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

INTRODUCTIONNevertheless, promoted exclusively at the level of political elitesunder the decisive influence of the international community, the Romanian-Hungarianreconciliation has not been based on a real change ofimages at the level of cultural production and public opinion. Negativeclichés and reciprocal stigmatization continue to pervade the public memory,the political and the cultural discourse, as well as the academic productionof knowledge. In fact, while decision-makers in Romania andHungary became somewhat more conciliatory, one can witness an upsurgeof radical ethno-politics in both countries, triggering similar reactions inacademia, among cultural elites and – rather unexpectedly – among theuniversity youth, as well. This creates a vast playground for politicians relyingon a nationalist symbolism to legitimize their political positions. What ismore, throughout the 1990s, public opinion in both countries witnessed thereturn of virtual history (asserting various forms of national and territorialcontinuities, pedigrees, historical precedence, etc.) into the common stockof political debates and official representation of the nation.One of the main reasons for the lack of symbolic resources necessaryfor a large-scale intercultural dialogue is doubtlessly the limited impact onpublic opinion of those scholarly discourses that are transgressing the traditionalframework of the nation-state. At the academic level, the firstpost-communist decade was characterized by rather timorous attempts inthe fields of historiography and social sciences, such as sociology andcultural anthropology, to reconsider the socio-political and intellectualhistory of Romania and Hungary from updated theoretical and methodologicalperspectives. However, the critical revision of hegemonic historiographicalcanons through an inter-cultural dialogue and an effective renegotiationof the prominent identity-discourses of these cultures is an issuethat remains to be tackled in Hungary and Romania, and in the widerregion as well.As the Eastern European cultural space is marked by highly divergentnation-state centered narratives, most of the cooperative attempts inthe last decade resulted in a pastiche that did not problematize the broaderframeworks, but rather sought to accumulate various narratives andaccentuate their mind-boggling plurality and seeming incompatibility. Theonly way out of this deadlock is to promote scholarly enterprises thattransgress the traditional frameworks of cooperation and are based oncommon socialization. Throughout the region, there is an endemic lack ofinstitutions where a common academic socialization could happen.Among the few, Central European University in Budapest, Hungary –where most of the contributors to the present volume have studied or continuetheir studies – features prominently. Having discussed and questionedfor years the various mutually exclusive historical narratives, institutional-10