Development Discourse in Romania: from Socialism to EU Membership

"Development Discourse in Romania: from Socialism to EU Membership" is the title of the PhD thesis written by Mirela Oprea in 2009 at the Università di Bologna, Italy.

With their accession to the European Union, twelve new countries - Romania among them - (re)entered the international community of international donors. This thesis collects evidence for improving our understanding of this process that sees the co-optation of twelve new countries to the dominant theory and practice of development cooperation. As the Executive Summary reveals, the thesis is a critical reflection of constructing the ‘new’ Member States as‘new’, inexpert donors that need to learn from the ‘old’ ones. It gathers data that suggests that conceiving of the ‘twelve’ as ‘new’ donors is both historically inaccurate and value-ladden. On one hand, Romania’s case-study illustrates how in the (socialist) past at least one in the group of the twelve was particularly conversant in the discourse of international development. On the other hand, the process of co-optation, while being presented as a knowledge-producing process, can also be seen as an ignorance-producing procedure: Romania, along with its fellow new Member States, takes the opportunity of ‘building its capacity’ and ‘raising its awareness’ of development cooperation along the line drawn by the European Union, but at the same time it seems to un-learn and ‘lower’ its awareness of development experience in the (socialist) past.

Thanks to the friendly permission of the author, the full text of the thesis is available for download from the TRIALOG website:
http://www.trialog.or.at/images/doku/oprea_mirela_development-cooperation-discourse-in-romania.pdf

For more information or exchange of views, you can contact Mirela Oprea at: mirella.oprea@gmail.com

Information provided by Anita Bister, TRIALOG