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

BALÁZS TRENCSÉNYIply happens. This means that liberalism has a derivative ontological status.It is rooted in the exigency of modernization, the concomitant expressionof historical necessity. It is not hard to see that, from this perspective, thenineteenth-century debate between liberals and conservatives becomesmeaningless. This also makes his use of the Marxist analytical tools of socialtransformation rather ambivalent: he keeps the model of the causal relationshipbetween social structure and political superstructure, and goes sofar as to accept the existence of class-politics, but repudiates the Marxistvision of class struggle (which would be the most natural implication ofa class-based analysis). What he keeps, however, from the Marxist vision ismainly the idea of “historical inevitability,” the claim that the specific characteristicsof Romanian liberalism are to be derived from the analysis of thesocio-economic conditions of Romanian bourgeoisie.According to Zeletin, liberalism is the natural expression of the situationof people dealing with “values of exchange,” since the structure ofcapitalist exchange per definitionem necessitates the establishment of institutionsof liberty. In his narration, the advent of capitalist forms ofexchange meant a dramatic shift in the structure of civil society: itdestroyed the life-world of the pre-modern urban dwellers (Zeletin callsthem “mica burghezie,” i.e., “petite bourgeoisie”); the overall function of thecity changes, and, from the aggregation of corporate privileges and guilds(the pre-modern “island of the blessed”), it becomes the forum of capitalistexchange. The social-political changes are thus conditioned by the evolutionof modern capitalism, and they can be arranged according to the three consequentphases of capitalist economy (commercial, industrial and financial).These phases ultimately result in three markedly different forms of socialorganization, with specific laws of functioning, and the corresponding ideologicalframeworks (mercantilism, liberalism and imperialism).In Zeletin’s books, the concept of modernity is projected on this stadialscheme of development, stripped of its normative connotations, ina way that strongly resembled the perception of “democracy” in Tocqueville.It means the necessary replacement of one life-world with another, destructionand building at the same time. 16 Zeletin accepts the main tenet ofRomanian autochthonism, i.e., that the entrance of Romania into the worldeconomy meant the annihilation of this pre-modern urban stratum, and heis far from claiming that modernity was equally beneficial to everyone concerned.Contrary to the mainstream of the Westernizer discourse, which wastrying to depict modernization as a universal salvation-story, he witnessesthe tragic overtones of the process as well.On the other hand, however, he claims that these costs wereunavoidable. The monetarization of the economy requires the involvementof mobile capital, which can only be attracted from agents outside of66