Originile sociale, legislative și ideologice ale Legii Serviciului Social The Social, Legislative and Ideological Origins of the Social Service Law Section Studies

Abstract

The fact that the Social Service Law was passed in 1938, when Romania ceased to be a democratic regime, has converted this action into a specific measure for states with a totalitarian regime. This generated the lack of discussions regarding the causes that led to the passing of this law, as well as the label of `utopian` measure. In fact, these two different approaches fail to bring any clarifications in debating the subject. The present paper emphasizes the idea that the compulsory social service represented the final stage in combating the effects of intellectual unemployment in interwar Romania. This phenomenon, which in turn was caused by the ”overcrowding of the universities” both in Romania and Europe, was also debated by Walter Kotsching. In his analysis called Unemployment in Learned Professions, Kotschnig identified three types of measures capable of limiting the negative effects of the intellectual unemployment, being convinced that intellectual unemployment would lead to political radicalization. Kotsching’s classification refers to emergency measures, restrictive and distributive ones. In the author’s opinion, social service is a form of emergency measures, giving the example of Arbeit Camps from Germany and of the Civilian Conservative Corpes from USA. In Romania, the legislative genealogy of the social service is found in Legea muncii pentru interes obştesc [The labor law for community interest], passed in the spring of 1937. It must be stated that the Social Service Law represented a mechanism of recruiting human resources for the Dimitrie Gusti’s project of ”mapping” the 15.000 Romanian villages. But it is equally true that this measure represented a part of the project of social control implemented by King Carol 2nd over the Romanian youth. It was a way of redirecting the Romanian youth out of the legionary movement ideology and making it adhere to the new regime of royal dictatorship.