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

BALÁZS TRENCSÉNYIand urban life), and the perception of “ethnic threat” (resulting in thereflex of xenophobic self-defense on the part of the Romanian society).Thus – in Zeletin’s conception – the aliens are not the cause, rather thetools of the destructiveness of capitalism, but their presence evokesa strong counter-effect. The solution to this problem lies in the “providential”pattern of economic development: the march of capitalism cannot bestopped, but it can be (as he shows us through abundant historical examples),moreover, it must be autochthonized. The phase of a purely commercialisteconomy is inevitably followed by a mercantilist period of transitiontowards the next – industrial – form. Mercantilism, an economicpolicy relying on state-intervention in allocating resources and protectingthe internal market, aims at the “creation of a national industry,” 25 reflectingthe ultimate weakness of the indigenous class of entrepreneurship.“The logic of development” necessitates a positive discrimination infavor of the local industry. Thus, Zeletin devises a de facto anti-Semiticpolitical program on the basis of a social-political analysis, without anemotional-racist discourse (he does not blame the Jews for a sinister racialsolidarity and secret plotting to ruin the Romanian nation), referring himselfto the seemingly objective laws of economic development. These lawsaccount for the merging of objective and subjective factors. The subjectivethrust for economic gains on the part of Jewish merchants merges with theobjective emergence of commercial capitalism; while the subjective thrustfor ethnic self-defense on the part of the ruined urban and rural populationmerges with the program of a new pattern of mercantilist protectionism,objectively the next stage of economic modernization. According tothe objective “laws of development,” Jewish capital should be replacedbecause it is too much linked to an antiquated phase of commercial(export-import) exchange. The second (predestined) stage, the creation ofa national industry, simply cannot be financed by alien and fragmentedcommercial capital (operating with short-term investments and seekingimmediate profit, mainly by buying and selling luxury items). In order tomake this shift to heavy industry possible, the nation “needs to collect allits forces” to perform the great leap to industrial capitalism.Using Tocqueville, Zeletin seeks to describe this mercantilist phaseas a classical pattern of transition from ancien régime to modernity. Thelocal bourgeoisie is too weak to establish a national industry from its ownprivate strength, so it must rely on a centralizing absolutist power. In thissymbiotic relationship, society turns the state into a weapon of self-protection,while indirectly contributing to the centralization of political powerin the hand of the “Enlightened Absolutist” ruler. This “EnlightenedAbsolutist” pattern is encoded in the mercantilist stage of the socio-economictransition (from the ancien régime to the “age of the masses”).70