Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

Searching for Common Groundsautarchy and modernization simultaneously. While the liberal political elitesought to retain the democratic surface, they envisaged a process of industrialization,financed from a brutal reallocation of capital to the detriment ofthe agrarian population and the minorities. Ultimately, the etatist logic ofnation-building devoured its own instruments and opened the ground fora radically anti-modernist ethno-politics.In Central and Southeast Europe, these dilemmas reached theirclimax in the 1930s, when the discursive space was effectively expropriatedby autochthonist cultural discourses. Mihály Szilágyi-Gál’s essay isan overview of the philosophical roots of the autochthonist arguments,focusing on the various visions of a “national philosophy.” The authorderives these attempts from the general political context in interwarRomania, marked by an all-encompassing homogenizing project ofnation-building, which was supposed to inform intellectual production inthe domain of history, as well as in philosophy, and even in arts. The outcomewas an organicist, or even biologistic, conception of cultural unity,completely undermining the contractual and inclusivist model of nationstatehood.While reconsidering some of the major assumptions of thisdiscourse, the paper gives a creative re-reading of these debates in viewof the cultural embeddedness of philosophical inquiry and the – not negligible– intellectual challenge posed by radical anti-modernism.The legacy of interwar discourses of integrist nationalism is tangibleeven today. Of course, one cannot speak of an uncontaminated continuity,rather of a curious interaction of national romanticism, the ideas originatingin the interwar period, and the national communist synthesisemerging in the late 1960s. It is from this perspective that RãzvanPârâianu’s paper explores the recent scandal that occurred in Romaniaaround the first post-communist generation of history textbooks. Thisscandal brought to light very deep cultural tensions, hidden by the currenteconomic crisis and the problems of socio-economic transition. Evokingthe arguments of some of the protagonists, the author suggests thata “thick description” may yield important insights concerning the status ofpublic historical consciousness in Romania. The principal conclusion ofthe paper is that a radical reform of history teaching and, consequently, ofthe historical consciousness will be extremely painful and troublesomewithout a fundamental change in the broader cultural framework.The second part of the book, Nation-Building and Regionalism ina Multi-Ethnic Context, analyzes specific instances of cultural and politicalinteraction between different ethnic communities in the context of theprojects of nation-statehood. Providing a case study with broad implicationsfor the entire Romanian nation-building project, ConstantinIordachi’s paper focuses on the integration of Northern Dobrogea into13