Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

The Idea of the “Nation” in TransylvanismKINGA-KORETTA SATA1. IntroductionThe present study focuses on the post-World War I self-definition andidentity of the Hungarians living in Transylvania, who, as a result ofthe Trianon Peace Treaty, became citizens of another state: Romania.Thus, the Transylvanian Hungarians, members of the dominant nationbefore 1918, suddenly became members of a national minority. The taskof redefining Hungarians in Romania as a minority was mainly assumedby local intellectuals. Attempts were made to define the Hungarians inRomania as members of a more or less homogeneous and stable group,and various ideas and ideologies were set out to accommodate this newnational minority in the newly shaped Greater Romania. The situationrequired new directions for action both for the community as a whole, andfor individuals, as well. The Hungarian intelligentsia set out to find theprinciples that could be unanimously acceptable, and to define a life-strategyfor the members of the minority.My study proposes to investigate the early phase of ideology-construction,namely the early 1920s. The sources analyzed consist of thepolitical essays and theoretical writings that were published in the journalPásztortûz in its first five volumes (1921-1925). 1 The reason forrestricting the study to this journal is that it was the only major journalpublishing literature, theoretical essays and political writings that survivedthroughout the period. It was considered “conservative,” in contrastto what was called “progressive” in the same period (mainly theshort-lived Zord Idõ, Keleti Újság, and Napkelet). However, thesenotions actually lost their sense in the case of the post-World War I Hungarianminority in Romania. It was a program of uniting all politicalviews into a single framework that characterized this period. The rivaljournals were actually publishing by and large the same authors and,after the “progressive” journals ceased to exist, the Pásztortûz incorporatedtheir contributors.Limiting the period of study to five years can be justified by acknowledgingthe date around 1925 as being a boundary. All of the authors writingon Transylvanism considered that there was a transition in Transyl-42