Introduction: Global Integration, Violence, and Regional Normalisation

With their six mineriade (literally, miners' quests), the violent marches and actual and threatened invasions of Bucharest spanning the years 1990 to 1999, Romania's Jiu Valley miners forcefully thrust themselves and their region into world consciousness. Analysts often explain these outbursts as essential Romanian experiences, existing apart from other connections and interrelationships (Gledhill 2005; Vasi 2004). However, as this essay and others (Jack Friedman 2003; Rus 2007) suggest, the nature of Jiu Valley social and political life, miner activism, and changing regional inequalities must also be linked to the workings of large-scale international processes and relationships that articulate with national and local political economies. In particular, within this chain of relationships the changing conditions of labour, imbalances set in motion by labour migration, and a new kind of international dependency especially undergird developing inequality and differentiation and contribute both to the decline of violence and the emptiness of politics. The focus of this paper is the transformation of one Romanian region from a place dominated by a mono-industrial, rugged, working-class culture to one with differentiated but declining labour. Such a process is duplicated over and over throughout the world today, where contestation is neutralised, and politics, economy, and the market are replaced by global administration as regions become integrated into networks managed by international institutions and actors, and dependent on them for livelihood and hence survival.