GLOCALIZATION OF NEOLIBERALISM IN ROMANIA THROUGH THE REFORM OF THE STATE AND ENTREPRENEURIAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

The study captures how global neoliberalism has been localized starting from the end of the 2000s, acquiring particular relevance and significance in post-socialist Romania, newly integrated in the European Union. Moreover, it observes that especially from 2010, while neoliberalism has been constructed and justified as the political recipe or the alleged solution for economic crisis, it solidified as The taken-for-granted political economy of the country. The analysis goes through the presidential speeches between 2009 and 2011 that have transformed the provisions of the economic policy of the European Union, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in discursive justifications that made sense in Romanian context, most importantly framing them as the demand for reforming the state. Furthermore, the analysis descends into the contexts of two settlements from Romania to show how local actors translate/produce the neoliberal model of development, and how they articulate visions of neoliberal entrepreneurial competition and culture in local development programs. Eventually the paper observes how nowadays in Romania too, neoliberal governance reinvents itself by transferring the social role of the state to "local communities" and demands from them competitiveness in the vein of a "community-led local development" paradigm, which is a new tool of neoliberal governmentality that re-creates the relationship between the citizen and the state.