Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

Transylvania RevisitedRomanian nationalism in his “Nationalism and Romanian Political Culture inthe 1990s,” in Duncan Light and David Phinnemore, eds., Post-CommunistRomania: Coming to Terms with Transition (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Accordingto him, the central place nationalism performs in Romanian political lifecould be explained by the fact that: “First, the state must govern in the nameof ethnic majority. ... Second, state laws must not be subject to external interferenceor regulation, as this will encroach upon Romanian sovereignty inunacceptable ways. ... Third, freedom from foreign rule is more important thanthe upholding of freedom against tyranny. ... Fourth, native traditions are thebest ones to shape Romanian government.” Gallagher, “Nationalism andRomanian Political Culture in the 1990s,” pp. 105-106.8As George W. White suggested: “At the macro-scale, Transylvania is seen as anintegral component of a broader national territory that is viewed as an organicand inviolable unit; within these broader organic units Transylvania is the cradlefor both Romanian and Hungarian civilisations. At the micro-scale, Transylvaniacontains within it a number of places of great cultural and historical significance.”See George W. White, “Transylvania: Hungarian, Romanian or Neither?”in Guntrom H. Herb and David H. Kaplan, eds., Nested Identities, Nationalism,Territory and Scale (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 268.9See Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, NationBuilding & Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).10 See Gusztáv Molnár, “Problema transilvanã”(The Transylvanian question), inGabriel Andreescu and Gusztáv Molnár, eds., Problema transilvanã (The Transylvanianquestion) (Iaºi: Polirom, 1999), pp. 12-37.11 Regions described by Gusztáv Molnár as “fragmentary regions of Mitteleuropathat have been left outside the new eastern frontiers of the West.” See Molnár,“Problema transilvanã,” p. 21.12 However, as Sorin Antohi observes: “Such negative views of the native spaceare not central to the way Romanians imagine their Sitz im Leben, but theyshow how the most stable landmarks of collective identity melt down eventually,and cannot be taken for granted. Thus, we realise how unstable, artificial,recent, and even unpredictable the co-ordinates of the national existence canbe.” See Antohi, “Putting Romania on Europe’s Map,” p. 37. See also the radicaldiscourse of Sabin Gherman and his “M-am sãturat de România” (I havehad enough of Romania), Monitorul de Cluj (16 September 1998).13 Orientalism was originally conceptualized by Edward Said in his Orientalism(New York: Pantheon, 1978). My argumentation here depends heavily on argumentsdeveloped by Sorin Antohi and Robert Hayden. As the latter suggested:“Orientalism can be applied within Europe itself, between European ‘proper’and those parts of the continent that were under Ottoman (hence Oriental) rule.The evaluation implied by this distinction can be seen in the rhetoric typicallyapplied to the later: Balkan mentality, Balkan primitivism, Balkanization, Byzantine,Orthodoxy.” See Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert Hayden, “OrientalistVariations on the Theme ‘Balkans:’ Symbolic Geographies in Yugoslav CulturalPolitics,” Slavic Review 51 (Spring 1992), p. 3.14 See Sorin Antohi, Civitas Imaginalis: Istorie ºi utopie în cultura românã (CivitasImaginalis: History and utopia in Romanian culture) (Bucharest: Litera, 1994).205