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

DRAGOº PETRESCUOrigin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 6. Regarding thefundamental features of national identity, I followed Anthony D. Smith whoproposes the following five: (1) an historic territory, or homeland; (2) commonmyths and historical memories; (3) a common, mass public culture; (4) commonlegal rights and duties for all members; and (5) a common economy withterritorial mobility for members. See Anthony D. Smith, National Identity(London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 14.18 See Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Questionin the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 63.19 Connor, Ethnonationalism, p. 223.20 This is how Weber sees the process of national integration in France: “Beforethe inhabitants of France could come to feel a significant community, they hadto share significant experiences with each other. Roads, railroads, schools,markets, military service, and the circulation of money, goods, and printedmatter provided those experiences, swept away old commitments, instilleda national view of things in regional minds and confirmed the power of thatview by offering advancement to those who adopted it. The national ideologywas still diffuse and amorphous around the middle of the nineteenth century.French culture became truly national only in the last years of the century.” SeeEugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France,1870-1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), p. 486.21 Connor, Ethnonationalism, pp. 223-224.22 See Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, NationBuilding & Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995),pp. 7, 297.23 See Kenneth Jowitt, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development:The Case of Romania, 1944-1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press,1971), pp. 89-90.24 Smith, National Identity, p. 57. Drawing on Smith’s ideas, Sorin Alexandrescuhas argued that two contrasting types of nationalism coexisted in interwarRomania: liberal and modernizing economic nationalism was confronted by ananti-modern cultural nationalism, centered on the return to “traditional values.”See Sorin Alexandrescu, “Naþionalismul român în perioada interbelicã”(Romanian nationalism during the interwar period), Revista 22 593 (10-16 July2001), pp. XIV-XV. Following Smith’s concept of ethnic bureaucratic incorporation,I argue that under the communist regime the administrative, economicand cultural revolutions converged towards the creation of a homogenousRomanian “socialist” nation.25 I intend to provide an in-depth analysis of these issues in a larger work inprogress, entitled “Building the Romanian Nation: The Romanian NationalizingState, 1918-1981.”26 Virgil N. Madgearu, Evoluþia economiei româneºti dupã rãzboiul mondial (Theevolution of Romanian economy after the World War) (Bucharest: IndependenþaEconomicã, 1940; reprint, Bucharest: Editura ªtiinþificã, 1995), p. 23.27 Michael Shafir, Romania. Politics, Economics and Society: Political Stagnationand Simulated Change (London: Frances Pinter Publishers, 1985), p. 47.28 Shafir, Romania. Politics, Economics and Society, p. 47.294