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Abstract
Eastern European cities have been going through complex transformations in the wake of the revolutionary year 1989. Their restructuring has been marked by an abrupt transition from the centralized economy and totalitarianism of the communist period to the free market economy of new capitalism and democracy, under pressures for regionalization and globalization. The article looks at how City Hall texts (available in print and in digitalized form on the City Hall website) draw upon a historically rooted discourse of regional multiculturalism, constantly rearticulating it with EU neoliberal discourses of economic growth and competitiveness, participatory democracy, and interregional cooperation. The texts are thus seen as part of an ongoing strategy employed by the local authorities to rescale the city of Timişoara, the capital of the Banat region (near the western border of the country), as an emerging multicultural regional centre and a pole of mobility. This process is taking place against the backdrop of the recontextualization of the region’s historic identity in academic texts produced by local (mostly) intellectuals, who are concerned with a reassessment of the concepts of ‘Central Europe’ and interculturalism in the postcommunist context.
Acknowledgements
This article grew out of exploratory work for an intended project on Eastern European city rescaling. It benefited from useful insights and suggestions from Norman Fairclough and our friends in the Rescaling Romania Research Group (Bucharest 2005–2008), Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, and, during the revision phase, Lynne Pearce, Monika Büscher and Ruth Wodak (in chronological order). I am deeply grateful to them, as I am to my colleagues and friends from Timişoara (Adina Baya, Dana Percec, Ciprian Vălcan). Special thanks are also due to the two anonymous Mobilities reviewers.
Notes
1. Beck distinguishes between a ‘normative’ or ‘philosophical’ cosmopolitanism as an Enlightenment ideal and a ‘real existing cosmopolitanism’, a ‘cosmopolitanization of reality’, enacted in everyday practice, and ‘forced’ in the sense that it is not a choice, but a new way of being, which has become institutionalized (Beck, Citation2008, p. 27). It is the latter form of cosmopolitanism that bears relation to mobility politics and globalization. According to Beck, the principles of ‘radicalized liberalism’ are compatible with and can become part of the cosmopolitan perspective (Citation2008, p. 29).
2. By neoliberalism I understand a set of theoretical and ideological principles which shape (in particular) economic practices that promote the self-regulating free market and its global spread, in an institutional framework based on minimal state intervention, privatization and liberalization (see Steger and Roy, Citation2010).
3. The research group was started in 1997 by two professors at the University of the West of Timişoara, Adriana Babeţi and Cornel Ungureanu, but it grew considerably in the following years, producing valuable anthologies of texts about Central Europe (critical and literary), comparative studies, dictionaries and an ethnographic database.
4. Importantly, toleration is viewed as an outcome of concern for the Other, not as a form of distant indifference. Academic writings emphasize the processes of osmosis and intercommunication.
5. ‘Public intellectuals’ are often quoted in the media, lay the foundations of civic associations and NGOS and even become involved in politics (Tănăsoiu, Citation2008, p. 82).
6. The City Hall texts in the corpus, from which excerpts have been used to illustrate the points made in the analysis, are available in electronic format at http://www.primariatm.ro/ (accessed 15 August 2009).
7. I use multi-/interculturalism throughout this section as the two terms appear to be employed interchangeably in the City Hall texts.
8. I used the document in Romanian to extensively revise this excerpt, for meaning clarification.
9. I used the document in Romanian to extensively revise this excerpt, for meaning clarification (translation inaccuracies obscured the meaning).
10. I used the document in Romanian to extensively revise this excerpt, for meaning clarification (translation inaccuracies obscured the meaning).