‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.
[…]
‘I – I hardly know, sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then’.
‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’
‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see’.
‘I don’t see’, said the Caterpillar.
‘I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly’, Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing’.
‘It isn’t’, said the Caterpillar.
(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)
This book is about change. Just as Alice’s inexplicable physical transformations belonged to the ‘mad’ side of life (in which caterpillars talked and rudely contradicted others), so too the putative overnight transformation of Eastern Europe has been seen by some as belonging more to the wonderland of imagination than to the reality of ingrained habits, beliefs and world orientations. For many, 1989 signified merely the dream of a radical break with the past, with many societies emerging from totalitarian rule yet remaining, in a stubborn state of inertia, the same as before the change of regime. Post-socialism and change began to resemble an unlikely marriage that had given hope to many but which had broken down once subjected to more careful scrutiny.
As unreal as they may have seemed to Alice when stepping into her ‘wonderland’, her uncontrollable changes in size, however, made perfect sense in the caterpillar’s eyes. One must sometimes only change perspective in order to render the incomprehensible comprehensible. Thinking about the (unnecessary) incommensurability between worlds as illustrated by this classic passage and, consequently, about ways of transgressing the boundaries we ourselves have drawn can help us reveal—and hopefully overcome—some of the difficulties inherent in our current understandings of post-socialism , 1 undercut as they are by dichotomised concepts such as real versus imagined, East versus West, convergence versus divergence and change versus inertia.
It is from this starting point that I advance the main argument of this empirically researched study 2 : despite what is usually held in dominant accounts of post-socialism, there have been significant changes in Romanian education since 1989 which have brought it ever closer to developments in the rest of the world. These changes are conspicuously apparent in the way Europe is used as a powerful point of reference against which to measure the ‘new’ national self and from which it gains legitimacy on many levels. Although these shifts may reveal themselves as belonging to the discursive realm (i.e. of words, justifications, narratives, imagery), they are ‘real’ and made tangible through their everyday usage, exposure, visibility and salience in the cultural universe of the participants in this study. Such important developments are, however, often overlooked in the dominant literature examining Romania and the broader post-socialist context as well as in that literature which links education to Europeanisation and globalisation, as a result of the continuing (some would maintain, revived) significance of nationalising agendas in education and society.
The nationalising thrust of post-socialist societies is usually associated in prevalent research on educational change and societal transformation with internal or local configurations that resist ‘real’ change from the otherwise progressive, and inevitably anti-nationalising and globalising, outside world. This often results in a dichotomous portrayal of change which obscures the complexity of the intersection between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ and instead assumes a clear-cut distinction between the two, as if neatly subsumable to either ‘national’ or ‘anti-national ’ tendencies. The state of ‘transition’ relegated to post-socialist countries is often essentialised and understood in teleological and deterministic terms (Dimou 2009; Silova 2009). This leads to a concomitant essentialisation of the region itself as standing in sharp contrast with the rest of Europe, another branch of the dichotomous thinking that has its roots in a special form of Orientalism applied to the Balkanic ‘other ’ (Todorova 1997). Accounts of educational reform in post-socialist countries similarly adopt a ‘balkanising’ standpoint resting on simplified imagery of East versus West and the consequent ‘othering ’ of Eastern Europe by both internal and external observers (Perry 2005). Europe’s role in education (and that of other international organisations that had important roles in educational reform post-1989) is, as a result, misinterpreted from either European Union (EU)-centric (intrinsically Westocentric) or methodologically nationalistic standpoints resulting in a view of Europeanisation that is not compatible with an investigation of post-socialism that both takes wider world developments seriously and does not succumb to internal/national versus external/global dichotomies.
In contrast, this book offers a conjunctive rather than disjunctive account of Europeanisation in the post-socialist Romanian school 3 as part of a wider process of cultural transformation that students of the region can no longer afford to ignore. It does so by contextualising educational change and inertia in relation to both the past and the wider world, in relation to both specific ‘internal’ contexts of meaning and ‘external’ globally informed discursive repertoires, by bringing together a range of perspectives which are usually seen as incompatible: sociological institutionalism (world polity or the diffusionist variant of institutionalism, inspired by the work of Stanford-based sociologist John W. Meyer and his colleagues 4 ), with Scandinavian and historical institutionalisms as applied to comparative education analyses (as illustrated, inter alia, by the work of Humboldt University-based comparative educationist Jürgen Schriewer 5 ). Going beyond the supposedly irreconcilable differences between these perspectives that are generated by their different methodological choices and empirical foci is one theoretical task of this book.
Following Alice’s example above, this volume proposes, then, an exercise in boundary transgression, going in both (in fact, several) directions. The book concerns itself with developments in post-socialist education, an area of inquiry almost exclusively dominated by historical and Scandinavian traditions of institutionalism focusing on critical junctures and local contextualisations of global forms. It is therefore at the same time a purposeful attempt to rebalance this polarised field of research by specifically interrogating the ways in which insights from the diffusionist variant of institutionalism —interested in the global institutionalisation of authoritative discourses in education more than in local dynamics—are useful in explaining some of the peculiarities of post-socialist educational transformation. In the following sections, I articulate in more detail the puzzles exemplified by the Romanian case, the key arguments and explanatory framework proposed in this book and its main contributions to current research, followed by a brief methodological excursus and an overview of the volume’s structure.
1.1 Romanian Post-socialism, Europeanisation and Schooling: What’s Europe Got to Do with It?
Consider the following situations: a Romanian education policymaker in the run-up to Romania’s EU accession goes out of her way to include in the preamble of every policy document she writes references to the ‘European standards’ to be applied in order to ‘adjust’ Romanian education to that of the rest of Europe, despite the fact that there are no set criteria for EU membership in the realm of education; an education editor chooses photographs of black, Hispanic and Asian children to illustrate principles of non-discrimination, tolerance and diversity in a civic education textbook , even though the largest ethnocultural minority in Romania that would more faithfully illustrate the pupils’ everyday reality is the highly discriminated against Roma population, who, in contrast, is hardly ever represented or mentioned in officially approved educational media; a teacher tells her pupils that they must exercise their freedom to vote but in such an authoritative fashion that it undermines the very democratic value she wishes to impart; in a civic education lesson on patriotism , a pupil mentions that one reason why he is proud to be Romanian is that ‘we’ joined Europe, while a reason why he is not proud is that the Roma are bringing shame to ‘our’ image in Europe.
These examples are drawn from the data on which this study is based and reveal some of the paradoxes of the institutionalisation of new educational tropes in a post-socialist context. These paradoxes are common, in fact, in any context foregrounded as post-socialism is by the symbolic landscape of renewal and rebirth. While common wherever institutionalisation occurs, it is particularly in contexts of symbolic renewal that we are likely to find more pronounced decoupling between aspirations and implementations, stronger tensions between universalising and particularising articulations, and puzzling dilemmas of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, of opening up while closing down, or of catching up while lagging behind. These features show not only an increased tendency to take for granted locally vacuous but globally authoritative ideals in education (such as international standardisation, celebration of diversity , democracy or choice, all somewhat disconnected from the hic-et-nunc of the pupils’ lives) which are also observed elsewhere in the world, for example in South Korea (Moon 2013) or in Japan and China (Soysal and Wong 2015). They also demonstrate certain specificities of the wider European context, most notably the theme of ‘catching up with’ or ‘returning to’ Europe and the role that the European ideal has more widely played in national redefinitions across Europe, particularly since 1945. While the first is a theme particularly found in post-socialist societies, as noted in the case of Bulgaria by Pilbrow (2005), Slovakia and Estonia by Michaels and Stevick (2009), Albania and Moldova by Gardinier and Anderson-Worden (2010) and Latvia by Silova (2002), the second reveals itself as a theme with a much wider European applicability, as observed in educational discourses in both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ Europe (see volume edited by Schissler and Soysal 2005 with case studies on Germany , France , Bulgaria , Turkey, Greece and others). The connection between Europe and the individual nation is therefore not a uniquely post-socialist trope. But the intricate points of convergence and divergence between global, European, post-socialist, national and local articulations cannot be fully appreciated without a change of perspective regarding the complex societal (cultural, political, economic, social) contexts in which they are embedded and which undoubtedly require particular attention.
The conundrums outlined earlier regarding Romanian education post-1989 are particularly impenetrable when viewed from the dominant perspective, one which postulates clear-cut, easy-to-compartmentalise, East/West, nationalising/Europeanising and authoritarian/democratic dichotomies, 6 as will become clear below. Romania has experienced one of the most difficult instances of ‘transition ’ within the region, and having encountered manifold diffi...