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

The “Münchausenian Moment”uinely liberal and “Westernizer” context (vs. a supra-national conservativecanon), the nationalist movements had to face the challenge of power-politics,and this inherent conflict finally led to the discursive separation ofnationalism and liberalism. The dissolution of this “liberal nationalist”canon was due to the simultaneous upsurge of two new discourses. First,there was the emergence of a new type of anti-liberal nationalism, connectingsocial protectionism with a nationalist (and often ethnocentric)rhetoric (following the Central-European examples, like Schönerer andLueger). This transition marked a shift in the conservative political tradition,from an elitist-aristocratic conservative canon to a new populist one. 6At the same time, the liberal political elites changed their theoretical andpractical attitude towards the state. Gradually, they abandoned theirambiguous position (rooted in the contrast of the – imported – propensityfor decentralization and limitation of state-power, and the more etatistpractical exigencies of “imposing structures of modernity” on the society),and rephrased their stance in much more etatist terms. This can beobserved, for example, in the case of the second generation of post-1867Hungarian liberalism, coming to power in the 1890s, where an emphaticsecularism and social modernization matched a strongly etatist (andassimilatory) policy towards the nationalities and a cult of violence ininternal affairs, envisioning an imaginary Hungarian Empire. 7One of the most interesting (and least discussed) aspects of East-Central European intellectual history of the first three decades of the 20 thcentury is exactly the emergence of “mutant” political discourses: both interms of the “autochthonization” of international paradigms (liberalism,socialism, etc.), as in terms of the blurring of the traditional symbolicframeworks which organized the discourse before World War I. The originalityof Zeletin was inherent in the way he sought to reformulate the ideologicaltenets of the Romanian liberal tradition in the 1920s. Contrary tothe “more official” ideologue, I. G. Duca, who sought to grasp the essenceof Romanian liberalism in terms of the trans-contextual commitment tothe “values of individual liberty,” 8 (i.e., avoiding the question of the specificityof the “local mutant,” anchoring the prestige of Romanian liberalismin the respectable pedigree of the political culture of the “Big WesternBrothers”), Zeletin attempted to devise a genealogy, and, what ismore, to legitimize the local modification of this ideology in Romania.Repudiating the “idealist” trend, he sought to grasp the meaningof liberalism through its social message, opening two fronts against traditionalinterpretations. First, criticizing the common assumption thatliberalism was merely an intellectual fashion imported from the West,he attempted to localize its emergence in the cleavage between theboyars, utilizing quasi-Marxist analytical tools to document the tangible63