ABSTRACT
A question has remained in my mind from the moment when the invitation to participate in this conference arrived. What is the relevance of the past, especially the interwar period, for the post-communist transformation of the economies of central and eastern Europe in general, and for Romania in particular? There are, at least, two explanations for having succumbed to the temptation of pursuing this nagging question in my endeavours to frame this contribution, instead of resorting to the approach of an economic historian. One is related to the exceptional nature of the process of postcommunist transformation in humankind's history which has made, almost inescapably, most eastern European economists 'intellectual opportunists'. By the latter phrase, I mean the overwhelming and compelling intellectual appeal of contemporary events, because this has guided and almost established the research agenda since 1989.1 The second explanation concerns the role played by history in teaching. On the one hand, the flow of historical events and their analytical interpretation directly feeds the kernel of theoretical and policy-oriented knowledge. On the other, history has influenced the development of current events in terms of what is meant by path-dependency in development theory and where this refers to the burden of the past In the case of central and eastern Europe, pathdependency encapsulates the legacy of the region's backwardness bequeathed over a long historical period. Consequently, this contribution attempts to address continuities and discontinuities within the secular quest for modernization in Romania as well as the specifics of the interwar period, which is the focus for particular scrutiny here. Albeit timidly, this opening points to some of the following discussion, but with it also shaped by the author's own perceptions and, unavoidably, his intellectual biases.
