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

The “Münchausenian Moment”derive the totalitarian turn of the nationalist discourse from the receptionof Western extreme right-wing ideologies. Recently, some authors, eminentlyIrina Livezeanu in her insightful Cultural Politics in Greater Romania,started to revise this canonical assertion and sought to identify theseeds of the integrist nationalist project in the centralizing discourse andefforts of the liberal elite, 35 right after the creation of “Greater Romania.”If one reads Zeletin carefully, one finds Livezeanu’s argument very accurate.Far from being rooted in any kind of fashionable totalitarian ideology,it was the dynamics of his arguments which pushed him towardsa political vision fusing etatism, nationalism, economic protectionism and“liberalism.”Reading his clear scholarly prose, one is left with the gloomy dilemmaconcerning the nature of modernization in Eastern Europe. Was it encodedin the nature of the project that “imposing modernity” on these structuresentailed violence? Did totalitarianism necessarily flow from an attempt atcatching-up with Western modernity? Was there a way out? Was integristnationalism encoded in the experiment of creating a nation-state in a multiethnicspace? And what about the alternatives: was the fall of the regionalistor the peasantist movements inherent in the logic of history? In any case,the message of this “Münchausenian moment” of modernization – theemergence of an ideology seeking to pull the country out of the abyss by itsown hair – is frightening enough.NOTES1See Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization in the Mindof the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), and MariaTodorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Forthe Romanian context the best case-study to date is that of Sorin Mitu, NationalIdentity of Romanians in Transylvania (Budapest: Central European UniversityPress, 2001). See also Alexandru Duþu, “Europenism ºi autohtonism laromâni,” in Alexandru Duþu, Ideea de Europa ºi evoluþia conºtiinþei europene(The idea of Europe and the evolution of European consciousness)(Bucharest: All, 1999), pp. 155-236; and Victor Neumann, The Temptation ofHomo Europaeus (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).2The best interpretation of this discursive cleavage is Andrzej Walicki, Philosophyand Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Notre Dame: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1994), and The Slavophile Controversy: History of a ConservativeUtopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought (Notre Dame: Universityof Notre Dame Press, 1989).3On the discourses of collective identity in Eastern-Europe, see Ivo Banac andKatherine Verdery, eds., National Character and National Ideology in Interwar75