THE BATTLE FOR THE “ROMANIAN AUTUMN” – GOOD GOVERNANCE VERSUS ANTI-CAPITALIST DISCOURSES IN THE ROMANIAN 2013 PROTESTS
Keywords:
Romanian Autumn, anti-mining protests, politics, hegemonic discourse, good-governance, anti-capitalismAbstract
The article explores how different actors had tried to frame and to appropriate the meaning of the anti-mining protests that started in September 2013. The analysis focuses on two discourses that had disputed the construction of the protest’ knowledge: the good governance discourse versus the anti-capitalistic discourse. This confrontation is described as an attempt to establish a different regime of truth by the anti-capitalist narrative proponents. The assumption of the article is that the protests from 2013 had marked a return to real politics, by re-politicizing the Romanian realities and disrupting the post-communist consensus. However, it argues that keeping the claims in the good governance framework had minimized the re-politicization potential of the social movement emerging from the protest (#UnitiSalvam), by obscuring some of the latent conflict that undercrosss the Romanian society. The article also explores the factors that contributed to the anti-capitalist discourse’s failure to impose a different rhetoric of the protest, by looking into the good governance discourse trajectory in the post-communist Romania and observing how it established itself as a hegemonic discourse.
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