New Europe College Regional Program Yearbook 2001-2002

N.E.C. Yearbook 2001-2002
machines. Today, the workers have returned to their villages, however
the shared values of Soviet workers remain strong.
Common action: According to exegetes, the term “industrialization”
can be replaced by “modernization”:
If modernity is taken to mean the kind of social arrangements that there
were institutionalized after the English industrial and French political
revolutions, that is, if the term describes the destruction of localism and
creation via unprecedented social mobilization, of broad social areas in
the social, political, economic and cultural spheres, then we can argue that
the elective affinity that Gellner tries to establish is not between nationalism
and industrialization, but between nationalism and modernity. 59
Industrialization could mean the whole idea of modernization as both
suppose literacy, urbanization, the school system, symbols and complex
cultural artifacts. Some Soviet regions saw all these elements for the first
time during the Soviet period. Revisionist interpretations of totalitarianism
regard the Soviet period as one of modernization of most of the regions
within the Soviet empire. 60 This is not an acceptable argument because
any account of Soviet phenomena must be located within a global
framework, part of global modernization. Nonetheless, even though the
revisionist modernization argument does not hold up entirely, the
population of Moldova did carry out construction works in the Soviet
period, such as roads, factories, schools, institutions and kolkhozes, etc. 61
– all new to the population and signs of a “better life”. It is difficult to
call these were good things, but it was, nonetheless, collective action.
Identity was also defined as a “dynamic emergent aspect of collective
action” 62 or, more exactly,
as the reflexive capacity for producing consciousness of action (that is the
symbolic representation of it) beyond any specific contents. Identity
becomes formal reflexivity, pre-symbolic capacity, the recognition of a
sense of action within the limits posed at any moment by the environment
and the biological structure. 63
In Moldova, the identity created as an emergent aspect of common
action was, of course, the Moldovan identity. Even if a part of these
people understand that these actions and institutions would have been
34