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

DRAGOº PETRESCUFurthermore, as Walker Connor argues, “the nation-formation isa process, not an occurrence.” 19 In the case of Romania, the process ofturning peasants into Romanians, to paraphrase Eugen Weber, 20 tooka decisive course only under the national-communist regime of NicolaeCeauºescu (1965-1989), in the conditions of an extensive program of centrally-plannedurbanization, industrialization, increased communicationand the spread of education. It is difficult, if not impossible to providea precise date for the creation of a nation. Connor states that “the pointin the process at which a sufficient portion of a people has internalized thenational identity so as to cause nationalism to become an effective forcefor mobilizing the masses does not lend itself to precise calculation.” 21Nevertheless, in the case of Romania, the process of creating the nationdid not come to an end in 1918, as a majority of the Romanian scholarsargue. As Irina Livezeanu has shown in her work on interwar Romania,“the unification of Romanian lands in 1918 constituted a national revolution... and this revolution initiated the turbulent nation building and civilstrife that characterized the decades between the two wars.” Furthermore,Livezeanu has observed that “the union of 1918 brought into beinga deeply fragmented polity, and the startling effects of centuries of politicalseparation presented great challenges to the newly enlarged state andto the sense of national identity of its population.” 22 Similarly, KennethJowitt has argued that during the interwar period “the elites and majorsectors of the population lacked meaningful, shared sentiments of communityand a relatively consistent, jointly shaped set of commitments tothe nation-state itself.” 23My argument is that the process of Romanian nation-building wascontinued under the communist regime and reached a decisive phasearound 1981. Or, to use Anthony D. Smith’s terms, communist Romaniawent through a piecemeal process of “ethnic bureaucratic incorporation”that entered its final stage in the early 1980s. 24 Symbolically, 1981 representeda turning point because, in that year, the urban population reached50.1% of the total population. In reality, it was a combination of economic,social and cultural factors that determined the achievement of a decisivestage in creating the nation. After 1981, the economic crisis and the ideologicaldecay undermined to some extent the regime’s efforts to furtherhomogenize the Romanian “socialist” nation. At the same time, the ideathat the regional identities of Transylvanian- or Moldavian-Romaniansmelted into a Romanian identity is also supported by the fact that theRomanian nation did not follow the fate of the “unrealized” Yugoslav orCzechoslovak nations after the 1989 revolutions. Therefore, I would arguethat a thorough look at the period between 1918 and 1981 is essential inorder to understand the Romanian nation-building process. Since a com-280