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

argument blaming the elite for “selling out” the country to foreign powers.This increasingly important rhetoric also determined the ambiguousstance of the Liberal government towards the anti-Semitic student movementin the early 1920s, which finally turned into brutal violence.“Organic Truth”The Nationality of ReasoningAs already mentioned, the literature identified the autochthonist-modernistdichotomy as defining the Romanian debate regarding the desirablepath of development. The dichotomy illustrates the polarizationbetween two orientations towards the nation-state. While theautochthonists gave priority to national specificity, regarded as the normativeframework for integrating the society into an organic unity, themodernists argued for importing the modern West-European culturaland institutional structures that were expected to generate the nationaldevelopment in Romania as well.The “theory of forms without substance,” elaborated in the secondhalf on the 19 th century by Titu Maiorescu – one of the most important literarycritics of his time, prominent member of the Junimea circle and,later on, minister in several conservative governments – claimed that withoutorganic development of both form and substance, the mere imitationof Western forms would not be efficient in establishing Western institutionalstructures. In the interwar period, the literary critic Eugen Lovinescucontinued a complex dialogue with the “theory of forms without substance.”In his Istoria civilizaþiei române moderne (History of modernRomanian civilization), Lovinescu argues that the problem of imitation ofthe Western institutions and values was inevitable for Romania. In hisexplanatory model of harmonic social structures, the form and its relationshipwith the substance were metaphorical expressions for the necessarilyinorganic position of institutions existing in an environment which was notready to structurally absorb the “alien” forms.In the following, I discuss conceptions that relate the idea oforganic unity to the idea of community, but in a markedly differentmanner. These arguments apply the metaphorical vocabulary composedof terms like “form,” “substance,” and “organic” in a more genuinesense than the “theory of forms without substance,” that is, consideringthem the essential features of a community. This line of reasoning ismore fundamentally organicist, because it does not refer to the nonorganiccharacter of institutions, but to the non-organic character ofcertain categories of individuals, and questions their eligibility for cultural-nationalinclusion. This type of organicism relies upon racial andreligious categories, rather than upon an understanding of a political-85