Europeanization qua Institutionalization of World Culture: Examples from Post-1989 Romanian Education

Abstract

Inspired by World Society scholarship, I use examples from the Romanian educational sphere to examine Europeanization in relation with worldwide developments. Instead of seeing Europeanization broadly as the process of becoming more 'European' (an approach that encounters the difficulty of defining 'Europe'), or narrowly as a process of 'EU-ization' (an approach that suffers from EU-centric blindness to the rest of the world), I propose to define Europeanization as a process of institutionalization of world culture that is particularly visible in post-socialist contexts characterized by an emergence from relative totalitarian isolation. The main finding presented here is an increasing cosmopolitanization of the nation emerging from the way in which the category 'Europe' permeates schooled content: the nation is tamed down through discursive association with Europe (a significant other) rather than through elimination or discreditation. By expressing educational scripts that legitimize it as a nation-state in the post-1945 redefined sense of the term, Romania's compulsory education displays signs of becoming more like the rest of the world rather than more like 'Europe'. Europeanization, in this sense, exemplifies less the goal of catching up with Europe or of joining the EU and more the means to insert Romania into world society.

Changing Patterns of Nation‐Building: Educational Reform Narratives in Post‐Socialist Romania

“…Moreover, this pride came in the context of obvious failures to address the persisting discrimination and segregation of the Roma in schools. 11 This discrimination remains strongly embedded in the very structure, organization, and content of teaching for the national minorities following contradicting institutional logics, and is often embraced and reinforced by the teachers and the textbooks themselves, which still contain manifold contradictions (Szakács 2007(Szakács , 2011(Szakács , 2013. Such ministerial pride in the absence of both exclusive agency and effectiveness on the ground exhibits the extent to which a commitment to celebrating diversity is becoming discursively institutionalized within the system, while being starkly divorced from the realities of the school.…”

“…Indeed, other research found that the policy field in the educational sphere in Romania is full of polyphonies. Rus (2008) found that the post-1989 Romanian civic education policy field is best described as a form of 'organized hypocrisy' of diverging (internal and external) pressures; Mincu and Horga (2010) found that the global decentralization theme is locally refracted through different policy actors' interests thus leading to discursive hybridization; Tibbitts (1994), Bunescu et al (1999), andFreyberg-Inan andCristescu (2006) all highlighted the dissenting voices undercutting civic and human rights education in 1990s Romania while also noting the key role of international organizations and financial donors in promoting change; Capita and Capita (1999) presented details from the diversifying field of actors involved in educational change in Romania, especially the role of local NGOs in promoting fresh pedagogical approaches in both civics and history, while Szakács (2013) highlighted the peculiar role of Europe as a legitimizing resource in relation to schooling for the Hungarian and Roma minorities while keeping discriminatory institutional structures intact. Educational decision-making in Romania (as elsewhere) is thus characterized by a multitude of voices, interests, and agendas; policy-making and the positions of national actors are by no means homogeneous; but in a neo-institutionalist perspective isomorphism does not necessarily follow from the sheer consensus across actors involved; convergence can be the result of coercion, of imitation or of cognitive change, with legitimization playing a key role.…”