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

FOREWORDIt is surely an understatement to say that understanding and empathy, letalone a meeting of minds and a common frame of reference, have featuredrather poorly in exchanges between scholars of different nationalbackground concerning their mutual predicament in Central and SoutheasternEurope; and perhaps nowhere has this been so conspicuously thecase as among Hungarians and Romanians. Apart from a few remarkableexceptions, such exchanges have tended to be dialogues of the deaf. Forthe sake of drawing a contrast with the present undertaking, let me illustratethis with an example from the not too remote past.Some of the authors of the papers collected in this volume may barelybe old enough to recall the full span of the controversy launched by thepublication of the three-volume History of Transylvania under the auspicesof the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1986. Undoubtedly a majorscholarly undertaking, that work was at the same time also subtly intendedto bring under control, by quelling and satisfying, a specific demand inthe Hungarian public sphere to tackle the “national issue”, to which theTransylvanian heritage had much symbolic and factual relevance. Thearray of denigrating political pamphlets (that is what they largely were,although many of them emanating from the hand of leading Romanianhistorians) that responded to the History in the immediate aftermath of itspublication were not answered in kind, but merely by citing some of thecharges levelled in them against the team of authors – “there is no politicalissue here, comrades”, it was suggested by officialdom in languid andpragmatic, de-nationalized communism (of Hungary) in response to theoutburst of communist nationalism (of Romania). After the fall of communismin both countries in 1989, the debate was indeed placed on a morescholarly plane. Evidence was countered by evidence, but in what was stilla contest between one national phalanx and the other on issues that bothof them regarded as crucial to national fate. They raised incompatibleclaims which they took, as it were, to adjudication by an impartial arbiter:the case was “tried” at a colloquium in Paris, in the presence of Frenchhistorians in 1992. Ironically, upon return home both parties reported,rather condescendingly in regard of the opponent, their own “victory” ashaving been sealed by the arbiters.This probably looks like a caricature, and there was surely a lot ofgoodwill and true scholarship involved in the process, but as all caricatures,I believe it contains more than a grain of a realistic portrait. Scholarshipof this kind, even unwittingly, tends to assume a kind of negative7