Life in Transition and in Crisis. The Political Autobiography of a Generation

30 years since the regime change: beyond an occasion and a topic of academic and political discussions, this period also constitutes the lifetime of a generation. Connecting socio-economic analysis with their own position as members of this generation, the authors provide an account of postsocialist transformation in Romania. Against interpretations that conceive communism as a system separate from the capitalist world economy, and understand transition as a story of “returning to capitalism”, the chapter depicts the specific ways in which communist Romania’s internal development was tied to changing geopolitical and world-economic partnerships. Within this process, authors trace their own generational experience as marked by three overlapping crises of structural processes: the profitability crisis of the post-1945 global cycle that starts in the 1970s, the crisis of the communist model of rapid industrialization; and the social crisis built up by global neoliberalization, into which postsocialist societies entered with the highest hopes of freedom and capitalist welfare.