­There has been more attention allocated to the strange properties of property itself throughout transition, which admittedly has been, as Katherine Verdery marks, contentious, to say the least. In the mid-1990s, past ­communist leaders known as the nomenklatura became what she describes as “entrepratchicks,” or former party elites who became entrepreneurs overnight. Entrepratchicks, at least at first, didn’t want to sell the country to foreign investors in order to guard their own financial interests. However, when possibilities of Romania joining the eu ­were first considered in 1999, ­things began to change. Many who capitalized on “fuzzy property rights” following transition ended up exploiting popular trust in Western institutions such as the eu and nato. Utilities soon became privatized per an eu mandate in order to “promote the princi­ples of market economy,” resulting in countless ­people losing heat while transnational companies began forming new monopolies.120 Thus as Emanuela Grama suggests, “The pocess of Eu­ro­pe­anization could be viewed as a form of gentrification on a continental scale: the constitution of a union of ­European states aimed to engender flows of capital, ­people, and goods has been accompanied by an intensification of border control and international surveillance meant to identify ­those who do not have the right to move freely and evict them.”