Communal villages, reparatory justice and social trust in post-communist Romania

Abstract

For centuries, the free Romanian peasants managed forests, pastures or infrastructure as commons. Some of the commons were managed by a self-governing organization, the obste. The imposition of the communist regime in 1948 meant that the obsti had been dismantled. In the late 1990s, during the transition to democracy, members of the old obsti made efforts to re-establish the old organization, efforts concretized in 2000, when a new law allowed the obsti to function again. In this paper, we focus at first on describing the positive process of re-establishing the Obsti and the restitution processes after 1989. Afterwards, adopting a position according to which reparatory justice is necessary in order to restore the moral fabric of societies which had been affected in the past by egregious historical injustices, we analyze those processes' normative implications. Issues such as whether or not it is fair to focus on righting past wrongs and dealing with those who benefited from historical injustice or who are the relevant duty-bearers in present societies have received much attention in the literature on reparatory justice. Nonetheless, the case of re-establishing the Obsti poses new, challenging problems to this ever-growing research direction.