Trencsényi Balázs et al.: Nation-building and contested identities: Romanian and Hungarian Case Studies (Budapest, 2002)
Part 2. Nation-building and regionalism in a multi-ethnic context
Transylvania Revisited Romanian nationalism in his “Nationalism and Romanian Political Culture in the 1990s,” in Duncan Light and David Phinnemore, eds., Post-Communist Romania: Coming to Terms with Transition (New York: Palgrave, 2001). According to him, the central place nationalism performs in Romanian political life could be explained by the fact that: “First, the state must govern in the name of ethnic majority.... Second, state laws must not be subject to external interference or regulation, as this will encroach upon Romanian sovereignty in unacceptable ways.... Third, freedom from foreign rule is more important than the upholding of freedom against tyranny. ... Fourth, native traditions are the best ones to shape Romanian government.” Gallagher, “Nationalism and Romanian Political Culture in the 1990s,” pp. 105-106. 8 As George W. White suggested: “At the macro-scale, Transylvania is seen as an integral component of a broader national territory that is viewed as an organic and inviolable unit; within these broader organic units Transylvania is the cradle for both Romanian and Hungarian civilisations. At the micro-scale, Transylvania contains within it a number of places of great cultural and historical significance.” See George W. White, “Transylvania: Hungarian, Romanian or Neither?” in Guntrom H. Herb and David H. Kaplan, eds., Nested Identities, Nationalism, Territory and Scale (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 268. 9 See Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building & Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 10 See Gusztáv Molnár, “Probléma transilvanä”(The Transylvanian question), in Gabriel Andreescu and Gusztáv Molnár, eds., Probléma transilvanä (The Transylvanian question) (Iasi: Polirom, 1999), pp. 12-37. 11 Regions described by Gusztáv Molnár as “fragmentary regions of Mitteleuropa that have been left outside the new eastern frontiers of the West.” See Molnár, “Probléma transilvanä,” p. 21. 12 However, as Sorin Antohi observes: “Such negative views of the native space are not central to the way Romanians imagine their Sitz im Leben, but they show how the most stable landmarks of collective identity melt down eventually, and cannot be taken for granted. Thus, we realise how unstable, artificial, recent, and even unpredictable the co-ordinates of the national existence can be.” See Antohi, “Putting Romania on Europe’s Map,” p. 37. See also the radical discourse of Sabin Gherman and his “M-am säturat de Romania” (I have had enough of Romania), Monitorul de Cluj (16 September 1998). 13 Orientalism was originally conceptualized by Edward Said in his Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). My argumentation here depends heavily on arguments developed by Sorin Antohi and Robert Hayden. As the latter suggested: “Orientalism can be applied within Europe itself, between European ‘proper’ and those parts of the continent that were under Ottoman (hence Oriental) rule. The evaluation implied by this distinction can be seen in the rhetoric typically applied to the later: Balkan mentality, Balkan primitivism, Balkanization, Byzantine, Orthodoxy.” See Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert Hayden, “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans:’ Symbolic Geographies in Yugoslav Cultural Politics,” Slavic Review 51 (Spring 1992), p. 3. 14 See Sorin Antohi, Civitas Imaginalis: Istorie si Utopie in cultura romána (Civitas Imaginalis: History and utopia in Romanian culture) (Bucharest: Litera, 1994).