« Activities « Strategic Meetings
Discussions focused on historical semantics, one of TransCorr’s main methodological approaches. Team members examined how the meanings and uses of specific concepts linked to “corruption” changed over time and space. They highlighted how for “corruption” to have meaning it has to be situated within a set of political and social discourses. The emphasis on the intersection of (social and political) practice and discourse constitutes one of TransCorr’s methodological novelties.
Constantin Ardeleanu presented his research with the title “ ‘Trading consuls’ and the blurring of public and private interests at the Lower Danube (1830s-1860s)”. The presentation focused on the activity of two British vice-consuls to the Lower Danube (Charles Cunningham and St. Vincent Lloyd), who served as case studies to illustrate the importance of consuls as key actors in denouncing local authorities in Moldavia and Wallachia as incompetent, abusive, and corrupt. At the same time, the two vice-consuls, who often blurred the lines between public or state and private interests, were themselves the object of various accusations, not least of all since their privileges stemmed from a special legal regime that was actively contested as backward and abusive.
Andrei Sorescu’s presentation, “The Perils (and Promise) of German Colonization: Civilizational Hierarchies and Anxieties in Nineteenth Century Romania”, focused on the constant recurrence of “colony” and “colonization” as key concepts in nineteenth century Romanian public discourse and on what this recurrence reveals about the nexus between capital, development, civilization, nation, and state. He argued that, in the formative stages of Romanian nation-state building, anxieties regarding the perceived encroachment of (Pan-)“German” expansionism were cast in explicitly “colonial” terms. As part of a self-perceivedly “backward” and underpopulated region which had historically attracted German settlement, the Danubian Principalities (and, subsequently, Romania) were increasingly feared by local political elites to be the final piece of a geopolitical puzzle, within a spatial and temporal colonial continuum of expansion. Drawing upon parliamentary debates, press, pamphlets, and economic literature, his presentation highlighted the importance of recovering historical actors’ own categories, and demonstrated the need for reflexively historicizing “colonization” and “colony”, beyond their retrospective usage as analytical categories.