roth and of other non-resident actors involved in the struggle against the Roşia Montană project. This fact creates a source of ambiguity and uncertainty in the translation of Roşia Montană by AM and its allies which makes the translation end up, in a number of instances, in treason. The actor-world of “Arcadian” Roşia Montană is particularly transparent in the early descriptions provided by the non-resident actors, especially Francoise Heidebroek and Stephanie Roth but also by some of the resident actors. Figure 4.5 depicts – both textually and graphically - some of the views which articulate the Arcadian discourse over Roşia Montană. The underlying attitude which unites these views is the opposition to the RMGC project. The epithets beautiful, idyllic, spectacular, wonderful and unique are used by these actors to convey their rationale for valuing this place as well as their feelings and choices. It is usually an experience rooted in individualism, linked to a deep personal commitment whereby knowledge and action are private matters (Herndl and Brown 1996: 6) which motivates the Arcadinan discourse in the actor-world of the project opponents. For example, Roth recounts her first visit to Roşia Montană in April 2002 in the following terms: “And I saw this place and it broke my heart and I decided to stay here and to fight for this place to stay as it is”. Strong feelings of place attachment – even after only one visit to Roşia Montană – play a role in the experiences of several non-resident activists and journalists.

” ….beautiful place, small “…the idyllic valley that fills our view. `Can “Retired gold miner Zeno Cornea leads “So this very mountain where we are 171 communities, traditional you see the villages of Cetate and Cirnic?' me past flocks of wiry sheep tended by now, surrounded by flowers, life” (Roth cited in He directs my gaze towards two picture ageing shepherds, and beyond a surrounded by life, will be an open pit.” Kingsnorth 2005: 44) postcard villages” (Roth 2002a: 26-7) crystalline lake” (Roth 2002a: 26-7) (Roth 2004b).

“Some have left and it’s so pleasantly quiet here, you “I want to demonstrate that in the are as in a monastery here, Roşia Montană area, in these between these hills, it is beautiful mountains, one can live that beautiful ” (Cenusa, off something else than mining. I inhabitant, in Kocsis 2004). want to live off this farm” (David, inhabitant, in Kocsis 2004)

“Today Roşia Montană is a historical place, with a rich “Roşia Montană is a magic place” gold deposit towered over (Heidebroek 2006) the centuries by Dacian and Roman fortresses. The gold in Roşia Montană has been “This region, which is probably one exploited by all inhabitants of the last paradise in Europe, of the area: Bucium , Roşia where we have wild animals, we have wolf, we have bears, Montană, Corna.. This is extraordinary birds here, this place where miners have worked, should be a natural park” a source of income, Roman (Heidebroek 2004). vestiges, unique places, renowned for their beauty.” (Elisabeta, resident of Bucium) “[T]his magnificent land “This mining project of Gabriel Resources […], if realized, Heidebroek “has seen many nestled on the Romania’s would destroy the way of life which made the moti beautiful places and finally she Carpathian mountains is stopped in the Bucium-Poieni village Heidebroek came to [motzi – inhabitants of Apuseni Mountains] an integral where history meats a in the Apuseni mountains because it Bucium (south of RM) in part of their mountains. […] It is their land, their culture, spectacular natural seemed to her to be an ‘unequally 1991 and “felt the pulse of their history and their character has been wonderfully environment” (Redford alive museum’” (Heidebroek 2002). these wild and pure places” shaped by the natural forces existing in this unique (Ţurcanu 2002) 2005) place” (Roth 2002b)

Figure 4.5. Arcadian views of Roşia Montană (selection of relevant quotes) Source: untraceable

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Horia Ţurcanu, who wrote the first article in the Formula As campaign against the RMGC project in February 2002 (see chapter one), returned to Roşia Montană a few weeks later, “feeling guilty for not having sufficiently explained the endlessly tragic story of these places.” (Ţurcanu 2002b). The Arcadian world of Roşia Montană is the most powerful attractor for Ţurcanu as he recounts how he “hurried again to the magic place which has spurred the lust of empires to take what is not theirs, to the cursed land where, today, a silent war is fought”. Francoise Heidebroek, a Belgian activist who opened a guest house in Bucium said that during the first summer after she opened this place she had people coming from Hungary, Germany, Austria, Belgium and, furthermore, “everybody wanted to come back” (Heidebroek 2004). Her words convey the Arcadian view in great detail:

This region, which is probably one of the last paradise in Europe, where we have wild animals, we have wolf, we have bears, extraordinary birds here, this place should be a natural park. All around the world, everybody has fell in love with this place. And everybody who comes here says “I want to have a place in that incredible paradise!” (Heidebroek 2004).

According to Van Koppen (1998), the Arcadian discourse has three distinct characteristics: externality, iconisation and complementarity (as cited in Hannigan 2006: 39)64. Externality means that Arcadian nature is constructed as a realm external to human society, or at least at a distance from everyday life in cities. lconisation refers to the tendency of images of nature in the Arcadian tradition to be modeled on stereotyped visual images which become part of cultural memory. Finally, the Arcadian tradition involves a context of complementarity. This means that Arcadian nature stands in counterpoint to the urban industrial society and to all the social and environmental ills attached to it. Externality is conveyed by distances which separates Arcadian landscapes from the rest of the civilized world. For example, in describing Epirus, Greece and New Mexico, United States before their incorporation into the world system, Tainter points out that both were “remote”

64 The Van Koppen (1998) article provides the basic framework of this section. Unfortunately, I was not able to get a hold of this article but only of a revised version of it, published in 2000, under the same title. However, the revised article does not include a discussion of the three features of Arcadian discourse mentioned above (Van Koppen 2000), even though the author still regards externality, iconisation and complementarity as relevant characteristics of the Arcadian discourse (Van Koppen, personal communication). For this reason, I will rely on Hannigan’s (2006) discussion of these ideas.

173 because “formidable terrain and economic marginality kept villages isolated, closed, autonomous, and self-sufficient.” (2007: 370). Roşia Montană and the Ţara Moţilor, more generally, have been portrayed in a similar way in the Romanian literature. For example, Geo Bogza, begins the description of the Rocky Country – a literary term for the Ţara Moţilor – as follows:

The Ţara Moţilor is located in the heart of the Apuseni Mountains, which are not very high65, but cover a large area of Transylvania. To get here [to the Ţara Moţilor] from the North, from the East, or from any other direction, you have to travel one hundred kilometers through a narrow gorge of rocky mountains. One hundred kilometers through the mountains, not to traverse them, but to merely reach their heart. Can you imagine what this means?

The beginning of a short movie available on the internet (on a Romanian website) conveys the same notion of distance, that separates the true Roşia Montană from the bustling life of the modern city:

Dear friend, I felt that I need to share with you something that has made me very sad. I visited Roşia Montană for the first time not too long ago. The first impression was that of an isolated place, safe from the civilization of exhaust pipes, from the terrible noises and from the stress of everyday life, which I was used to in the city. The places that I was seeing were like a blessing. A piece of paradise which you would have liked to see as often as possible, if you were unlucky enough to not have been born in its middle. Since then, I returned several times. I came to see with my own eyes what is happening with the project I heard about and which I thought was impossible (al3cse 2007)66.

Distance appears in different ways in the active attempts of the project opponents to translate Roşia Montană as an Arcadian world. Alburnus Maior constructed its actor-world through two “solidarity marches” of those opposing the RMGC project. Starting in Cluj Napoca, 100 participants walked to Roşia Montană to express their solidarity with those refusing to be relocated as well as to give voice to their opposition to the RMGC project (2003). The next year, twice as many participants from Romania and abroad walked from Cluj Napoca to Roşia Montană (2004). Regardless of the strategic importance of these solidarity marches, the notion

65 The highest peak is Bihorul Mare at 1849 m above sea level. 66 http://video.acasa.ro/documentare/adevarul-despre-rosia-montana-ep-1--933d536748a60458b979.html

174 of walking 130 km underscores, even if unintentionally, the externality, the separation between Roşia Montană and the urban world of Cluj Napoca. The anonymous narrator quoted above invokes the local people “who have, over the centuries, preserved the customs and secrets of traditional crafts and those of mining.” In addition to distance, his interpretation of life in Roşia Montană underscores the complementarity of the Arcadian world in contrast to the “civilization of exhaust pipes, [with the] the terrible noises and the stress of everyday life.” (Van Koppen 1998, as cited in Hannigan 2006). Complementarity is expressed by other actors in temporal terms: Arcadia represents the rural past set in striking contrast to the urban present: “These people have lived the communist time just like one hundred years ago” says Francoise Heidebroek in the documentary “New Eldorado” (Kocsis 2004). Horia Ţurcanu went to Roşia Montană and the nearby commune Bucium to explore “the fascinating world of the village probably unchanged for centuries…” (2002b). The same sense of Roşia Montană being outside of time but threatened now by the destructive modern technology is conveyed by Ţurcanu in highly personal terms:

The rabid reporter rummages with his boots the red dirt of these mountains ground away by history and indifference, stabbed by the mechanical monsters of the company and surrounded by the apocalyptical landscape of a sea of rocks wrested from their place. (2002b).

There is no neutral way of invoking Arcadia at Roşia Montană. All accounts quoted above are inextricably tied to the emotions of their authors. One can even sense in them the sort of spiritual and religious values which Cronon (1996) identifies in the reverence for wilderness in urban American culture. Some have been tempted to extend the wilderness discourse onto Roşia Montană by recognizing the same world-wide pattern of untouched nature threatened by modern industry. For example, Elisabeth Rosenthal (2006) of the International Herald Tribune writes that Roşia Montană is a classic tale of a “rich North American company [that] discovers gold under pristine land and encourages the villagers to leave.” Probably the best illustration of the iconic view of Roşia Montană is expressed by Heidebroek when she compares this place to an “unequally alive museum”. According to Dario Gaggio (2011: 93), “an image becomes an icon when it comes to possess symbolic value, and

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such value is bestowed on the image through its association and connection to a shared narrative of authenticity”. The sense of authenticity is given, in this case, by the recurrent movement or extended stays of project opponents in the area of Roşia Montană. The first- person accounts through which the Arcadian view is expressed (see Figure 4.5) lend support to this argument. If Roşia Montană is no wilderness, it has to be interpreted through an appropriate form of human habitation. This is what Arcadia is about, after all, namely humans and nature living in near-perfect harmony. Worster refers to a poem by eighteenth-century curate Gilbert White who evokes a “pastoral dance” in Selborne: “The image of uncomplicated rural felicity, of a simple and natural people living under the watchful care of Providence and their pastor” (Worster 1995: 10). People living in harmony with the rural landscape are typically farmers, as Cezara makes clear in an in-depth interview:

The people here are subsistence farmers so they need nature to co-exist. I mean, nature and people here have always co-existed. So, you know, they have to...

The image of the farmer represents for the anti-mining activists an icon of the Roşia Montană landscape. The farmer is also iconic because he is also “natural” – how else could she survive if the ecological balance with the local environment would not be maintained? A photographic album entitled Roşia Montană: The Hidden Light (Niculae 2006) provides the visual accompaniment of this discursive interpretation of the human – nature relationships at Roşia Montană. Pop (2008) summarizes the message of this photographic collection as follows:

Roşia Montană’s people are hardworking peasants living in harmony with nature. Nearly all of the photographs depict elderly or adult persons engaged in their daily activities in the open air. Their cloths and hands are dirty, symbolizing handwork. They practice agriculture by ancient methods, using traction animals (horses, bulls) as did their ancestors two thousand years ago (Pop 2008: 98).

To revert to the ANT interpretative frame, what role does the Arcadian view of Roşia Montană play in the translation put forward by AM and its allies? In its alliance-creating process, especially with actors engaged at different scales (national or global) than the local, AM used the farmer trope as an interessement device. The actor-world of AM defines the Roşia

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Montană population as one of farmers, living in an area characterized by significant biodiversity. Another iconic representation of the Roşia Montană environment, which will not be explored in this context, is that of “a cultural landscape of universal value” (ARA 2007). The reference to the Roşieni as farmers is consistent enough to warrant its designation as interessement device. Roth talks about the threat of displacement for “700 subsistence farmers [who] will loose their land, and will have to be resettled” from Roşia Montană (Roth, 2004a). Agriculture and especially cattle raising have been practiced at Roşia Montană in addition to mining, although, historically, the two have tended to work in tandem: the less intensive mining activities were accompanied by less agriculture (Suciu 1927), without there being a predetermined relationship between the two. On the other hand, ongoing mining activities were associated with intensive agricultural use of the land, especially around the middle of the 20th century (Iulian, resident of Roşia Montană and Georgian, resident of Corna). More recently, the survey of 247 households in the Roşia Montană area commissioned by RMGC (2002) found that 77% of the residents keep farm animals and 89% engage in agriculture to a greater or lesser extent (Planning Alliance, 2002). Interestingly, the farmer trope was used by the leaders of AM not as a way to interest67 the local inhabitants of Roşia Montană but rather like-minded activists. In this way, the farmer trope was used in order to tap into networks of organizations concerned with the fate of the world’s poor who are threatened by various forms of ecological dispossession. As a result, the farmer trope applied to Roşia Montană was widely adopted in activist networks. Franco Petri of Greenpeace Vienna decries the fact that 2000 people will have to be resettled to make way for the project: “many are farmers whose sole occupation is agriculture and they refuse to leave their lands.” (cited in Popescu 2002a). In a letter published in the London edition of the Times (October 29, 2002: 21), British archaeologist John Nandris similarly refers to “the forced relocation of over 2,000 people including those from 740 subsistence farms.” The No dirty Gold campaign organized by the anti-mining NGO Earthworks (2005), presents the position taken by Stephanie Roth whom they describe as the representative of “a community group of farmers and property owners in Rosia Montana”. The Mines and Communities website also mentions

67 Callon (1986a: 9) uses the verb “interest” in a transitive sense.

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“subsistence farmers” in connection with Roşia Montană but acknowledges that “many have also worked in the mining sector.” The link between the farmers inhabiting the Roşia Montană area and the surrounding landscape was used for the interessement of international activists and organizations from the very beginning. Roth explains that what is at stake is a “very sleepy valley, populated by farmers and people going about their own business. Beautiful place, small communities, traditional life” (Roth cited in Kingsnorth 2005: 44). In an article published in 22, a prestigious Romanian cultural magazine, Roth (2006) offers further arguments on behalf of those who oppose the mine and who are, in their majority, subsistence farmers who refuse to part with their land, homes and the town itself because it is “here that they have their roots”. The question of roots, which may be counted as another way to augment the authenticity of the resistance against the Roşia Montană project (see Ban and Romanţan 2008: 6) and is a further interessement device. There is no straightforward way to judge the effectiveness of the farmer trope as it was used in relation to the defense of Roşia Montană. It certainly helped create a great deal of empathy among international activists as Roşia Montană was seen to fit the world-wide pattern of resistance by local farmers against encroachments on their lands. An international delegation at the Newmont AGM (2005), which included Stephanie Roth and three other activists from Ghana and Indonesia, “highlighted the hardships faced by hundreds of farmers in Rosia Montana, Romania, and villagers in the Ahafo region of Ghana, who are being displaced from their homes to make way for large, industrial gold mines owned by Newmont and its partners.” (Mines and Communities 2005).

The Effects of Interessement on the (Temporary) Success of the Anti-Mining Campaign

There seems to be a significant difference between the translations put forward by GR on the one hand and by AM on the other. Over the years, the tendency of the GR translation has been to expand in order to incorporate and control a growing number of actors through an incessant effort to mobilize and displace them. This effort has met with mixed success. The relocation of the population of Roşia Montană has been a much thornier matter than the company assumed, because a variety of actors revealed themselves as unstable networks in their own right. The incorporation of the environment into the GR actor world lagged behind its eager seizure by the

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anti-mining activists. Until 2006, when the company decided to “fight fire with fire”, that is, counter the accusations of the activists with similar accusations (rather than self-defense), few questioned the Arcadian view adopted by AM and its allies. On the other hand, AM has begun the construction of its actor world by defining its members inwardly as property owners and outwardly as subsistence farmers. While it achieved success after success in establishing alliances with a variety of national and international actors, the local base of Roşia Montană residents has shrunk over the years and many people have left the area. Inwardly, the defense of the environment and the landscape become the job of a limited number of property owners, especially those with large properties. The interessement of the residents proved difficult to sustain discursively and declined in importance. This section will follow more closely the successful construction of alliances by AM and its concomitant loss of support on the part of a number of residents from Roşia Montană. The group of Roşia Montană residents which I have identified as the “staunch opponents” (above) have been very successful at establishing a variety of links with influential actors. The emergence of Alburnus Maior in September 2000 is linked to a meeting organized by Frank Timiş in Roşia Montană in 1997. At that time, Valeriu Tabără, a Romanian deputy and president of PUNR [a Romanian nationalist party], addressed the locals who had gathered in front of the building where the meeting was held and told the disgruntled Roşieni that they need to organize themselves, otherwise they will be “eaten” by the company (Adrian, personal communication). Between 2000 and 2002 there is little information about the activity of Alburnus Maior, expect for several references in the first article on Roşia Montană published in the weekly magazine Formula As (Ţurcanu, Formula As February 4 – 10, 2002). Alburnus Maior is identified in this article as a “gold miners’ association” (“asociaţia aurarilor”)68, consisting of 250 families who do not want to leave this place. Despite the allurement of high compensation for residents’ properties, Zeno Cornea of Alburnus Maior said that they will be cheated (Formula As February 4 – 10, 2002). At this initial stage, Alburnus Maior refused the definition imposed by GR. The company had used a variety of tactics to get residents to sell their properties, from financial inducements to more or less veiled threats with expropriation.

68 The designation “gold miners’ association” was used, for example, in a press release dated August 23, 2002 (see Alburnus Maior 2002).

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Although it defined itself in different terms – as an association defending the property rights of families in Roşia Montană – Alburnus Maior was confined to the local actor world of resident proprietors who refused to leave. Alburnus Maior became a significant actor in its struggle against the RMGC project with the arrival of Stephanie Roth, which was a “globally-networked environmental activist” and former campaigns editor for The Ecologist (Ban and Romanţan 2008: 7). Under the executive leadership of Roth, Alburnus engaged in strategic network building starting in April 2002. In July 2002, it organized a meeting in Roşia Montană together with a large Bucharest-NGO, Terra Millennium III. The meeting was attended by representatives of 34 other NGOs, mainly from Romania, and 350 locals. On that occasion, the ‘Rosia Montana Declaration’ was adopted by the participants69 and included the provision that it will further seek support from “the Romanian civil society, the international institutions and organizations, and from the European Union and its member states”. On the same occasion, the problem of the environment was singled out as a rallying point for the resident and mostly for the non-resident actors: no cyanide leaching in the Apuseni Mountains70. In August 2002, AM began issuing press releases which were published in the national media. In the same month of 2002, Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), commissioned an expert opinion from two members of the Institute of European Law, University of Vienna. This study opened the GR translation of the mining project to EU- regulated environmental liabilities:

This implies that if Romania authorises the Rosia Montana Mining Project despite its serious infringements of EC/EU environmental legislation and environmental standards, it will have to reckon with a considerable number of legal proceedings before the [European Court of Justice], some of which will initiated by concerned individuals, in the case of EU membership (Fischer and Lengauer 2002: 23).

69 The declaration is available at: http://www.rosiamontana.ro/img_upload/472936e3bca2bc61045730fbb1869240/Rosia_Montana_Declaration.pd f 70 “The gold extraction technology proposed by the project is in contradiction with the 2001 Berlin Declaration which has banned cyanide use if the process irreversibly affects ecosystems” (The Roşia Montană declaration, point 4).

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The first victory of the growing campaign – and actor network – of AM came in October 2002 when Friends of the Earth (2002) flew two campaigners to Washington DC to “to directly challenge World Bank President James Wolfensohn at a town hall meeting to review the project” (FoE 2002). According to a World Bank spokesperson, “the decision was in large part driven by concerns about the project's social and environmental impact” (cited in McAleer 2003: 27). However, the official position of the International Finance Corporation was that the $100 million loan was cancelled due to the availability of private finance for the project, “which we are not allowed to compete against” (as cited in Beattie and McAleer 2002: 13). The expanding actor-world of AM included, in addition to FoE and Greenpeace a significant number of international environmental and human rights NGOs, such as CEE BankWatch Network, MiningWatch Canada, EarthWorks, and over 30 environmental NGOs in Romania (Ban and Romanţan 2008). But it also received the support of a growing number of public institutions, including: the International Committee for the Conservation of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS 2001, 2002), the Romanian Academy (2003, 2004, 2009, 2010), the Academy of Economic Studies (2003), Roman-Catholic, Unitarian and Calvinist churches in Romania (2003, see Greenpeace 2006), the Romanian Orthodox Church (2003, see Greenpeace 2006), the European Federation of Green Parties (2003, see Greenpeace 2006), Ecological University (2004, see Greenpeace 2006), the Romanian Ecological Party (2004, see Greenpeace 2006) etc. The speed with which these alliances were forged was determined by the perceived threat of the proposed mining project. Roth had warned the international activist community that “Gabriel Resources and Newmont are modern-day vampires who in the name of progress aim to bleed Rosia Montana to death” (Goldman Prize 2005)71. The business media confirms the image of these companies as “vampires” (especially as they operate in Transylvania) and the reader might be left with the impression that they are ready for a quick strike: “Think of Gabriel Resources as the Count Dracula of gold mining -- the company loves a rich vein.”72 On the other hand, in its Annual Report 2002, GR had declared that it intends to begin the

71 http://www.goldmanprize.org/node/158 72 http://www.hoovers.com/company/Gabriel_Resources_Ltd/rfcrkyi-1.html

181 construction of the mine in 2004 and the first gold pour in 2006 (GR 2003b: 13). For AM and its supporters, the urgency to assemble a powerful actor network appeared obvious. In order to make its translation successful, AM had to engage in a process of defining the actors – in this case, the members of the community of Roşia Montană – and to establish itself as an obligatory passage point for the struggle against the mine proposed by GR. The two aspects of the first moment of translation, problematization, were interlinked as the organization identified itself as being established by “property owners” and most of the Roşia Montană residents were, indeed, property owners. Paradoxically, the company helped to establish legal ownership titles – some of which had not been updated since the time of the Austro-Hungarian administration – for all residents affected by the proposed mine by the end of 2006 (GR PR July 2006). It thus inadvertently strengthened one of the defining elements of the AM translation. The fluidity of different forms of agency should be emphasized once again, as it has unexpected repercussions across the visible lines of conflict. On the other hand, however, the farmer metaphor did not work as an effective interessement device and even less as an enrollment strategy at the local level. It worked to a very limited but highly significant extent among the miners-turned-farmers Dorin and Iulian. But, as will be shown later, this was not even very important for the success of the AM translation who stated aim was to thwart the plans for the new mine. Even among members of Alburnus Maior living in Roşia Montană, there was considerable ambiguity about the presumed status of Roşia Montană residents as farmers. Farming was not something that readily came to the mind of the late Stelian, a retired miner but self-employed as carpenter at the time of the interview (July 2007). When asked about should one learn first on Roşia Montană, he did not uncritically endorse the iconic image used by AM: To a large extent, they are interested in the place for this gold. It is a pity not to see what is here. Many people are interested. Underneath our feet there is gold, I know this mountain from side to side. The Cetate [mountain] has been the emperor’s chair. It is a gold-bearing area, everything means gold. The buildings were not made without gold.

Another active member of Alburnus Maior, Adrian, was asked specifically about how did his parents and grandparents make a living in Roşia Montană. He mentions that there were many different crafts in Roşia, such as tailors, shoemakers, butchers, carpenters, barkeepers (anecdotal evidence suggests that there were no less than 16 bars in the central square of Roşia

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Montană). However, especially during difficult times, people kept farm animals (cows, hogs) and used the produce from their gardens, in most cases for making plum brandy and jams. Iulian is a retired miner in his late 50s who engages in subsistence agriculture. He recounts the livelihood strategies of his parents and grandparents as being based on agricultural activities which were highly developed during the period of prosperity of Roşia Montană (before the 1948 nationalization). However, on his account, this was also the period of intensive mineral extraction, which attracted people from other areas surrounding Roşia Montană (the Muşca and Lupşa communes, for example). People in Roşia Montană owned mining shares [which proved ownership of certain parts of mines] and they exploited the seams either with their families or by employing other workers. However, these small-scale miners also used to seek employment in the state mine because in this way they could receive social insurance and a pension in old age. The iconic image of the farmer loses its coherence in such statements. Dorin is also a former miner and, at the time of the interview, full-time farmer. As the leader of Alburnus Maior, he offers a more sophisticated view of the economic history of Roşia Montană. He claims that communities that have relied for most of their existence on an income source – mining in this case – have to face, at some point during their existence, the choice to continue along the same trajectory, or change it. If they continue their past activities, the mining occupation that has ensured their long-term existence can bring their demise. Alternatively, if the emphasis shifts towards what were previously considered secondary occupations – agriculture, crafts, traditional activities – the community can engage on a more solid development trajectory. “From my point of view, the time has come for this shift” in Roşia Montană. As a self-styled farmer, Dorin comes closest to the views espoused by international activists and is often invoked in international debates as the iconic figure of the farmer resisting encroachments on his land73. His translation of the GR project chimes very well with those of international activist networks. The economic history that comes through in these accounts is thus a complex mix of strategies employed by these “miners – peasants” (Wollmann, personal communication

73 One example is the debate between John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA and Phelim McAleer, director and producer of the documentary Mine your own business (2006) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us0yOg5uS5Q). The movie, considered as a new problematization of the mining project by GR will be discussed below.

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January 2008). The remembrance of how one’s forefather earned their livelihoods – and occasional musings or arguments over which was predominant at different times, mining or agriculture – are, however, of little consequence for the staunch opponents such as Dorin, Adrian or Iulian. Interestingly, these opponents who form the nucleus of AM and, more recently, of the Cultural Foundation Roşia Montană, are also the best externally-connected actors on the Roşia Montană scene. Their lives and livelihood have thus come to depend on resources that are not available on the local scene alone. Their need to align themselves with the GR translation is thus mediated by other, more powerful translations that revolve around Arcadian and environmental justice discourses. Other members or supporters of Alburnus Maior, who are less well connected and sometimes appear to feel the chills of their uncertain economic status, are likely to problematize the farmer trope in projective rather than habitual ways (Emirbayer and Mische 1998). Mihai answers the question on the most important thing to be known about Roşia Montană in the following way: Mihai: The first thing that they should know is the occupation of the locals, their former occupation and their current one. [...] Or, their source of livelihood until now and in the future. Interviewer: Can you explain a bit? Mihai: Until now…, we should not fool ourselves, because this is the truth, 80% of the locals lived off mining. That was it. And the rest… from agriculture, there were the local office workers, and that’s pretty much it. But 80%..., that was it.

For him, the link between the past and the future is one of continuity rather than change, but a form of continuity that has nothing pre-determined about it. The future of the mining project is uncertain and this uncertainty reverberates in the way Mihai relates to mining: In the past we lived off mining, in the future, I don’t know. The state mine was closed, people [are hesitant] to put their trust in this project, because it was not well thought out from the beginning. This project would have been very welcome if it would not have destroyed the locality, people would have stayed here, than I myself….

At this point in the interview he was interrupted by Adrian, who also present in the local office of the Soros Foundation where the discussion took place: “…if it would not have affected the environment….”, he said. Mihai accepted the suggestion, but continued his train of thought:

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If it would not have affected the environment, that’s right. But once you destroy a locality [settlement], I don’t see…. A Roşian [does not] see the purpose of the project if they have to leave anyway. He will not be a miner anymore.

Mining is thus not a form of activity that all members of AM reject out of hand. In this case, Mihai clearly argues against the project as it was conceived by GR, and in this sense he holds a similar point of view with that of Horea, discussed in chapter two. In the winding course of the conflict, such definitions of the situation are likely to change, however. What appears as unacceptable at some point may undergo a shift in problematization and lead to contrary positions that appear justified. Simmel recognized that discrete moral standards around which human personalities coalesce have nothing to do with the conflicts inherent in human life but, I would add, with discursive formations. Mihai is a case in point. Several years after the interview, as a member of the local council, he endorsed a letter drafted by the Roşia Montană local authorities which challenged the proposal of including Roşia Montană on the UNESCO heritage list (Unirea, January 21, 2011). In other words, he changed from being an opponent of the GR translation of the mining project to being a supporter. It may be that he adumbrated his experience of insecurity and feeling of being marginalized by the AM outward-looking translation during the 2008 interview when he said: Let’s say, if the company leaves tomorrow, I think that others [non-resident activists] will forget about us as well. I think… maybe I am wrong. […] Now we need, I told you already, support. And they can say: “Well, we supported you, we saved you from the ugly monster, now you figure out for yourselves [what to do].”

The literature on ecological distribution conflicts has documented the sometimes uneasy or unstable alliances between indigenous organizations and international environmental NGOs (Conklin and Graham 1995; Roue 2003; Ali 2000; Horowitz 2011), but has also revealed cases where red-green alliances have been functional under specific circumstances (Ali 2003). The “serious ideological disjunctures between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ elements of transnational environmental movements” observed, for example, in Chimalapas, Mexico (Doune 2007: 460) were relatively muted at Roşia Montană. Although the above discussion suggests that the farmer trope was not widely shared even among the close supporters of AM, it did not lead to an ideological cleavage, although there is some evidence

185 for this. It was probably another aspect of problematization that introduced a wedge between local residents (more or less in favour of AM) and the international activists of AM. AM relied extensively on alliances and connections with external actors with the help of which it became involved in what is called strategic litigation (Kühnle 2009). This involved using the courts system to challenge different permits and certificates issued by the Romanian state authorities (local, county or national), which the company needed for the approval of its project. The actor world of AM tended to shift, as a result, from a pronounced grassroots character in the early 2000s to one that included scientific and legal experts at the expense of a broader democratic base. AM underwent thus a change in its position as an obligatory passage point. From mobilizing residents and property owners against the RMGC project it redefined itself, in effect, as an advocacy NGO aiming at stopping the project. It maintained, for example, a broader national appeal by organizing each year the “Hay Fest” (FânFest) festival in Roşia Montană. The re-definition of AM, although never officially acknowledged was quite profound. In this way, it appears that it insulated itself against a series of surprises which would have challenged a broader-based grassroots organization. The continuous thinning of its ranks, as increasing numbers of residents left Roşia Montană between 2002 and 2008 – a period during which over 75% of Roşia Montană residents sold their properties to RMGC, did not shatter the influence of this NGO. During my field research (May 2007 – May 2008), I also found a very low level of trust among both Roşia Montană residents and relocatees in the NGO opposing the project. On a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 means “very much trust” and 5 means “no trust at all”, AM scored 3.9 (out of 70 valid responses) and the modal category (the one showing the highest frequency of responses) was “no trust at all”. Furthermore, when asked which organization or person defends their interests, more than half of 82 respondents said ‘nobody’ or ‘I don’t know’. Only 20% of these respondents named one or several organizations or persons who oppose the project. The interpretation of these findings can be linked to the disarticulation of individual and collective translations in the case of Roşia Montană. No organization was able to ensure an effective and lasting alignment of its translations with those of the inhabitants of Roşia Montană. Cezara, an international activist with AM provided an illustration of the narrow

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passage point that AM had become in 2007, for example: “…I mean, if I have one family I am legitimate.” This can, in turn, be linked to the political economic context in which the NGO operates – expropriation is a complicated and challenging process in post-revolutionary Romania. Dorin explains “Those who resist are important. We don’t need many supporters, but significant ones, owners of houses and land.” By narrowing the local passage point and the definition of the participants in its actor world – “property owners who resist” – AM effectively disconnected its translation from that of the majority of the inhabitants who, over the years, have seemed more willing to align their translations with those of GR, even if not without conflicts.

“Fighting Fire with Fire”: Contested Environments at Roşia Montană

One consequence of the farmer trope was that it led to a rather unexpected redefinition of the international environmental activists. The translation by AM of the environment of Roşia Montană as an idyllic landscape inhabited by farmers engendered a resymbolization of the Roşia Montană environment by pro-mining interests. The result was the documentary called Mine your own business (2006) directed by Phelim McAleer. This new translation, which has emerged on the scene of Roşia Montană, has sought to establish a new alliance between mining companies and their representatives and the local populations by severing the link between the latter and environmentalists. These were portrayed as misanthropists only concerned about protecting the environment but insensitive to the needs of local communities, such as employment or compensation for properties. The former CEO of GR, Alan Hill was quoted saying that the documentary for which GR paid was meant to “fight fire with fire”, that is, to respond to environmentalists, as members of AM are defined, by attacking their presumed misanthropy. In this way, the company revealed itself once again as an actor that seeks to translate its mining project as an opportunity for development in the face of the stasis – or the development hiatus – which the opposition to the project and other contingent factors have brought about. The interessement device is, in this case, the polluted environment of Roşia Montană which resulted from the operation of the open pit since the 1970s.

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As with the Arcadian discourse and the farmer trope put forward by AM, the discourse of environmental doom is meant to connect the interests of the project developers for Roşia Montană to wider frameworks. Some of these frameworks are those discussed above, namely those advocating free-market remedies to the disastrous environmental legacy of state socialism. A point of contrast with the employment of the Arcadian discourse by the anti-mining activists is the emphasis on work, especially industrial work, which is a conspicuously absent construct in Arcadian environmental discourses (White 1996). McAleer shows in the movie a vivid contrast between leisurely activists who allegedly enjoy nature without depending directly on it for their livelihood and the unemployed miners – whose iconic figure is Gheorghe Luchian – who suffer the brunt of poverty when a promising development project such as the mine of Gabriel Resources is halted. McAleer flew Luchian to an ilmenite mine in Fort Dauphin in Madagascar and to the Pascua Lama mine at the border between Chile and Argentina to show him how other poor people like himself suffer at the hand of the short-sightedness of environmentalists. Gheorghe’s enrollment is facilitated precisely by his unemployed status and his mobilization is a way to show the contrast between physical mobility and the social and economic immobility brought about by the suspension of the project approval. One of the main aims of the Mine your own business movie and the associated media campaign was to articulate a vision of environmental doom in relation to the environment at Roşia Montană. The red waters that had given the name of the valley and the town, at least since the sixteenth century, were reinterpreted as historical pollution. This new action aimed at turning the value of the environment at Roşia Montană on its head is reflected in a National Post article which directly challenges the Arcadian discourse:

Rosia Montana is not an idyllic community whose traditional lifestyle needs to be preserved. It is a desolate and polluted village whose streams run literally red-brown with toxic chemicals. […]. Moreover, Gabriel's project would reclaim much of the area polluted by state-owned mining operations. Gabriel CEO Alan Hill's favourite--and accurate-- sound bite is, "This is a mine to clean up a mess." (Foster 2006)

For the first time in the history of environmentalism, an anti-environmentalist documentary was produced under corporate sponsorship. The whole discourse of

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environmental degradation in Eastern Europe was revived by the PR campaign organized by GR: inefficient socialist-era state-owned mines had severely polluted the environment; post 1989 governments were, and still are, unable to clean up the polluted legacy of socialism; only private investors with adequate financing and an assumed goodwill can help clean up the mess left by “uncontrolled mining.” The company sent bottles with red water to media outlets to suggest the high level of pollution in Roşia Montană. By rendering the environment as worthless, GR sought, in effect, to produce a second displacement of Roşia Montană, this time in terms of ecological integrity. In this thesis I have strived to show that agency cannot be captured by discourses even when actors do embrace, at times, one discourse or another. In an interview with Gheorghe in 2007, his views were far less clear-cut then they had been portrayed in the movie. Rather than seeing Roşia Montană as lacking any beauty, he admitted that it had “good parts and bad parts”. When asked about his psychological attachment to Roşia Montană he says that he says that he feels this attachment and that he is used to the rhythm of life there. Even if he chose the response option “I agree with the [RMGC] project and trust that the company will do a good job”74, he added that “he will wait and see when they will commence the project if they respect the environmental regulations.” In fact, the wait and see attitude was dominant throughout the whole interview with him, suggesting that his personal opinions where only loosely tied to the framing put forward in the Mine your own business movie. In a subsequent informal discussion with Gheorghe I became aware that even he might betray the new translation of GR. After the company announced that it will lay off two thirds of its workforce after the environmental impact assessment was suspended (2007), Luchian seemed uneasy about this decision of the company and almost challenged their (presumed) good intentions, which he had helped prove by his participation in the movie.

74 This structured question was included in the preliminary interview (to which Gheorghe has responded) but was subsequently dropped from the final interview.

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Alternative Translations of the Environment: the Residents of Roşia Montană

This short section addresses the question of how the residents of Roşia Montană and those in the surrounding areas relate to the translations of the environment put forward by both GR and AM. The use of cyanide in the planned mining project is a widely employed discursive strategy used by the project opponents and, more recently, by its supporters as well. Concern over the health dangers of this technology and the technological impact of the project in general is quite pregnant in some respondents. For example, Teodora (Roşia Montană) who lives outside the GR-defined project-affected area but in close proximity to this area, worries that “if [cyanide] affects the environment in such a way, how much [more] can it affect us? We can [even] die!”. Another respondent, who lives in Bucium, a commune close to the affected area, explains what cyanide means to her: “For us, it is a catastrophe! The tailings pond. We have to swallow all the cyanide and all the emissions.” (Ecaterina, Bucium). However, other respondents held opposite views. When asked what cyanide means to her, Nadia, who has moved from Roşia Montană to Abrud, answered: “I know what it is. I worked with it […]. It is a chemical, this is what it means. That’s all. I know it is dangerous, but it can be found in some fruits and vegetables, obviously in small quantities”. There is an obvious cleavage between the displacees who have been compensated for their properties and have moved elsewhere (or are able to do so if they wish), and the local population living in close proximity to the project. Among the latter respondents (28 in total), more than three quarters, see the use of cyanide in a negative way. Tudor, a resident of a village in the vicinity of the Roşia Montană project, but outside the affected area, probably expresses the general attitude of all those in his situation: “the problem is that the company should be mindful of those who stay in the area, close to the [mine]. Nobody cares about those who stay; we have no warranty; this is a risk”. Fear of cyanide pollution can work to undermine the translations of both AM and GR. On the one hand, the alliance building and strategic litigation approaches used by AM may seem less than transparent to a number of Roşia Montană residents. Risk research has shown that individuals sometimes take risky actions in order to avoid a perceived greater loss (Heimer 1988). Fear of cyanide poisoning may thus have had an effect on the relocation decisions of some Roşia Montană residents.

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For some actors living in Roşia Montană, neither the Arcadian nor the environmental doom scenarios fit with their experience of Roşia Montană. Lucia was an unemployed mining engineer (2007) and she thinks that neither the stated expectations of AM (to a lesser extent) nor those of GR are realistic. With regard to the discursive strategy used by GR to portray Roşia Montană as a disaster area that needs clean-up, she comments: So I accused [Alan Hill – the CEO who commissioned the Mine your own business movie]….. Maybe for some investor who never came to Roşia Montană, this catches on, but for the inhabitants, it was a scurvy trick to show that [red] water which everybody know about. [They] did not get sick because of this water. This water has always been like this, and it gave the name to the village, to the valley. “The environment is healthy here, you cannot claim that it affects you in any way.”

Environmental risks can be conceptualized in a more complex way when using the sociology of translation rather than framing theory. Again, the fluidity of ways of thinking eludes sometimes predetermined discourses of riskiness and shows that despite the appearance of coherent actor worlds, there is a destabilization potential inside any given actor. In other words, the actors themselves are not monolithic entities but reveal fissures in what appears from the outside as a unitary image and willpower. For example Anca, an employee of RMGC (2006) claims that the project could be risky from an environmental and an archaeological point of view. This is quite a surprising argument which she shared with me, adding that she is not well seen by her colleagues. She then explained that what she had in mind was that the leadership of the company has a bearing on the question of risks. If the upper management team is foreign she has no qualms with it. If, however, a Romanian leadership would take over RMGC, she fears that they would not respect the standards of environmental protection or workers’ health in order to cut costs. The above are only some illustrations of the ways in which individual actors think about the issues of landscape and environment at Roşia Montană. There is no possible way to subsume these positions to preexisting discourses, as actors repeatedly challenge them. The consequences of these challenges are yet unknown, but they cannot be dismissed without consideration.

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The Variable Translations of Community In concluding his discussion of place and community, Relph argues that “people are their pIace and a place is its people and however readily these may be separated in conceptual terms, in experience they are not easily differentiated” (1976: 34). This may be true in most circumstances, but the situation in Roşia Montană shows just in how many ways the above claims is only partly true. Raymond Williams (1976) provides an argument for why this may be so. For him, community is...... the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc.) it seems never to be used unfavourably (1976: 66).

Looked at through the lens of ANT, community can be interpreted as amendable to different translations which are, simultaneously, powerful and contradictory. Community is frequently invoked in the construction of the AM and GR actor worlds to refer to the residents of Roşia Montană. This is the nominal definition with which both GR and AM would probably agree. Community is also an interessement device as both sides try to get the community on their side as an essential element of their actor worlds. For Cezara, AM is a “community organization” (2007), while GR identifies itself as a “responsible member of the community” (GR PR April 10, 1999). The other NGOs in Roşia Montană – for example Pro Roşia Montană and Pro Dretatea - identify themselves as grassroots organizations of those who support the RMGC mining project. As with the use of the Arcadian environment as an interessement mechanism by AM, and of a doomed environment by GR, community has a low appeal for the residents of Roşia Montană. There is, thus, a high potential of treason of translations that appeal to community. Several examples will help illustrate this observation. In the interviews carried out in Roşia Montană, there is a highly unequal distribution in references to community. Some respondents invoke community frequently while others can talk for hours about local life without mentioning this word. In general, however, the term community seems to be largely absent from the vocabulary of those interviewed in Roşia Montană and in the surrounding areas. For example, in the semi-structured interviews with 90 respondents, only six mentioned the word “community” spontaneously, with an average of slightly less than two references for each of

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these respondents. On the other hand, the actors most actively involved in the visible struggle over Roşia Montană, even if they are residents, invoke community which much greater frequency. For example, Dorin, the local leader of Alburnus Maior, mentioned “community” 24 times in the first hour of an interview. What is important, however, is the context in which community is mentioned. For some non-activist local respondents, community is the equivalent of settlement or locality. For example, Viorel, the head teacher in Roşia Montană, juxtaposes “community” and “locality” in two instances out of four in which he mentions community. For others, community is associated with “unity” and is used to describe the patterns of dense communication which prevailed before the arrival of RMGC, for example by Alina, a former school teacher in Roşia Montană: “We were a tight-knit community, many of us, like in a family. We used to talk, for me this is food for the soul.” Similarly, community is used by Nicolae, an unemployed miner, to refer to relationships with other people (“this is a community”) and not making distinctions between those who are for or against the mining project. The destruction of the community is decried by several active opponents of the mining project. Iulian claims that after the arrival of RMGC, with its policy of what he calls divide et impera (divide and conquer), the community was torn apart. He feels strongly about the community and calls those who have left Roşia Montană “traitors”: the curse of the Roşia Montană gold will follow them everywhere, and they will be never able to shed the longing for Roşia Montană until their death. Sandu75, an active member of Alburnus Maior, similarly says that RMGC has tried and has succeeded in dividing the community based on strictly personal interests. However, for Sandu, the community is far from the cohesive group of property owners who oppose RMGC’s plans. For him, the problem is that the mining company has accentuated the divisions that exist between people’s personal interests: “where they felt the fissure, they dug deeper. It was like putting dynamite in each family. Where they felt that someone is more greedy in a family, they put pressure on that person.” There is no image of a monolithic community of project opponents in his words, but a community that is more or less prone to being split by competing translations. He points to the more subtle ways in which community – used as an vehicle of interessment by GR – has had unintended consequences:

75 The interview material is courtesy of Alina Pop.

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We were the lucky ones, to have all our family members either for or against the project. The rest [i.e. those cases where one family member sold properties without the consent of others], were plagued by dramas, divorce and suicide.

In the use of community as an interessment device both GR and AM refer to an understanding of community that comes closer to Bauman’s reading of the definition of community by Robert Redfield (1955). According to Redfield, community is the human whole that is “...distinctive from other human groupings, it is small, and self-sufficient.” Bauman unpacks each of the attributes used in this short definition and herewith suggests, without being his explicit intention, how community can function as a vehicle for the interessement of actors according to an "us vs. them" logic. Bauman writes:

“Distinctiveness” means: the division into “us” and “them” is exhaustive as much as it is disjunctive, there are no “betwixt and between” cases left, it is crystal-clear who is one of us and who is not, there is no muddle and no cause for confusion – no cognitive ambiguity, and so no behavioural ambivalence. “Smallness” means: communication among the insiders is all- embracing and dense, and so casts the signals sporadically arriving “from the outside” into disadvantage by reason of their comparative rarity, superficiality and perfunctory character. While “self-sufficiency” means: isolation from “them” is close to complete, the occasions to break it are few and far between.’ (2001: 12).

At the hands of some actors, actively involved in the struggle, community becomes a political rallying cry designed to mobilize both supporters and opponents of the mining project. For both sides, the best ally is the community. Community has a democratic appeal – having the “community” on your side provides legitimacy to any creation of alliances. Cezara links community and the establishment of successful alliances in explicit terms:

…when the World Bank came here in 2002, this is why they talked to us because we said we are local, we are property owners who will be impacted so we have legitimate concerns.

As important as the role of community is in forging alliances with powerful actors – which, in turn, are eager to show their popularity - the high interpretability of this concept weakens its effectiveness. A few more illustrations from the translations of both AM and GR will lend support to this argument.

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Adam, a resident of Corna, recounts how in the early days of the opposition, more precisely before the winter Holidays 2002, there was a big meeting at the “casino” (centre of Roşia Montană). Mr. Tiberiu was crying because he said he does not want to leave. He was elected on the committee of Alburnus Maior. Several months later, Mr. Tiberiu sold his property and left the area. Even more dramatic is the case of Gheorghe Ivăşcanu who was featured in the New Eldorado movie as an extremely staunch resister of the RMGC project: “we will never leave, only over our dead bodies!” will they commence the mining project. Several years later, Gheorghe Ivăşcanu was featured in a RMGC ad touting the need to „get the gold out from these rocks”. Adam claimed that they “are in the middle” (between the NGOs opposing and those supporting the project) and that he does not want to be used as “cannon- fodder” by either side. Petra, a resident of Gura Cornei, said that she would “neither leave nor remain alone” when she was interviewed in 2007. However, she was sceptical that Alburnus Maior defends their interests as they claim to do. On the one hand, she saw that despite their efforts, the project seemed to continue unabated. On the other hand, she argues, Alburnus cannot really defend her and that she, in turn, “cannot stop anyone from leaving; the older people move closer to their children.” Telling residents not to sell their properties is, indeed, seen negatively by some respondents. Miron, a resident of Roşia Montană, considers that it is rather impolite to ask someone why they sold their property. Even a determined opponent of the RMGC project such as Sandu admits that he was reluctant to heed the advice of some Greenpeace activists to ask local people to attach “This property is not for sale” plates on their houses. Some of them were certainly willing to display these plates, but for others it probably meant pushing the limits of “community” too far. On the other hand, I will briefly recount a public meeting in the Corna village, held in December 2007. On that occasion, RMCG announced mass layoffs due to the suspension of the environmental permitting process for its project. The audience was composed of several representatives of RMGC, including a director who presided over the meeting, several tens of residents from the Corna valley and several “outsiders”, including the researcher76. A few minutes after the meeting began, two other “outsiders” entered the schoolroom where the

76 Both the researcher and a journalist had voice recorders, visibly displayed.

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meeting was held: Tibor Kocis, a Hungarian filmmaker and his assistant. The speaker – a director of RMGC – noted that the meeting had been joined by “other stakeholders” who “don’t necessarily belong to the Corna community”. The director decided that he wants to first ask the “community” if they accept to be filmed, because, he underscored once more, this was a meeting for the community. The reaction of the “community” was, as one might expect, highly variable in attitude and vociferousness. First, several participants shouted briefly: “ask them to leave! Ask them to leave!”. Then a clear voice (V1) resounded in the general chattering of voices: “let them film!”. The director intervened: “the community decides!”. V1 reacted: “Yes, the community. This is my opinion…”. Then another participant (V2) asked, rhetorically, if a representative of the Romanian press would be allowed in a similar discussion in Hungary. V1 again reacted: “he has the right, you have to allow him…”. V2 kept insisting, saying that if a “Romanian media outlet would go to a discussion on a project in Hungary they would not be allowed.” V1 sought an alternate strategy: if they ask them [Kocis and his assistant] to leave, will they not bring shame on themselves [as locals]? Another voice (V3) intervened: “we have to discuss the problems of the Corna community […]. If you want to listen to what is being said, it is ok. But with regard to filming, let us vote, who is for filming.” The suggestion was not taken up the RMGC director. Instead, he concluded that the community accepts the presence of the outsiders but without being filmed. He wanted to proceed with the meeting, but the chattering had not died down. V2 insisted that the outsiders will cause trouble and that they, the locals, “suffer all the stress”. Few minutes of chattering convinced Kocis and his assistant that it would be wise to leave the meeting. The other “outsiders” in the room, although obviously not part of the community (including the researcher with his voice recorder in his hand) were completely ignored. The community was used again as a means of mobilizing support for a specific translation but it proved, yet again, to be much more elusive than usually assumed. In this instance, however, it appears that it worked effectively to separate the residents from “problematic” outsiders.

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Roots and Home Places: The Variable Meanings of Profound Experiences

So far, attention has been devoted to the translations put forward by AM and GR and to the many contingencies which they have encountered along the way. The residents of Roşia Montană have been interpreted as “creative opportunists”, eagerly seizing opportunities that seemed to enhance their cultural expectations, but equally forfeiting their chances for a good and peaceful life. Relph (1977: 38) cites Robert Coles that "it is utterly part of our nature to want roots, to need roots, to struggle for roots, for a sense of belonging.” The question of roots and home places is very important in debates about Roşia Montană as what surfaces repeatedly in discussions is whether people can or should be forced to leave their homes. Stephanie Roth argues that people cannot be simply displaced because “it is here that they have their roots”. She looks down upon those who might “want to sell their roots for buying a TV or a car for their children, that’s your opinion, I mean...”. It is consistent with the Arcadian discourse to take care and spare one’s home place from arbitrary change or exploitation (Heidegger as cited in Relph 1977: 39). The question of roots was of concern to several respondents that I interviewed in Roşia Montană. A number of respondents decry the uprooting entailed by the RMGC project. Petra, for example, does not want to be “uprooted like that.” When she has almost reached her age of retirement and “all [she] needs is good health, should I leave?” Two respondents, one from Carpinis (NE of Roşia Montană) and the other from Bucium (S. of Roşia Montană) used the same expression to convey their rootedness – “we are like the worm in the horseradish root”, which means that they feel adapted to their living place. Several respondents underscored their rootedness in Roşia Montană: “I was born here, here are the roots of fire of my ancestors,” says Dana, 79, who lives on the main axis Roşia Montană. By “roots of fire” she refers to her ancestors’ struggle against foreign oppression. At the beginning of the interview, she asked me to read from a history book which described a military action carried out by her great grandfather. This was meant to justify her claim that “it is very difficult to give up our lands…,

197 the holy land that gave us life.” Her grandfather was also a delegate to the Great Union of 1918 when Old Kingdom of Romania and Transylvania formed Greater Romania. For other residents, it was the question of uprooting that seemed more relevant. An interesting case is that of Ecaterina. In her 70s at the time of the interview, Ecaterina has been a primary school teacher for 34 years in Roşia Montană. Her case is probably best known by residents and foreigners alike as it was featured in the first documentary on Roşia Montană entitled “New Eldorado” (by filmmaker Tibor Kocsis). In the movie, Ecaterina walks the streets of Roşia Montană with a detached attitude and tells the story of her relocation:

I left Roşia Montană a year ago [2003]. I’ve found a good place to live, I’m very satisfied. You won’t hear any complaints about Gold Corp. from me, they paid me what was due to me. […] And here, next to the church, is the grave of my dear husband. I hope that with the help of Gold Corp. I can move him to Cluj. Gold Corp. will pay for the exhumation, transportation, and the new grave. And everything. My husband’s been here for 12 years. This used to be my house. It’s so big, I often got lost in it. I can look at this house with serenity. It secured a peaceful retirement for me. Thanks to the Gold Corp.!

Among those who accepted to relocate from Roşia Montană, she was the first to move the earthly remains of her late husband and this created some commotion both among the locals and some opponents of the mine. By way of background, it is worth mentioning that “resettling graves” is for many a radical departure from the Christian Orthodox conception of life and death, something which “not even the Communists dared to do!” In the movie, she seems to project the image of a “happy relocatee”, entirely content with the compensation package she was offered by RMGC and enjoying the good life of the city [Cluj Napoca]. She underscores the legitimacy of GR’s definition of community members-cum relocatees who only stand to benefit by leaving Roşia Montană after having sold their properties to the company. However, at what level does Ecaterina’s translation overlap so neatly with that of the company? “Nobody knew where Roşia Montană is” before the arrival of the “stranger” [străinul], that is RMGC, begins Ecaterina the story of her departure from Roşia Montană, while sitting in front of me at her kitchen table in Cluj Napoca. Who left and why they did it is of no concern to my respondent. She underscores that she does not want to talk about anyone but herself. After her husband passed away 16 years ago [i.e. in 1992], she wanted to leave Roşia Montană. Why? Because she had gone several times through the experience

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of being “uprooted”, both as a person and through the memory of her ancestors. And, she argues, after you have been uprooted once, the second or third time you feel that severing your roots is not that difficult anymore. Ecaterina never knew her mother because she passed away when my respondent was 10 weeks old. The first uprooting took place when she was 5 or so years old and she went for a visit to her grandparents on her father’s side in a village (Sărata) close to Bistriţa, in northern Transylvania. She was still there when Transylvania was partitioned, following the Vienna dictate (August 30, 1940), and remained in the territory under Hungarian domination. She lived in Sărata for seven years, and returned to Roşia Montană in 1946. She endured many hardships in her stepfamily for “five terrible years”, until she was finally brought back to Sărata and “adopted” by an aunt in 1951. After finishing the pedagogical school in Zalău in 1955, she was assigned a teaching position in Roşia Montană [such positions were compulsory in the early years of the socialist regime, rather than a matter of free choice]. But, she “did not want to go to Roşia Montană, because I was afraid.” Therefore, she decided to try something else, and found, through a fortunate circumstance, a position in an isolated hamlet (Cireşoaia) very far from Roşia Montană, where she stayed until her marriage. “And then, I nevertheless returned to Roşia!” “Was it your choice?” the researcher asked. She answered with an effusion of humorous pathos: “it was love!” “Because I was young once, too”, she adds laughing. Her husband was from Roşia, and she was too, after all, and she followed him there. Going back to her life after her husband passed away, she says that she wanted to leave Roşia Montană and she let the news circulate among her relatives. An interested buyer approached her and asked: “how much do you want for your house?” This, she hastens to add, was 13 – 14 years ago, well before the arrival of the Goldu [the local popular name for RMGC]. Her house in Roşia Montană was too large for a lone woman and she answered that she needed enough to buy a one-bedroom apartment because she felt she was “aging rapidly” and needed a quiet spot. The buyer replied dryly: „Mrs. Ecaterina, your house is not in Cluj!”. In other words, she was asking for too much. “If it is not in Cluj, it is in

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Roşia Montană, so let it [be] there” was her answer, if not the actual one, than at least the imaginary response given to the buyer of 14 years ago. “And then came the stranger [the mining company].” Four years after the New Eldorado movie, she stays unmoved in her attitude: “…how should I put it? The truth must be told. We cannot build everything on lies and phariseeism. […] This is my part, isn’t it?” [emphasis added]. She reiterates, almost word for word, what she said in the movie: “I thanked the [company] for giving me enough money to make ends meet in Cluj. And the company paid for the exhumation, transportation, inhumation and the new grave for my husband”. But she does not simply internalize the discourse of the company:

Ecaterina: This is it. But…, let me be well understood, I sold my building… Interviewer: Yes… Ecaterina: The sentiment, the beautiful years, those cannot be sold, she adds in a voice trembling with emotion. They have no price. And for this reason I admire those resisters [those refusing to leave Roşia Montană] who, let us be clear about this, have lost enormously in terms of money. But they were left with the sentiments. We are not alike! We are not alike!

After this moving confession, she evaluates her personal circumstances before the relocation in the following way: “I don’t suffer because my mind is at peace; it was no longer possible for me [to stay in Roşia Montană]. One winter she had her arm broken and she recounts how she had to shovel the snow with the shovel tied to her arm… “You were alone, you were alone” she repeats on a clear tone as if to convince herself. At that point she decided to sell, “but…with no sentiments, with no nostalgia for the place where I spent… the most beautiful years of my life”. Her voice trembles again… She concludes: “I talked so much about… I think there is nothing worth in it.” One can agree with Horowitz that translation alignment means a (partial) compromise of the goals of the weaker actor, in this case of an elderly lone woman. However, as Szombati (2007) found, even this painful alignment can be a source of hope. At the same time, the agency of Ecaterina, the possibility that she could have acted otherwise, brought the GR translation one step closer to its realization when it could have, equally well, distanced it by one step.

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Roots and especially homes do not have only emotional value. Some residents in Roşia Montană relate to their houses in a pragmatic way, as a means to achieve other ends. However, the way they discuss the conditions under which they would sell their properties which are, in most cases, their own homes, implies an emphasis on free choice. In other words, the negotiation of individual properties appears as an independent sphere in which the agency of residents of Roşia Montană is evident. In fact, AM increased the bargaining edge of all residents by shifting the definition of the interessement devices of GR. According to the company’s Resettlement and Relocation Action Plan, “RMGC will apply the World Bank Group’s Operational Directive on Involuntary Resettlement (OD 4.30)” (RRAP 2006: 9) . This directive is premised on the requirement that any private property expropriated based on the state’s power of “eminent domain” has to be compensated (Szablowski 2002). However, from the beginning of the RMGC project until the present (fall 2011), the proposed mine has never been formally declared of “public interest”. Recent events such as the proposed amendment of the mining law might, however, change the current legal status of the project. The use of the World Bank’s operational directive 4.30 can thus be seen as an attempt to create a constrained legal field premised on the notion that RMGC can mobilize the state’s power of eminent domain to support its project and use expropriation as a last resort. Trubek et al. (1994: 417 - 418) argue that legal fields create regulation, which means the structuring of economic relations, protection for individuals and groups and legitimation for a given social order. The RRAP is thus an interessement mechanism devised to regulate compensation for the eligible residents of Roşia Montană in terms of “the replacement value of their affected property, at a level intended to allow them to replace their property with a similar one” (RRAP 2006: 43). This level of compensation is legitimated based on the fact that the World Bank’s directive on involuntary resettlement is the international standard which ensures one of the most comprehensive and efficient protection of people affected by involuntary displacement (RRAP 2006: 34). However, the interpretation and actual experience of displacement and compensation of the residents of Roşia Montană has redefined the legal field from one of forced displacement to one of free choice through a series of interventions by less powerful actors. How was this possible? Translations have shifted? Actors have used their motivations, desires, knowledge,

201 connections to tinker with translations that were, apparently, set in stone: the relocation plan, the inevitability of a large-scale mine at Roşia Montană etc. With the mounting transnational opposition to the RMGC project, many residents have realized that the risk of expropriation of their properties is quite low and that, in fact, they can negotiate their compensation in market terms rather than under the principle of eminent domain. This is based, first and foremost, on the inviolability of private property. Dorin states that their struggle “began with [the issue of property] and this is how it will end.” “The struggle for property” is the fundamental aspect of the opposition to the project, according to Dorin, because the company cannot commence the project as long as a single landowner refuses to sell. In the words of the economist Herman Daly (2008: 126), the local opposition to the RMGC project has managed to substitute the “exchange principle” for the “threat principle” which the company wanted to impose. Interestingly, the confrontation with an interessement device that was based on another, more general translation – the need to acquire land by the developers - enabled local residents to take advantage of the more general definition and use it against the narrow interessement device of the compensation as envisioned by the RRAP. Actors weigh their choices, scrutinize the opportunities and risks that surround them and take steps towards action. First, they inform themselves (McAleer 2001) about the level of compensations that are available, usually about the minimum that other residents have received for their properties. Nelu gives the example of property in a state of complete disrepair (a “ruin”) which was sold by its owners for about $33,000. “Ruins” are a favorite term of comparison because it provides a standard in relation to which respondents can formulate their own claims for higher compensation. A second component in the process of deciding involves an estimation of the living costs that the relocatee would have to incur at the location of their choice. Ilie says that his brother-in-law sold his house and left. It seems that in this way Ilie became aware of all the extra charges that he would have cover and which were free in the mountains: water, garbage etc. Lest the residents of Roşia Montană be interpreted as rational actors, it is important to point out that there are also instances of miscalculation or unintended effects. Georgiana, the owner of the property with the “this house is not for sale” sign (Figure 2.3) sold the house that belonged to her parents-in-law. She received about $43,000 [rate of 30,000] which was “very

202 little” for this “fortune” (avere) which included a house with stable, a forested area and some areas of pasture which included “some rocks where I think there is gold-bearing ore”. She concludes that the fact that the massive stone gate was fissured made them – herself and her brother-in-law - sell the whole property quickly. But after a month her brother-in-law passed away: “he died content that he got the money” At other times, residents are able to the turn the RRAP to their own interest. Mihai and his wife sold the property of her parents and, having gone through the experience of negotiation, explains what this should involve, from his point of view. “Adequate compensation” means to him that….

…[f]irst, there has to be a true negotiation. What did they [company] do until now? They came and said “Sir, do you allow us to measure [your property]?” And they come with the measuring tape and they measure your house, they count your trees, they measure your stairs, they measure your land. Then they make a calculation: “this is how much you will get for a square meter of land, this is how much you will get for a square meter of house, depending on the house type…” and then they say “Sir, this is what we can offer you.” The owner says: I am “satisfied” or “not satisfied”. If he is satisfied, it’s ok, we shake hands, if you agree, obviously. If not, if the owner is not satisfied, they leave him alone. But, I don’t think this means negotiation. Negotiation is when… Sir, when I want to buy a house, I ask the owner “how much….”, but I don’t start measuring his house or see how it’s made because…he would not allow me to do this. I ask him, “Sir, how much do you want for this house?” And he answers: this much.” And I tell him my price. And from there we start the negotiation, he lowers [his price], I increase [mine]. This means negotiation. This has not happened with RMGC [emphasis added].

Several things are worth pointing out from this quote. First, the respondent is obviously not concerned about the threat of expropriation. This is confirmed by 22 other respondents, out of 82 interviewed using the structured interview, who explicitly reject the prospect of expropriation. Those who explicitly agree that the company might use expropriation are fewer (only 10) and some of them live outside the project affected area and are probably less well informed about the property acquisitions. Second, he disagrees with the standardized assessment of the value of properties, based on measurements and unit prices (for land, buildings etc.). He nevertheless acknowledges that the company only “makes an offer” – a soft manifestation of the legal field of involuntary displacement - but does not impose the price.

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Third, and most important, it seems that the respondent regards this approach as less than a true negotiation because there is no space for him to “tell his price”. He is thus hampered in his ability to be a free actor on the market. Several other respondents show great willingness to negotiate the prices of their properties, seemingly taking for granted that they can “tell their price”. In a local newspaper, Ziarul de Apuseni (June 4, 2010), a local homeowner states bluntly: “I am not leaving without 100,000 Euros. I am not selling the apartment, but the gold underneath it.” The notion that the interessement device represented by the RRAP can be seen, after all, as a mystification of the true purpose of the GR translation – to acquire right of way from willing sellers – is similarly suggested by Georgiana’s reference to the gold-bearing rocks. Finally, there are ways in which residents prefer to maintain the links to their home place but not to the broader place of their community. For Mihaela, another respondent living in Roşia Montană, it is her house that plays the decisive role. Although she has repeatedly told me that she wanted to sell her property to RMGC, she has not done so since 2005 when I first met her. Moreover, she claims that while she hates Roşia Montană in which had to spend her life after marriage, she feels strongly attached to the house which she built together with her husband. If they would move her house and small courtyard and garden, she would be willing to move.

Conclusion

This chapter has sought to bring to light the role of social agency in the manifold transformations that have taken place at Roşia Montană over the last decade. The main aim has been to point out the dynamic between the solidification of networks advanced by actors (AM and GR) and the continued threat that these networks be destabilized by the actions of a variety of other actors. This created a perpetual movement of agency at Roşia Montană, of which only glimpses could be offered even in the confines of this long chapter. None of the basic aspects of place identified by Relph stood still in this sweeping process. The effervescence of the actors meeting in this place has been very high and the shifting alliances which they have created demonstrate the importance of agency in situations in which the usual structural explanations of resource conflicts prove to be incomplete. The causal

204 factors usually invoked in analyzing such conflicts – for example the rural or indigenous character of the population, the involvement of the state, the power differentials between local and transnational actors – can hardly account for a situation in which little changes on the surface of the conflict in the course of a decade. When looked at more carefully, however, it is obvious that a variety of things changed or at least were destabilized in the daily micro- negotiations of a large plurality of actors.

Chapter Five: Summary and Conclusions: the Threefold Promise of Agency

This thesis argues that over much of its existence as a scientific discipline, sociology has generally been reluctant to engage with the problem of human agency, despite the early contributions of Weber and of the American pragmatists and the more recent theoretical developments around social constructionism and actor-network theory. The long reign of positivism and functionalism, which find certain echoes even in contemporary understandings of human social life, has relegated agency to a residual category or, at its best, to a marginal theoretical status. The present thesis aims to restore some of the imbalance by devoting sustained attention to what actors think and do in their interactions with others and how they rethink their options and redo their actions as a result of unexpected or contingent outcomes of previous interactions. What is the general relevance of the thesis for sociology, in both theoretical and empirical terms? The contributions that the preceding analysis brings up for discussion can be summed up under three headings: agency as relentless movement, agency as unexpected outcome of structural processes and agency as lived, day-to-day reality. Agency as relentless movement underscores what might be considered a relatively trivial idea, namely that agents act all the time. If the obstinate efforts of actors to produce or reproduce social life are sometimes hidden by the seemingly all-powerful dominion of structures – be they political economic processes or ideologies – this fact should not blind us to the continuous tinkering in which humans engage. The sociology of translation seems to convey this idea in the most dynamic terms, by showing how actors strive to construct translations and transformations of the world around them and how their attempts are simultaneously effective and prone to failure. The fact that the world changes as a result of these translations is demonstrated by the very sociological specialty that has brought to life the sociology of translation, namely science, technology and society (STS) (Callon and Law 1997). From there,

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the general intuition that social life is brought into functioning (or malfunctioning) in much the same way as the assemblage of a complex technology, has gradually enabled a rethinking of the role of agency in sociology. In the same way in which the sociology of translation emerged in a specific area of social life under modernity – the development of science and technology – the view of agency developed here was prompted by an unexpected finding. In this sense, the thesis addresses a rather atypical case of ecological distribution conflict. A junior Canadian-based mining company seeks to develop the largest gold deposit in Europe located below a historic mining town. The approval of the project is repeatedly postponed due to a variety of contingent factors, including a struggle between the project promoters and anti-mining NGOs. This time lag creates a space where actors can and do continuously make their case before the final verdict (the approval or rejection of the mining project) is passed. This space can be called – following Ulrich Beck’s (1986) allusion to the not-yet events which motivate action in the risk society – the not-yet project. The not-yet project is the changing reality with which actors have to contend in their daily lives: it threatens with closure but continues to remain open. In contrast to the actual mining project, the not-yet project is not hard and fast but rather shifts between apparent solidification and fluidity, as different actors seek to carry out their definitions/translations of the situation and constrain the choices of others. Paradoxically, it is macro-structural stasis that creates micro-structural movement. If one reads the older literature on mining towns or the newer literature on the forces of uneven development and neoliberalism, one would infer that it was almost inevitable for Roşia Montană to be developed as a new large-scale project. A major deposit discovered in an undeveloped mining area of high potential – some estimates run as high as 30 – 40 million ounces of gold in the Golden Quadrilateral of Transylvania (Reguly 2010) - with low grade ore amenable to open-pit exploitation would have almost certainly attracted investors given the continued expansion of the treadmill of production (Schnaiberg and Gould 1994). The economic context of the Eastern European transition countries, marked by lack of foreign capital, and the dismal state of the mining sector, which needed investments, made the search for foreign investors by the Romanian government hard to avoid (Argeşeanu Cunningham 2005). On the other hand, mining investors needed lax legal environments and the IMF structural adjustment

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program pushed for this relaxation. The right combination seemed thus to be in place at the turn of the 21st century to make the Roşia Montană open-cast mine almost a certainty. Yet, the outcome of these powerful processes failed to materialize, or at least not as fast as the project developers expected. Roşia Montană has entered, from the point of view of resource extraction, into a development hiatus. Several macro-economic and political factors did not work in the expected direction. The Roşia Montană saga began to be played in slow motion and in the interstices of the structural processes, human actors – either in individual or institutional roles - become visible. It is probably no coincidence that the cases of technological and scientific innovation to which Callon and Law applied their sociology of translation (the scallops fishery, the electric vehicle etc.) were ultimately unsuccessful. This brought the repeated efforts of actors to create and negotiate workable translations to the fore. The steps, choices, miscalculations or contingent factors that shaped actors’ involvement in network construction became readily visible – albeit in hindsight - in cases where the new actor world did not solidify what were at some point mere tenuous alliances. From the point of view of its historical evolution, Roşia Montană is similar to the cases discussed above, that is, a still unfinished project that prompts action. What we see at this point are tenuous alliances, constantly revised and destabilized through the choices of actors. “All that is solid melts into air” said Marx in the Communist Manifesto. All that was taken for granted about the division of labour, the isolation of mining communities, the relentless drive of extractive industries to push the extraction of minerals to the furthest frontiers, the marginalization of communities appears to be not only the outcome of structural processes but also of a variety of more or less intended human interventions. In all these instances, human practice is seen at work, maybe more visible, because more tense, in Roşia Montană than in other cases. But the insights could be taken as a point of departure for an investigation of where spaces of agency might emerge – in unexpected ways - even in seemingly pre-determined processes such as those of natural resource extraction. Finally, the notion of agency as lived, day-to-day reality is suggested at several points throughout the fourth chapter. Actors – whether corporate or individual – make choices and engage in actions aimed to materialize those choices. But they seem to constantly be aware that things could have been done (or gone) otherwise.

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The primary empirical contribution of the thesis is to show – using the conceptual language of the sociology of translation – that the agency of one actor tends, in many cases, to define and ultimately solidify the agency of other actors. The latter, however, can hardly be confined to predetermined roles and, as a result, continuously threaten to destabilize the roles assigned to them and, ultimately, the whole enterprise of translation and solidification of structures. The more general theoretical lesson for sociology is to probe pre-existing structures for those points at which previously successful translations can be destabilized. Of course, not every structure is amenable to such an investigation, and here I am referring to what Gross calls social mechanisms, considered as “chains or aggregations of problem situations and the effects that ensue as a result of the habits actors use to resolve them”. Then, the question would be how are actors likely to change the habits and what would be the aggregate effect of such change in habits? Agency is multifaceted, and broaching it analytically requires some level of systematization. For the present analysis I used Relph’s (1976) discussion of the main characteristics of place, which allows a systematic approach to the manifold manifestations of human intentionality in relation to place. The table below (Table 5.1) offers a general overview of the principal dimensions along which translations have been purposefully carried out and which have revealed the destabilizing potential of other, alternative, choices which also emerged as complex networks.

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Table 5.1 Overview of the dynamic between the solidification and the renewal of choices Project Treason – Project Treason – Individual developers (GR) destabilizing opponents (AM) destabilizing residents (Roşia potential potential Montană) The Displacement → New AM emerges as Local residents Varying degrees profound from absolute actors part of a do not become of trust in AM relocation space to emerge transnational pure among locals abstract space (local coalition opponents but opponents, pursue variable scientists) to interests and challenge the choices relocation Physical Gaining “right →Refusal to Staunch → Willingness Great variety of relocation of way” for the sell opposition to to negotiate trajectories out project properties relocations which with GR of Roşia Montană → Legal both enhances (bargaining as well as challenges and thwarts power) recurrent against the displacement → Complex movements (“the RMGC considerations return of the project in asking for displaced”) the “right price” from GR Changing the Doomed and →Outsiders Arcadian → Risk- Fear of cyanide landscape worthless eager to discourse of avoidance of pollution micro- landscape experience rurality and relocatees can geographically the rural idyll subsistence become the and socially source of risk structured of those unable to move Transforming The general →Each The small group → Some locals Different voices the voice of resident who of significant feel alienated that cannot be community community lives brings landowners who from both GR brought to a which “wants the project refuse to sell and AM common the project” one step denominator closer →Each resident who resists, prolongs the uncertainty Changing Continued → The Determination to → Historical and links to pressure to passing of keep all such ties Reinforcement personal ties to homes and sever all ties time works of ties through place felt as roots against the outsiders highly significant. preservation Pragmatic use of of ties homes as bargaining device

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This thesis has placed much emphasis on the complexity and unpredictability of a long, ongoing conflict between multiple actors over a large mining project. In doing so, it has left the comfortable security of functional needs, rational choices, and predictable causal relations which, in so many sociological theories, offered the reassuring suggestion that social actions had orderly, predictable outcomes. In Rosia Montana this has not been the case. Instead, individual responses to the changes brought by the mining project turned out to be have been fluid and multivocal, and the structural outcomes have shifted unsystematically between phases of consolidation and instability. The sociology of translation has been chosen as a framework to conceptualize this fluidity and multivocality. This approach has distinct advantages over more conventional approaches to studying environmental conflicts, such as framing theory and political economy. According to a recent account, framing theory “emphasizes the dynamics of conflict and focuses on how actors dispute each other in order to gain hegemony over the dominant view on [an] issue” (Buijs et al. 2011: 329 – 330). In their classic article, Gamson and Modigliani (1989: 3) define a frame as “a central organizing idea for making sense of relevant events and suggesting what is at issue”. However, if one is truly concerned with the incessant movement of human agency, as this thesis has sought to do, the search for a “dominant”, “central” or “hegemonic” idea or point of view is likely to be fruitless. This relates to a basic ontological presupposition of the present thesis, namely that the circumstances surrounding the Roşia Montană case make it epistemologically impossible to congeal the human actions and reactions observed at Roşia Montană into any sort of definitive frame or discourse (or set of frames etc). What this researcher noticed over the years (2005 – 2008) is a constant shifting and transformation of opinions, people, artifacts, and so on. This process will probably continue in the future as well, with no easily foreseeable outcome. At the same time, framing theory is closely tied to social movement theory, as Benford and Snow’s much-cited article shows (2000). My argument, on the other hand, is that social movements and their opponents (corporate actors and interests) do not capture the whole picture of a complex conflict. This is obvious in the case of Alburnus Maior which managed to marshal highly compelling (and equally complex) frames, while being undermined by the movement of its membership out of the organization and out of Roşia Montană altogether. In

211 this case, people developed their own, personal “frames”, but calling these attitudes and practices “frames” means stretching the concept too far. In this sense, the term translation seems more appropriate. In response to the mobilization attempts of AM to get residents to stay in Roşia Montană and defend their properties, some have partly subverted this movement frame: they have stayed in Roşia Montană (in this way opposing the project) but have sold part of their properties (enabling the company to move one step closer to its goal). These processes happen in piecemeal fashion but, I would argue, they are important to anyone who wants to really understand the many “moments” that agency entails. Furthermore, framing theory does not devote attention to the pre-discursive elements of agency, in this case of corporate agency. As I tried to argue, the company sought to transform Roşia Montană into an absolute space through the creation of a globally tradable commodity (between 1997 and 2001) without the aid of any publicly-aired organizing frame. The first time it invoked a political metaphor (in this case “support by the Romanian government”) was in March 2000, most likely as a response to the Baia Mare accident. With framing theory, all the diligent work that the company did to ensure that it becomes the owner and exploiter of the Roşia Montană deposit, remains undisclosed. The role of surprises, which transformed GR from a narrowly specialized resource company into an active framer of pro- development discourses, would also be lost from view. The sociology of translation, however, seeks to follow all these steps taken in constructing the mining project, while refraining from finding “the frame” that guides the actions of the company. Instead, it makes the researcher aware that each of those steps might have taken an unexpected turn, as it actually happened, at some years’ distance. Framing processes emerged in connection with Roşia Montană once the opposition against the mining project was sufficiently crystallized. The same may be said to apply to the individual residents of Roşia Montană. Their apparent endorsement of a given frame does not mean that they will not challenge it at some later point. People act discursively but also meta-discursively at the same time (Giddens’ discursive consciousness and practical consciousness). They can align themselves with certain powerful problem-framers but may decide, under changed circumstances, to seek out other allies. Does this mean that they simply change frames? Not very likely, as what appears as a mere process of shifting frames is accompanied by growing ambivalence once actors recognize

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that in the winding path of the conflict, any one frame is in practice contestable. In this case, it is more appropriate to say that they try to translate their interests in given ways, in full awareness that they might be betrayed by their allies or by changing events. In short, the main reason for preferring translations over framing processes is that – in my view - frames and framing processes suggest too much rigidity to use this perspective in the case of Roşia Montană. While sociologists have, indeed, focused on the active processes of frame construction (Buijs et al. 2011), they have devoted less attention to the ways in which these frames are adopted by some actors, ignored by others or strategically deployed at some moments but challenged when the course of the conflict shifts. Those employing framing theory have also neglected the processes by which people act outside any dominant frame, by employing their practical consciousness. Political economy provides a framework which is highly relevant for the thesis, and for this reason it is extensively discussed in chapter three. In fact, I long sought to make sense of what is going on at Roşia Montană by building on such concepts as peripherialization, resource curse, fragmenting development or even world systems theory. They all seemed relevant at first sight but their explanatory power went only part of the way in trying to explain the lively changes taking place in Roşia Montană. For example, Roşia Montană has not entered into a process of exploitative peripherialization simply because extraction has not commenced. Similarly, RM and Romania in general did not experience the resource curse because the economy has a different profile from that of resource extractive countries of, say, Latin America (North, Clark and Patroni 2006). But this does not mean that any of these paths may not be opened up at some point in the future. The problem the thesis sought to address was how to make sense of the space in-between, in which a long mining history has been stopped but no new project has taken its place, despite a large mineral potential (the largest gold deposit in Europe). This is probably best captured in the title of the chapter: “Powerful processes, complex interactions, unpredictable outcomes”. My argument is that at Roşia Montană, none of the processes typically associated with mineral extraction has run its full course. Put metaphorically, the floodgates of the Eastern European mineral bonanza have neither been completely opened, nor closed shut. Instead, they were left ajar at Roşia Montană and other mineral-rich places in the Western Carpathians. This should not be interpreted as a casual

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dismissal of the relevance of structural factors. Acknowledging one of the central insights of historical sociology, it is important to stress that “a historical contingency entails a confluence of two causal orders: the so-called intervening cause or new condition, and an existing state of affairs, into which the intervention is subsumed or incorporated” (Bryant 2006: 438). The political economic processes outlined in chapter three do not simply cease to operate at Roşia Montană, leaving in their wake the absolutely free reign of human agency (which would be a theoretical impossibility). My argument is rather that their interaction creates a context – an intervening new situation – in which the possibilities for human action are greatly expanded. They are not, however, expanded haphazardly but follow, in a selective fashion, the structural articulations of previous epochs. Understanding this selectivity requires both the recognition of structural loosening and the appreciation of heightened agency which has the potential to transform structural outcomes. To build on and move beyond political economy, by taking into account the momentary agency of actors, is crucial for understanding the “random walk” which Roşia Montană and its people have experienced and have helped create over the last decade. The focus on agency could of course be dismissed as capitalizing on a peculiar intersection of circumstances which makes the choices of actors more visible than in other situations. In the grand picture of broader processes (uneven development, commodification of nature), critics could argue, the discontinuities in the Rosia Montana project could be a mere temporary halt, an inconsequential delay the significance of which will vanish as soon as the macro processes resume their course. To lay such a critique to rest, and to broaden and extend the theoretical implications of this study, would seem to require further investigation in at least three areas. The first area is the fluidity of individual responses. In my interviews, Rosia Montana residents - and I believe in this regard they are typical of human responses generally - held strong and hesitant convictions, defended and changed their views, stuck to one script and expressed multiple opinions at different times, said what they believed or tailored their views to their audience. Sociological theory has tended to ignore this variety by forcing it into the framework of rational choice, while sociological methods achieved the same end by predefined interview questions, structured scales, and the dismissal of statistical outliers as unexplained variance. Even

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qualitative methodologies have sought to delimit bounded categories by searching for the saturation of themes drawn from a perpetually fluid reality. The Rosia Montana study not only shows the complexity of the reactions of residents, NGOs and the mining company, but raises the more general question how far their translations should be traced? The interplay between the stabilization effects of translations and the continuous acts of “treason” carried out by social actors seems to be quite significant and theoretically important. But how far should one go when the ultimate meaning of these stabilization – destabilization processes escapes our grip, precisely because nothing has solidified yet? In other words, how far can one go in proving empirically what has been established theoretically, namely the incessant movement of agency? The larger theoretical problem is why agency shows this characteristic volatility. One solution is an evolutionary view of the mind as a source of generative, creative variety which responds to contingent, unpredictable environments (Baldus 2006, 2011b). Another solution is to explore the activating potential of proliferating risk definitions, for example in the reflexive modernity discussed by Beck (1986, 1999). Human action has always gone beyond what sociologists have viewed as law-governed behavior. The advent of the risk society has created even more theoretical unease in sociology given the added uncertainties of an epoch in which human beings are compelled to go beyond a limited scientific rationality and in the process subvert established truths and practices: “risk society theory makes the circumstances of modernity contingent, ambivalent and (involuntarily) susceptible to political rearrangement” (Beck 1999: 147). Although these ideas are beyond the scope of this thesis, the Rosia Montana results show the need to explore this aspect of agency further. The second problem requiring further analysis is the interplay between the volatility of agency and the dynamics of structuration. Structural, temporarily stable event sequences occur throughout the period of the Rosia Montana project. The challenge my thesis was to avoid a reification of the company and the opposing NGO. In the literature, such opponents are often treated as monolithic actors. In Rosia Montana, however, translations occur not only in the actor-worlds outside these entities but also inside of them. How can they be rendered problematic and dynamic while at the same time posing the dilemma of where to put an analytic end to the translation process? The more general problem is to identify processes

215 which lead to the selective consolidation of some translations, and more generally to identify stabilizing and destabilizing dynamics in more general terms, and to get a better understanding of the relationship between them. The third and most ambitious area for further investigation is how the tension between agency and structure, contingency and order, destabilizing and stabilizing dynamics can be brought into a comprehensive theoretical framework. This topic has received much recent attention by actor-network theory, by evolutionary efforts to analyze culture (Baldus 2006, 2011b; Blute 2010), and in the debate between path dependent and revisionist interpretations of history (Bryant 2006, Goldstone 2008). Although these topics, too, go beyond what this thesis set out to accomplish, my results provide empirical case material that speaks directly to these issues. Finally, the potential political contribution of the thesis is to point to some hopeful signs for non-deterministic outcomes in resource conflicts. At the end of her ANT-informed analysis of a recent mining conflict in New Calendonia, Horowitz (2011) concludes optimistically:

In a globalizing world, it is increasingly important for the agents of capitalism to align their translations with those of the communities their activities impact upon. This is gradually opening a space for these communities to drive an ever-harder bargain by resisting alignment of their own translations (2011: 25).

There are, indeed, some reasons for Horowitz’s hopeful assessment. Over the last decade, the number of resource extraction projects that have faced delays or significant setbacks seems to have been on the increase. One recent example is that of the Tambogrande mining project in Peru, where a powerful opposition movement largely composed of farmers compelled a Canadian-based company to withdraw its operations (Muradian et al. 2003; Cabellos and Boyd 2007). Another involves an alliance of local opposition groups and social movement organizations which managed to drive off an under resourced mining company in the region of Intag, Northern Ecuador (Bebbington et al. 2008). A third case is the Bujagali hydropower project in Uganda, where long delays in the implementation of the project – in part triggered by influential environmental groups – worsened the resettlement outcomes of those affected (Kobus 2008). All these instances, along with the case analyzed in this work, point to the growing unpredictability of the trajectory and outcomes of resources conflicts. The causes are

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often complex and are likely to vary from one case to another. The common element has been recently theorized by Schurman and Munro (2009: 163) in relation to anti-genetic engineering movements disrupting complex global commodity chains. The authors’ argument is that the strength of a chain is as strong as its weakest link. In a similar way, the growing complexity of conditions – environmental, political, social and economic – that shape the development of resource extraction projects multiply the number of points where social movements can challenge their smooth functioning. My work on the Roşia Montană case has started, as I explained in chapter two, from a moderate sense of academic activism in which I saw my work as contributing to the intellectual ammunition for the critics of destructive development projects. At the end of this work I feel more humble and, at the same time, more empowered in thinking about the role that scholarship can play in struggles over resources. The feeling of humbleness comes from the realization that the social processes accompanying such struggles are vastly more complex and unpredictable to make definite pronouncements possible. Following my research at Roşia Montană I also feel more empowered because I discovered that people there are able and very willing to consider their situations in complex ways and make a variety of choices. The outcomes of the struggle over Roşia Montană are still unclear but it is certain that people there have learned to make their voices heard and the present thesis might be a modest contribution to this.

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