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

The “Münchausenian Moment”social harmony – the entire commercial layer of the society withoutreplacing it. The solution favored by Zeletin, however, is markedly different.It aims at the structural replacement of the non-Romanian commercialelite with an indigenous industrialism, through “positive discrimination,”“expropriation of capital,” and thus envisioning the “peaceful destruction”of the specific economic positions of the “aliens,” inducing them toleave the cities (by simply making them superfluous) when their socialfunctions are already taken over by Romanians.Zeletin was convinced that the necessary framework of social developmentis the city, but he separated the sociological aspect of urbanizationfrom the normative canon of “urbanism” (which would entail some kind of“cosmopolitanism,” acceptance of ethnic plurality, etc.), as he separated hisinterpretation of liberalism from the doctrine of “civic liberties.” In hisinterpretation, institutional politics is only the superstructure of the (urban)conflict of equally hegemonic claims, and the democratic ideology is ultimatelynothing but the weapon of “aliens” (“democraþia” is connected to“strãinism”; its individualist focus – ”atomism” – and the claim of “equalrights” are the tools of dissolving the ranks of ethnic self-defense on the partof the autochthonous population).Thus the key concepts of “neoliberalism” (i.e., protectionism,etatism, and nationalism) 31 are the necessary ingredients of an “honest”Romanian political platform, while democracy is at best a false illusion,but most probably a cunning attempt to “blur the difference between thealiens and the autochthonous,” as it always has a “precise ethnic coloring.”It is clear that this “transition to modernity” can only be successfully managedby a “modernizatory dictatorship,” protecting the “project” bothagainst the “aliens” (accomplishing the shift in capital-relationships), andagainst the “disfavored social strata.” After all, somebody has to pay theprice of forced industrialization: it is obvious that economic autarky andprotectionism exclude cheaper imported goods from the internal market,making everyday life generally more expensive.This repudiation of the democratic political canon is the final theoreticalconsequence of Zeletin’s analysis of the history of Romanian bourgeoisie:it is not by chance that the other champion of “neoliberalism” in the1920s, Mihail Manoilescu (who lived longer than Zeletin), became the mostinfluential, and internationally acknowledged, partisan of anti-liberal economicprotectionism in the thirties, finally turning towards the extremeright, and popularizing an economic program strongly resembling Mussolini’scorporativist ideology. 32 Zeletin was obviously aware of the fact that histheoretical conclusions were incompatible with the self-image of theNational Liberal Party, and, tellingly enough, he joined another politicalorganization, General Alexandru Averescu’s Popular Party. This party was,73