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

BALÁZS TRENCSÉNYIence to historical inevitability, he turns the Junimist critique upside down.“Bureaucratism” is not a moral fault, but a social result. “Romanians haveturned themselves into bureaucrats neither out of sheer pleasure, norbecause of the lack of diligence,” but because the pre-modern urban economicalspace, their natural life-world, collapsed. 29 This emerging bureaucraticlayer came to political power due to the relative numerical weaknessof the boyar-class. In order to widen their social basis, the liberal boyarshad to make a compromise with this newly-formed administrative class,thus merging into a “functionary-liberal elite,” creating possibilities ofrapid social ascendance for the ablest, and “giving work to those urbangroups who were expelled from the frameworks of national production.”This fusion was possible because both sides were rooted in the samenationalist dream about a Romanian nation-state, and, subsequently, theirinterests were identical in creating an “autochthonous industry” and supporting“autochthonous urbanization,” – an agenda for the transitionalmercantilist political philosophy of socio-economic protectionism.This means that the symbolic framework of this coalition is thenation itself, and the battlefield of the symbolic fight is the principal focusof modernity; i.e., the city. Attempts at autochthonous modernizationcoincide with “the fight against foreign domination,” 30 since the “interestsof the nation” (“independence,” “unity,” and “homogeneity”) convergewith attempts at “ethnic self-defense” on the part of the administrative,bureaucratic elite. The thrust for the nationalization of economic power isthe inevitable social reaction to the upsurge of modernity.Thus, in a way, the “nationalization of cities” is a symbolic claim andone of the most important elements in Zeletin’s political program (alongsidewith the nationalization of schools – the subject of a 300 page-longmanuscript from the 1920s). The conquest of urban space is simplyunavoidable, since cities are the “real centers of life,” and “the cities inRomania have never been Romanian,” because of the massive influx offoreigners, the commercialization of economy and the – fairly cosmopolitan– imperial frameworks incorporating the “Romanian lands” before theemergence of the unified nation-state.Since Zeletin was against the traditional populist perception of thecity as inherently corrupted, his great dilemma was how to harmonizenationalization with urbanization, how to autochthonize without ruralization,i.e., without destroying the structures of modernity. This is the messageof his emphatic distinction between the two models of “nationalization.”The agrarian xenophobia (the anti-Semitism of the declining andfrustrated peasantry) culminates in “unsystematic” and blind violence,and in occasional attempts of chasing the aliens out of the country, thusruining – in a futile attempt to reinstate an imagined pre-modern state of72