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

The Nationality of ReasoningThird Reich, which failed to reproduce the organic Volksgemeinschaft envisionedin the time of the Weimar Republic.In his book, The Nationalization of the Masses, George Mosse arguesthat Nazi Germany and fascist Italy developed a peculiar environment ofpolitical and national cult, which was embodied in architecture, art, andnational festivities. He stresses that the national symbolism of the WeimarRepublic was not sufficiently powerful because the parliamentary democracycould not offer a sense of unity. Such a unity was finally achieved inthe Third Reich, when the symbolic language of politics ritualized theexpression of political consensus. According to Mosse, such a conceptionof political unity was an immediate consequence of an aesthetic sense oftogetherness. He places the origins of the alliance between nationalismand mass-movement in German history at the beginning of the 19 th century,and relates the establishment of this alliance to the different attemptsat creating a unified Germany. Discussing the problem of organizing themasses, Mosse also emphasizes that the alliance between nationalism andmass-movement occurred within the framework of a secular national religionthat used national symbols as cult objects. 4In his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, BarringtonMoore discusses the organizational tendencies, which appeared duringthe heydays of fascism and in the decades preceding it, by examining thevarious models of political economy related to them. 5 Seeking to distinguishthe causes that led different political-economic systems eithertowards liberal democracy or in the direction of mass-democracies thatengendered fascist systems, Moore emphasizes that Japan, Italy and Germanydemonstrated, in different ways, how a conservative governmentcould rely on modernization in order to consolidate its economy. Furthermore,he demonstrates that the cooperation of certain social categoriesenabled the creation of conservative-modern hybrids of state organization,and argues that the extreme version of this cooperation resulted inthe appearance of fascist regimes. 6When one seeks to apply these models to the political and culturallandscape of interwar Romania, it becomes obvious that it is hard todescribe it in terms of an interaction between fascism and conservatism, atleast in the sense of a Western-European conceptual division. In Romania,there were no strong conservative political organizations in the given period.The ideological cleavage was fundamentally different from those characterizingthe different Western national contexts, where, traditionally, theconservative-liberal-socialist divisions were more clear-cut. In the Romaniancontext, however, the interwar ideological cleavage was rooted in thedivision between the autochthonists and the modernists. 7 On the whole, theorganicist arguments I am going to reconstruct here had been ideologically83