Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

ZOLTÁN KÁNTORpates in elections, takes part in parliamentary life either as part of the government,or in opposition. On the one hand, HDUR’s goals on the statelevel can be summarized as follows: it strives for the creation of smallerunits within the state, by advocating administrative decentralization, federalism,and territorial autonomy, in order to create structures in which theHungarian minority would be in a relative majority in order to influence thedecision-making process. On the other hand, it attempts to create separate,ethnically-based institutions, in which the minority decides over salientissues. The final goal is to create a parallel society. 15 Basically, this is whatI call minority nation-building. The HDUR, as a mixture of an ethnic partyand an organization, uses its two faces to achieve these goals. This is a specificattribute of ethnic parties and not of other types of political parties.Many Romanian, but also some Hungarian, politicians accuse theelite of the HDUR of striving to build a “state within a state,” and thustaking the first steps toward secession. 16 The “state within a state”metaphor presupposes that the Hungarians wish to create a power structurewhich is similar to the state political system. Although this model ismisplaced, several signs show that the relationship between the party andthe Hungarian population indeed resembles the state–society relationship.Nevertheless, several elements are missing for the “state withina state” metaphor to hold: e.g., there is no Hungarian judiciary, no Hungarianpolice, and no Hungarian military in Romania.On the other hand, the “presidency,” the “government” and the“parliament,” (i.e., Szövetségi Küldöttek Tanácsa), 17 resemble the statepower structure. The “parliament” includes Hungarian deputies in theRomanian Senate and House of Deputies, the representatives of territorialorganizations and representatives of political platforms and factions.Part of the representatives become members of the Council automatically,some are elected in the Congress, and the others are delegated by theirlocal organizations. Essentially, the structure attempts to include all thosewho represent, on one level or another, the Hungarian minority. Thereare several kinds of legitimacy in the legislative body. The Congress (composedby local delegations, deputies and senators of HDUR, representativesof political platforms/factions, and of affiliated organizations) substitutesthe elections. Even if several decisions are not taken in accordanceto democratic principles, the internal political life of the Hungarian politicalsphere resembles that of a state much more than the internal politicallife of non-ethnic parties.Only ethnic parties have their own “civil society,” which I called“ethno-civil” society. Civil organizations and civil society were also createdby the elite (and intellectuals) after the fall of the communist regime in1989. The relationship between the ethno-civil society and the ethnic party258