La nature, concept politique dans les modernités politiques roumaines à la Belle Époque
Nature, a Political Concept in the Romanian Political Modernity around the Belle Époque

Summary/Abstract: The paper explores a relatively new field of research in the landscape of political sciences in Romania, that is, an environmental history of Romanian political thought in the context of the circulation of different political models, as they appear embodied in the political, and administrative choices of the young Romanian state on its path to modernity. The Romanian Belle Époque stands in that perspective as a particularly rich and dynamic epoch, when discourses about the politics of nature shift as they meet and sometimes conjugate with the technological paradigm of that time. The new industrial revolution and the urgency of the Romanian state to modernize and to strengthen its political and physical infrastructures lead to sometimes uneven discourses about nature, seen both as a capital and as a value in itself, meant to be protected, and carefully utilized by humans. The case studies in this paper look precisely towards this ambiguity in the political discourse about nature and about the progressive shaping of the environmental discourse, together with the increasingly striking mobilization of nature as a support and a partner for the national identity. The encounter of these elements generates a reflection on the nature of the relationships between institutions, civil society, nature, all in a new institutional, Weberian paradigm.

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