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

The Idea of the “Nation” in TransylvanismThus, he acknowledges that the laws of nature are supplemented by lawsof power and that every nation, from its own point-of-view, sees itself ashaving the right to be victorious and not subjugated by the others. Nevertheless,in the national consciousness, aggression towards others is regardedas complementing the cosmopolitan love of all, as actually being moresincere, and on a deeper level of humanity, than love:I believe that this aggressiveness is just as much a human attribute as loveis. One does not have to be ashamed of it. Love is deeper this way; whatit loses in width, it gains in depth. To embrace the entire humanity withthe same force is an increasingly difficult thing. Where the notion ofeverything appears, the notion of nothing is also very close. 15The notions of aggressiveness and love can also be regarded as metaphorsconstructing an image of a nation in the manner of a single human being.Thus, by this inherent animism, national consciousness is equated to individualhuman sentiments, as an amalgam of love and hatred, and thenation is seen as acting on the basis of these sentiments towards othernations identified as either loved or, on the contrary, hated.2.5 INDIVIDUAL, NATIONAL AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESSAll Transylvanist ideas about the relationship between national consciousnessand class consciousness place the two on different levels. All of themagree on the priority of national consciousness over class consciousness,the later being seen as of secondary order and importance. These ideasrest on a conceptual basis assessing the nature and proportion of individualconsciousness, both on a general level and on the level of the actual existenceof the Hungarian minority in Romania in the given historical situation.The conception of individual consciousness acknowledges the existence ofa link between individuality and nationality mostly in the aspect of values,that is from an ethical perspective. The scale of ideas in view of the personality-nationalityinterlink is remarkably wide. Even with the same person, itranges from declarations acknowledging the mere existence of this interlinkto ranking nationality in the highest place among the factors shaping individualidentity. Reményik, for example, wrote that “the value of the individualis also dependent on his relationship to the community.” 16 Nevertheless, onecan also encounter the most extreme formulations when speaking about theconcrete existential situation of the Hungarians in Romania: “I believe anddeclare that today the most important, maybe the only existing content of ourhuman sense is indeed the consciousness of our belonging to Hungariandom.”17 But we cannot speak about a clear differentiation between the gen-47