Immanuel Wallerstein Travels to Romania: Ideological Fit, Leftovers, and the Future of Decolonization

Abstract A growing body of work has investigated the travel of neo-Marxist theorists and theory to state socialist contexts such as Romania and China, but this scholarship has not focused on successful strategies of indigenization. While several explanations for this process have been proposed, this article advances the concept of “ideological fit” to illuminate how a new body of work is successfully popularized and integrated into national conversations. I explore the relationship between the indigenization of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory in Romania within the context of Cold War ideological conflict. This study compares the popularization strategies of a group of U.S. social scientists (Daniel Chirot and Katherine Verdery) with local attempts (Ilie Bădescu) to promote Wallerstein’s theory in Romanian academia. World-systems theory advanced a critique of global capitalism in the United States, whereas in Romania, it was integrated into and discussed as a contribution to anticolonial struggles around the world. As a result, Bădescu’s assertion that Romanian national poet Mihai Eminescu was an anticolonial thinker became generative in local sociology. I conclude by discussing how key theoretical elements of Wallerstein’s theory, which I call the “leftovers,” have been redeployed in new scholarship on decolonization and discuss the risks of such an approach.