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Conspiracy thinking has a long history in Romanian literary culture. In the early 21st century, what counts as a conspiracy theory in the mainstream of Romanian life is nevertheless elusive enough to keep the public engaged more than ever before. The growing number of attempts to address the gap in knowledge with regard to local conspiracy theories is proof that concern with their possibly harmful consequences is on the rise as well. For most of the conspiracy-minded, the topics of the day are specific threats posed to post-communist Romania and its people. In the main, conspiratorial beliefs fall into three main fields. Namely, they come across as 1) conspiracy theories against the body politic of the nation, 2) health-related conspiracy theories and 3) conspiracy theories on use and conservation of natural resources. While the first two overlap and build on the tradition of home-grown populism, the third is mostly a borrowing from Western media sources. However, the most influential instances of Romanian conspiracism posit that the well-being of the nation’s body politic and that of individuals’ own bodies are one and the same.

Dans la periode 1950-1960 la ville de Brasov connait un changement d’identite, enrecevant le 22 aout 1950, dans le contexte politique de sovietisation de laRoumanie, le nom de « la Ville de Staline ». L’etude se propose d’examiner lamaniere dont le regime politique fonde la nouvelle identite, en nous appuyantdans ce but sur l’analyse de trois composantes : les manifestations politiquesconsacrees a cet evenement, l’ensemble de statues et de marquages symboliquesde l’espace et le discours officiel thematisant le developpement de la ville. Lanouvelle identite sera centree sur le caractere industriel et ouvrier de la ville,rompant avec un passe avec lequel elle se construit en antithese mais qu’ellecherche en meme temps a assimiler.

The Kingdom of Romania was one among those European states deeply affected by the October 1917 Revolution. After experiencing the reverberations of the October Revolution, the Romanian political elite were terrified by the prospect of the extension of the revolution in their country. This experience accompanied by the mass labour unrest in the period from 1918 to 1920 led to the emergence of the widespread belief in the existence of a concerted internal and external communist conspiracy to overthrow the “public order”. The obsessive fear of revolution and the official discourse about the communist conspiracies both motivated and legitimised the extensive resort to state-of-siege mechanisms in interwar Romania, which were broadly used to suppress labour unrest and trade union activity. Drawing on theoretical contributions of Giorgio Agamben and Mark Neocleous this study will deal with (1) the local reactions to the Russian Revolution of October 1917, (2) the relation between the widespread belief in the existence of a concerted internal and external communist conspiracy to overthrow the “public order” and the resort to state-of-siege mechanisms and (3) the extension of the state-of-siege mechanisms and their effects on Romanian politics and society. The study will argue that the abuse of the state-of-siege mechanisms during most of the interwar period led to routinisation of political violence. It also deeply affected the function of democracy in interwar Romania and laid the foundations for the emergence of the King Carol II’s dictatorship in the late 1930s.