Developmental Logics Beyond the Divide

Developmental projects have been the common denominator of the post-1945 global order irrespective of political divides and divergent economic systems. Whether we look at the emerging postcolonial states of the South, state socialist Europe or the industrialized Atlantic, development policies directed at industrializing ‘homogenous’ national spaces were adopted across the globe. However, by the 1970s this model showed signs of exhaustion. At the time when ‘Limits to Growth’ came out in 1972, the Romanian state was implementing a new strategy for economic progress:  it had negotiated with IMF and EBRD the ‘developing country’ status in order to facilitate foreign-debt financed investments and embark on export-led growth.   

This paper aims to shed new light on a particular kind of developmental continuum in an effort to question the wide-spread assumptions about the relationship between local variations and global structural constraints, namely the tendency in terms of explanatory frameworks to emphasize only particular local specificities, and to ignore external factors for certain socio-spatial formations. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in a Romanian Danube-riparian port city, I argue that it was the contingency of the 1977 earthquake that turned the city and the surrounding region into a laboratory for a new kind of developmental logic. After the downfall of the socialist regime in 1989, the very same region became yet again part of a new understanding of development. In accordance with pre-accession criteria for EU membership, Less Favored Zones have been established in 1998 in order to attract foreign direct investment through long term tax exemptions.

Instead of seeking to establish path-dependencies linking state socialism with its aftermath, I conceptualize ‘contingent development’ as a way to look into improvement schemes that result from the arbitrariness of a natural disaster in relation to local changes that result from  the dynamic of global capital since the 1970s.