Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

Transylvania Revisited: Public Discourseand Historical Representationin Contemporary Romania 1MARIUS TURDAThe ContextOne of the issues that repeatedly arose in the Romanian publicsphere is the suspicion that the country’s territorial integrity maysuffer a change and its national essence may be altered. This is not a newtheme in the Romanian discursive landscape. Since its emergence asa modern state, Romania has been defined in opposition either to somethingexternal (Europe, the Balkans, the Slavic world) or internal (theHungarians, the Jews, etc.) After 1989, however, the debate on Romania’splace on the European map not only vividly re-emerged, but also openednew issues. 2Interestingly, conflicts of identity and unexpected cleavages withinthe same cultural memory paralleled these discussions, making Romaniaa classic post-communist example of a society marked by the resurrectionof nationalism. Recently, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi analyzed this phenomenonin her book, Subjective Transylvania. Attempting to offer an alternativeexplanation to recent Romanian nationalism, she faced, as otherscholars working in the field, the problem of defining the “national problem”in Romania:Obviously, it means different things to different political actors. To thenationalist Romanian parties, mostly post-communist parties, … thenational problem is the lack of loyalty and therefore the danger of irredentismof the 1.7 million Hungarian community inhabiting Transylvania.For the Romanian anti-Communist intellectuals the “nationalproblem” seems to be the regaining of some meaning of the Romanianidentity in a world so different from the one before the Second WorldWar, the last moment said – although little evidence supports this – tohave presented such a clear identity. For the Romanian Hungarianelite the problem is to find a political formula, which can accommodatetheir very distinct cultural identity. Finally, for the international197