Rejecting the Olive Branch: State Forestry and the Environmental Politics of Citizenship in Rural Romania, 1920-1940

• In Event: Uneasy Partners: Evaluating the Relationships between Science, Environments, and the State

Abstract

Following World War One, East Central European countries needed to address the relatively new concept of citizenship and what it should look like in the region. This paper details how environmental duties and obligations centered on wooded spaces became central to defining the model citizen in a largely rural, and newly democratic, Romania. It argues that forestry engineers played a key role in debating and establishing the standards for economic, environmental, and political participation for rural citizens in the modern nation-state via their attempts to control the nation’s contested forest resources. In doing so, it traces their complicated relationship with other state institutions. Ultimately, despite some institutional successes by the late 1930s, the engineers' perception of fighting alone against state, industry, and locals to “save” the nation’s forests led them to seek out an ever more restrictive role for rural Romanian citizens and to engage in increasingly declensionary rhetoric. Studying this evolution, it claims that forests and their use and composition had a substantial effect on the image of and expectations from the modern Romanian citizen in the democratic interwar period, which in turn created disparate understandings of ideal forms of industry, education, and agrarian reform.

Author

• George Andrei, Indiana University Bloomington