Inventing Chaos:
the Politics of Anarchy in Transitional Romania
John Gledhill,
PhD Candidate, Georgetown University
There is a strand of political science writing that attributes transitional violence to a breakdown of state institutions during regime change. This is also the way in which states sometimes characterize episodes of violence during transition -- as anarchic, and uncontrollable. Yet, apparently anarchic violence broke out in Romania between 13-15 June 1990, despite the fact that the National Salvation Front had wrested power during the revolution, was able to control state security resources and then closely managed the installation of some minimal form of democracy. That is, anarchy exploded, although there was neither a real absence of authority, nor significant state incapacity until that point.
This paper argues that during Romania’s transition, National Salvation Front elites chose to play off assumptions that anarchy and violence are regular by-products of regime change, by introducing a "veil of anarchy" -- a temporary, managed, dissolution of the transitional government's control over the monopoly on violence. During this period of pseudo-anarchy, third-party thugs were hired to attack nascent opposition movements, in what has become known as the mineriadă. Once the objective of opposition repression was met, elites responsible for the "veil of anarchy" re-asserted their control over state institutions, and attention focused on actively articulating the events as “anarchic” and, therefore, a normal by-product of regime change.
Research into this phenomenon has three primary objectives. First, the paper aims to give a systematic account of the violent events of 13-15 June, 1990 -- violent incidents that defined the course of Romanian politics throughout the 1990s and continue to shape the state today, as it embraces EU accession. Second, I introduce the concept of state-led anarchy as an identifiable "type" of organized violence. This involves a micro-level analysis of the phenomenon's mechanisms; I look at the organizational steps that elites took when generating such anarchy, as well as the kind of individual-level incentives that emerged and acted as thug mobilization tools. Third, the study identifies conditions under which state-led anarchy, as a generalized phenomenon, might be employed as a strategy for the repression of opposition forces.
