Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

IRINA CULICThe most powerful conceptual framework to analyze the relationshipbetween the majority and the minority and, more specific, the productionof identities, was recently proposed by Rogers Brubaker. 16He devised a conceptual construct to encompass the complex relationshipbetween the majority and the minority, between the minority and thenational state, as well as between cultural identity, national identity andcitizenship. Brubaker’s conceptual construct comprises the relational triadicnexus of “nationalizing states,” “national minorities” and “externalnational homelands.” 17 The word “nationalizing” instead of “national”suggests that the political and cultural elites of these ethnically heterogeneousstates “promote (to various degrees) the language, culture, demographicposition, economic flourishing, or political hegemony of the nominallystate-bearing nation.” 18 This is a part of a larger process ofstrengthening the state through social-political and economic integration.The national minority enters this relationship to the degree it representsa substantial, self-conscious, and organized community. It demands,by means of elite discourse and political action, cultural or political autonomy,and reacts to perceived discrimination or assimilation policies.As Brubaker argues, a state becomes an “external national homeland”when its political or cultural elites decide that their co-ethnics living inother states are members of one and the same nation. They claim thatthese co-ethnics“belong,” in some sense, to the state, and assert that their condition mustbe monitored and their interests protected and promoted by the state:when the state actually does take action in the name of monitoring, promoting,or protecting the interests of its ethnonational kin abroad. 19Socialization and CitizenshipHungarians from Transylvania acquire their first framework of identificationwithin the symbolic space of a Hungarian family. 20 Their worldis constituted by relations and references centered on Hungarian culturalelements: language, celebrations, traditions, religious rituals, legends,myths, stories, and specific costume. As the child matures, his relationshipwith the outside world becomes more diversified and complex, as hisschemes of perception develop and become contoured. He begins to makeuse of classifications, classifying criteria, distinction markers and signs.In this process, the relationship with “the other” (i.e., ethnic Romanians)represents a constitutive element in the shaping of dispositions. Theinteraction with “the other” fulfills several functions, such as experiencingand recognizing diversity; organizing this diversity so that certain cate-230