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

KINGA-KORETTA SATANow that we have become the step-children of a stranger, we are flounderingand trying to find our way ahead without the solicitousness of thelove of a mother, as orphans pushed out and left alone. … They couldtake maternal love from us, but not that of the brother. Although we gota step-mother, we, brothers, love each other even more, even morestaunchly. 30The metaphor used to describe the situation carries the essence of themeaning. Presenting national relations in terms of human relationshipsargues for the naturalness and the indivisibility of the Hungarian nationconceived as an entity. It also reflects the belief that the TransylvanianHungarian minority is the same sort of entity as Hungariandom or Romaniandom,that is similar to a nation. Finally, it claims to be self-evidentthat Transylvanian Hungarians are in fraternal relationship with the Hungariansin Hungary and that they are “strangers” to Romanians, related tothem only legally, without the “love” characterizing a proper relationship.3. ConclusionsIn the period following the collapse of the communist regime in Romania,the Hungarian minority turned to the interwar period for a model of attitudes,since that was a period in which it had experienced a similar statusquo. Such elements of an interwar ideology as the attempt of uniting allHungarians into a single world-view, a single representative organization,or the emphasis on moral revival and cultural excellence are still very powerfulin the current minority political discourse. It is not by chance that theform of representation adopted by the Hungarian minority, a singlealliance (the Hungarian Democratic Union in Romania), exhibits thefunctions characteristic of political parties as well.It is not only the current prominence of ideas originating in interwarTransylvanism that makes the study of their origins meaningful. Their implicationsand their content matters even more than their mere prominence.An analysis of Transylvanism’s rejection of politics and of the legitimacy ofcreating, and voting for, different parties can actually reveal the implicationof denying that there was any sense in the proportional representation ofdifferent views. This ultimately implies the rejection of the appropriatenessof representative democracy, and implicitly of the parliamentary representationof the minority.Such inherent implications help to provide a clearer picture of whatsort of community is constructed by the given ideology. Transylvanismdeclares ethical and cultural values to be above any other, so-called “material,”values. Ethical and cultural values are considered to be the basis of the52