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

The “Münchausenian Moment”:Modernity, Liberalism and Nationalismin the Thought of ªtefan ZeletinBALÁZS TRENCSÉNYIOne of the crucial features of East and Central European politicalcultures is the markedly strong tie between questions of modernityand questions of identity. The emergence of political modernity was rootedin a confrontation with “the other” (from the late Enlightenment on,modernity was spatialized as “the West”), and ideologies of modernizationalways emerged from a crisis of identity – caused by the personal experienceof the contrast between “us” and “them.” Most of the culturalpoliticaltraditions of the region look back to these deep psychological(sometimes even psycho-pathological) crises of experiencing and conceptualizingthe “difference.” 1 Let me just evoke the names of Chadayev,Széchenyi, or Eminescu, all characterized by a specific discursive ambivalenceconcerning the epistemological and even ontological status of East-European existence. Is it a derivative supplement to “Western modernity”?Does it have an authentic mode of existence? Is there a local canonwhich could narrate and legitimize the local experience? Finally, is this“mode of existence” likely to survive, does it have anything to add to theconcert of humankind?These questions were sharpened by the apparently destructiveimpact of the emerging modern life-structures upon the traditional frameworksof social existence. The signs of modernity thus became inter-connectedwith the symptoms of the dramatic dissolution of the patterns ofarchaic communities and “pre-modern” life-worlds. This process obviouslymeant a radical challenge to traditional modes of self-description, andcould result in a general crisis of collective social identities, patterns ofbehavior, and ways of life.Two processes can be discerned as crucial: the acceleration of urbanization(not only in quantitative-proportional terms, which proved to bea protracted process, but also in terms of social imagery, i.e., the appearanceof an urban stratum in the social-political symbolic framework), andthe political-institutional thrust of national differentiation. These processeswere experienced by all sides of the political spectrum and createda common understanding of the “effects of modernity,” which might be61