Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

BALÁZS TRENCSÉNYIcal – imposed on the society, while conservative autochthonism was fashioningitself as local/organic) upside down. In fact, this reconsideration isturned mainly against the conceptual framework of Junimist “criticism”(Titu Maiorescu, Mihai Eminescu, and P.P. Carp), a tradition emergingfrom the 1860s on, blaming the revolutionary generation of 1848 (paºoptiºtii)for the slavish imitation of foreign models. 20 If we accept Zeletin’sclaim that the roots of liberalism are to be found in an unavoidable socialtransformation, the charge of “inorganicity” becomes irrelevant. In order tosupport his argument, he seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the discourseof anti-liberal autochthonism. The classical conservative discourse wasa fusion of several crucial ideas and catchwords: nationalism, historical continuity,organicism, critique of capitalism and historicism. This perspective“constructed” the liberal enemy as diametrically opposed to these ideas(being cosmopolitan, advocating historical discontinuity, inorganic, procapitalist,and anti-historicist). Zeletin’s program was to destroy this counter-position;while he tried to expropriate some keywords of the autochthonistdiscourse (which had unambiguously positive connotations), he turnedother concepts against their own canon, or simply tried to “explode” them.The question of “historicism” is a good example for the strategy ofdiscursive expropriation. Zeletin seeks to prove that Junimism was anachronistic,“lacking the sense of history,” because they were unaware of theuniversal historical laws of development that determine the nature of capitalisteconomy. Capitalism means the breach of historical continuity,therefore the anti-historical argumentation of the liberals was rooted ina “real sense” and a real understanding of the lessons of history. 21 Furthermore,he seeks to separate historicity and continuity: Romanian liberalismwas the “politics of discontinuity,” but this discontinuity was exactlythe harbinger of success in a process which was rooted in a dramaticbreach of continuity in socio-economic terms as well. This means therepudiation of the agrarian-autochthonist critique of capitalism: there isno alternative to modernity, the question is not whether we like it or not,but how to adjust to its effects.At the same time, he undermines the charges of “abstraction” and“import” as well. It is the autochthonist canon which falls into the trap ofabstraction, projecting the norms of an “alien” society (the agrarianautarchy of the pre-modern world) on the present structures (“it is theweirdest claim to model the institutions of a capitalist state on the ways ofthe old agrarian world” 22 ). While liberalism “became a reality in its entirety,embodied in modern nation-states,” conservativism “remained alwaysa theoretical principle, a simple abstraction.” 23 Furthermore, exactly theautochthonist canon was the imported one, having no connection whatsoeverto “local realities:” “the representatives of the reaction,” sons of the68