Law, labour, sovereignty: one century of anti-communism in Romania

Devised to irrigate the diplomacy of the cordon sanitaire at the end of the First World War and revived to lubricate the transition to liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War, what role did anti-communism play in the distributional struggles between labour and capital in twentieth-century Romania? Rather than an intellectual mood or a body of ideas, this article argues that anti-communism should be better approached as a framework of sovereignty, at once direction to law-making and prop to law-enforcement, and ultimate ground for the exercise of legitimate violence. During the interwar period in Romania, anti-communism shaped the writing of labour law, safeguarding the state from the demands of organized labour and conflating, under the legal device of the state of siege, the interest of capital and raison d’état. After 1989, anti-communism shepherded the disentanglement of the patrimony of the state from the people, in a process commonly called transitional justice focused on property restitution. In both cases, the outcome was business friendly states – authoritarian in the past and democratic today – the first repressive of labour protest, the latter disposed to leave no stone unturned for the real-estate market.