“However, only a few Romanian historians have sought answers to the questions of Romanian nation-building based on theories of nationalism, i.e. using comparative analyses within a broader context. (Sorin Mitu and Lucian Boia are two examples of Romanian historians reflecting on and applying theories of nationalism.)”
On the centenary of Greater Romania, numerous thought-provoking pieces of writing have been published looking at the historical performance of the nation-state that territorially expanded a hundred years ago.
However, only a few Romanian historians have sought answers to the questions of Romanian nation-building based on theories of nationalism, i.e. using comparative analyses within a broader context. (Sorin Mitu and Lucian Boia are two examples of Romanian historians reflecting on and applying theories of nationalism.)
In this paper, I endeavour to use the conceptual framework of nationalism theories to interpret the formation of the Romanian national ideology and fulfilment of the Romanian nation-state in the 20th century. I believe that today’s state of Romania came into being via the combination of two nation-building projects: a) the “awakening” process of the Romanian elite in Transylvania, which was based on an ideological origin theory, thus gaining a historical role by creating a national civil society; b) the bureaucratic, unifying nationalism of the political elite of the Romanian Old Kingdom (Regat), which established the nation-building ambitions of the modern Romanian elite.
TRANSYLVANIA: THE “AWAKENED” ROMANIANS
We can interpret the development of Transylvanian Romanians into a modern nation on the basis of the nation-building typology1 of Miroslav Hroch. According to Hroch the plans of a few “ambitious and narcissist intellectuals” are not sufficient for the evolution of nationalism theories; the linguistic-cultural bonds, the “memories” of the past as “fate” are essential for this, and – more importantly – the ability of a great ethnic community to form a civil society, without which the members of the group are unable to embrace the idea of equality. This evolution took place in Europe in two different ways.
In the West (e.g. in England, France and Spain) the early modern state – as Hroch explains – “developed under the domination of one ethnic culture, either in absolutist form or in a feudal–representative system”.2 Later on these states formed their own modern civil society by reforms or revolutions in parallel with the construction of a nation-state as a community of equal citizens.3
On the other hand, in much of Central and Eastern Europe, an “exogenous” ruling class dominated over ethnic groups spread across large territories within the structures of empires. Slovenians, Estonians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Transylvanian Romanians, and many other groups were in this situation.4
In the Western model, the modernising state – transformed by revolution – first created the national civil society, i.e. the state was the primary distributor of ethnic culture; in contrast, during the transformation of Central and Eastern Europe non-dominant ethnicities developed national movements (“nationalisms”) with the purpose of acquiring the attributes of nationhood, i.e. by the introduction and the recognition of local (“folk”) languages in education, culture and public administration.5
Hroch distinguishes three typical phases of Central and Eastern European national movements: 1) In the first phase, the active players of the non-dominant group begin to search for the linguistic, cultural, and historical features of their “nation”. 2) In the second phase, new actors take the lead: the “awakeners”. For the “nation” plan, they try to win as many members as possible of the community imagined on the basis of the cultural paradigm created in the previous phase; in addition, they aim for launching a mass movement via their agitation. 3) Finally, the national civil society emerging from the movement appears as a full social structure, with different wings and trends elaborating their own national programme alternatives.6
The Romanians of Transylvania as a non-dominant ethnic group of the Habsburg Monarchy went through these three stages of national movement development, which – even though they are overlapping in time – are still distinguishable. The next, partly overlapping periods can be considered starting points: 1) the foundation of the Daco-Romanian theory (early 18th century–1848)7; 2) the period of “awakening” (1792–1867); 3) the pluralisation of the Romanian national movement (1848/49–1918).
The first phase giving birth to the origin myth – the thesis of Roman origin of the Romanians – undoubtedly began with the establishment of the Greek Catholic Church. However, the idea of Latin origin is older; Western humanists (such as Bonfini8) had already noticed similarities between the spoken Romanian language and the Romance languages of Europe. The Transylvanian School (Școala Ardeleană) developed this into a real theoretical programme. The famous members of the School, Samuil Micu-Klein, Gheorghe Șincai, and Petru Maior published most of their works between 1780 and 1825. These historical and linguistic writings proved the Roman origin of the Romanians; in addition, they prepared the modern grammar of the Romanian language. The main thesis of the first version of the origin myth was that the Romans expelled and destroyed the Dacians, thus a new nation was born within Dacia: the Romanians, descendants of the Romans. The thesis of the Dacian-Roman mix only emerged much later. The pure Latinist school dominated until the 1830–1860 period as the new elite of the Transylvanian Romanians (the Greek Catholic priesthood) “weaponised” Roman origin in the fight against the Hungarians: Transylvanian Romanians as successors of the masters of the world whose language as Lucian Boia says, was still the official language of Hungary and Transylvania […] could not go on for ever accepting the supremacy of a people – according to the standards of the time – inferior to themselves in ‘race’ and origin.9 The origin myth was not generated by the “internal” development of Romanian society in Transylvania but by changes in the external power relations, namely the expulsion of the Turks from Hungary and the establishment of Habsburg rule in Transylvania. Vienna was trying to increase its influence in Transylvania via the strengthening of Catholicism to counter the dominant Protestant orders at that time. Catholicism had been limited by two factors: 1) the Diploma Leopoldinum, issued by Leopold I in 1691, ensured the preservation of the constitution of Transylvania, i.e. the status of the three nations of Estates – the Hungarian, the Székely and the Saxon – and, consequently, the system of the established religions. 2) As a massive re-Catholicisation project did not have much prospect of success in the Protestant society of Transylvania, the court had to look for new opportunities to increase Catholic influence. This was served by the unification of the Orthodox Romanian nation with the Catholic Church, i.e. the founding of the Greek Catholic Church in Transylvania. The unification included a pact: priests that left the Orthodox Church and religion were rewarded by a guarantee from Vienna of social advancement and rights equal to those of the Transylvanian Estates.
Thus, a new relationship of tension was created between the new Greek Catholic elite and the Romanian peasantry who remained loyal to the Orthodox faith. It determined the Romanian nation-building process in Transylvania. As Zoltán Tóth I. says, The estrangement between the people rooted in Eastern Orthodox realities and Western-style intellectuals constitutes one of the most important questions of Romanian nationalism in Transylvania.10 Within the premodern Romanian peasant society, an elite group was formed, whose mobility launched the social processes that Liah Greenfeld described with regard to several European premodern nation-building processes. In medieval English society, Greenfeld studied the new aristocracy that began to rise in the Tudor era (around 1530).11 The Wars of the Roses (1455–1485) decimated the traditional aristocracy, creating a vacuum at the top of the social hierarchy, which the ruler remedied by placing talented members of lower nobility with university degrees in high positions. A new elite was created, whose status was dependent on merit, not on birth, which resulted in an anomic state because the traditional image of society, in which upward mobility was not possible, was no longer true.12 The members of the new English elite, who did not consider their plebeian origin acceptable, compensated for this via the idea of nation, i.e. the homogeneously noble people.13 Thus, the idea of nation was born, which – as a sovereign community – could raise any of its members to a higher status.
The similarity between the new aristocracy of the Tudor era and the rise of the Greek Catholic clergy in Transylvania is easily recognised. In both cases, the possibility of upward mobility was created by the decision of the ruler, resulting in “status-inconsistency” (Greenfeld): the ascendant group was uncertain about their new situation and confused about their duties and calling.14 The new nobility in England therefore decided that its status was legitimised by serving the “nation”, not by being loyal to the ruler. Likewise, the Greek Catholic priesthood could not unequivocally place itself in the same position as the Transylvanian Estates (although they wanted to avail of the associated privileges) as previously they depicted these orders as enemies of the great masses of Orthodox believers. In addition, they could not refer to the Orthodox religious community before the believers either since they were working on the foundation of a new denomination and a new religion. In this situation, the idea of a common and noble origin, the descendancy from “noble Roman people” proved to be a substitute for the former (religious, orthodox) bond. The use of pure Latinity as a political weapon helped to create this modern bond.
The second phase, the period of “awakening” and agitation, was characterised by the appearance of the representatives of the evolving civil society alongside the Greek Catholic sacerdotal elite. At that time, the first Romanian-language papers were published in Transylvania, which helped to spread the idea of Roman origin. The two emblematic representatives of the period of “awakening”, George Bariț (1812–1893) and Timotei Cipariu (1805–1887), were the founders of Romanian public life in Transylvania. Bariț, who appears as György Baricz in the Hungarian literary encyclopaedia of József Szinnyei, was primarily a publicist – he founded Gazeta de Transilvania, the first Romanian newspaper in Transylvania – however, he also worked as a teacher.15 Cipariu was the first major representative of the modern Romanian language design; he developed the first comprehensive grammar of the Latinist school. In 1835 he published the first religious book printed in Latin characters; as a result, the Transylvanian Greek Catholic Church was the first to introduce the new writing system, which the press also used during the years preceding the Revolution of 1848. The Latinist School became a decisive factor of the national mobilisation in the mid-19th century.
The third phase, the pluralisation of the Romanian national movement at the level of political institutionalisation, began (not without precedent) with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. Due to the legal framework provided by the Compromise, Hungarian politics clearly adopted the French nation-state model, thus opposing the “communitarian” modernisation efforts of Transylvanian Romanians who had established their own model of “equal nations”, using the framework of Transylvanian Estates as a basis. It is worth noting here that the liberalism of the age only acknowledged the rights of individuals – it did not acknowledge collective rights, nor the legal entity of nationalities. This only encouraged the growth of the Romanian national movement; two Romanian parties were formed in 1869: the Romanian National Party in Transylvania and the Romanian National Party of Hungary. The former chose a strategy of abstentionism and did not participate in parliamentary elections as a protest. The latter, however, participated in political life and in 1869 sent 25 members to the parliament, who supported Ferenc Deák’s liberal party.16
Another dimension of pluralisation is the transformation of national ideology, the modification of the origin myth. This is an important turning point because the ideological connection between the Transylvanian and Moldavian-Wallachian (Old Romanian) national movements – of course, only at the level of the elites – was established. This affected the transformation of the Latinist paradigm (the idea of a pure Roman origin), which began around 1850. As Boia explained, the inferiority complex putting the Romans at the forefront was no longer so justified after the foundation of Romania, the gaining of independence, and the proclamation of the kingdom.17 It was slowly becoming accepted that the population of Dacia had been colonised not only, and not even primarily, by inhabitants of Rome and the rest of Italy and that the Dacians were also among the ancestors of the Romanian people.18
It was basically a combination – characteristic of the phase that Romanian society had reached in its evolution – of Western origins (the Romans and kinship with Latin sister nations) and origins of an indigenous nature (the Dacians).19 The “Dacian turn” was primarily based on the writings of I. C. Brătianu and B. P. HaȘdeu in 1850–1860. By this time, a synthesis was formed from the combination of the Roman and the Dacian elements, adapting to different social and political situations, always allowing a certain “re-establishment”: the adaptation of the paradigm of dual origin to the mentality of the age and to the existing ideological interest. Thus, the idea of Daco-Romanian origin – with the expression of Anthony D. Smith – began to function as a kind of mythomoteur:20 as a flexible synthesis of cultural and historical myths and symbols – enabling contextual reinterpretations – which could function as an ethnic religion.
OLD ROMANIA: BUREAUCRATIC NATION-BUILDING
In Moldavia and Wallachia, then in the United Principalities after the union in 1859 (in the state later called Old Romania, Old Kingdom, or Regat), a state elite started nation-building, which, in many respects, can be compared to the evolution of the strong states of Western Europe.
The elite of Old Romania (Regat) built primarily a state, of which nation-building was a consequence. The overlap between state-building and nation-building is naturally a complicated historical phenomenon; the separation of the two constitutes sometimes rather a dilemma. In Italian history, for example, there is still a debate over whether the Risorgimento – the Italian union – was “a state-building process led by Cavour, or rather a nation-building process led by Mazzini and Garibaldi”.21 As a result of the primacy of state-building, nation-building remained the task of a central state elite; this dilemma was formulated – during the Italian unification – by Massimo D’Azeglio, a politician from Piedmont in 1860: “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.”22
Hechter described the complex process of this unification, believing that “nationalism is better defined as a collective action to make the boundaries of a nation and its government overlap”.23 He distinguishes between four types of this: a) state-building nationalism, which aims to assimilate and integrate culturally diverse territories within the state (for example, the rulers of England and France had tried to assimilate the populations of the Celtic areas of their countries into the dominant culture and language); b) peripheral nationalism is the ambition of a culturally specific area, with which it can resist its inclusion into a single, homogenised country; c) irredentist nationalism is trying to extend the existing boundaries of a state to the territories mostly inhabited by the same nationalities of a neighbouring state; d) unifying nationalism unites a politically divided but culturally homogeneous territory into a single state (e.g. Germany in the 19th century or the above-mentioned Italian example).24
The unification of Wallachia and Moldavia into the United Principalities and later into the Kingdom of Romania (Old Romania) can be included into the fourth type, but with its own specific elements.
Although the “national awakening”, the idea of Roman origin, had already appeared in these lands by the 17th century in the work of Grigore Ureche and Miron Costin, it did not result in the organic process of the development of national civil society that could be observed in the case of the Romanians of Transylvania. This could only happen after the union in 1859, with the help of the state, following Cuza’s reforms. The national “proto-elite” began to develop only very late in the Romanian principalities, sometime around 1820–1830, when the principalities got involved in the world economy through grain exports, which triggered the “Europeanisation” of the Boyars. This elite suddenly turned its back on the Greek-Phanariote world (called “Byzantium after Byzantium” by Nicolae Iorga), with which it had long lived in symbiosis. Among the educated, the Greek language was quickly replaced by French, and in the young Boyars who had learned to write in Greek letters, the thirst for national culture was met through the French language.25 As a result of this quick shift, the Boyars of Muntenia and Oltenia soon acquired the conceptual and cultural ability to think of their “imagined community”26 as a community of equals, which is an important condition for nation-building. Thus, we can speak of a delayed and swift type of “awakening”, which rather affected the middle classes now considering themselves more “Romanian” than the masses. And this elite’s “awakening” – the emergence of their Romanian consciousness – did not rely on the founding myth but on the development of European consciousness and the acceptance of European examples.
Cuza introduced the first modern public education law in 1864 (with three educational cycles); the common regulations of secondary schools and grammar schools were published in 1866; and in 1870 the common regulations of elementary schools were introduced. All of these measures were based on the example of French public education (the system of Napoleon III). In the 19th century, the standardisation of the national imagination was promoted by modern public education almost everywhere in Europe. In Western Europe, industrial society needed the spread of a homogeneous, linguistically standardised high culture at that time. As Gellner explained: “the whole society must be penetrated by a single, standardised high culture, otherwise society cannot function properly”.27 A unified high culture and access to it are the prerequisites for the individual to move freely within the national labour market, to become a citizen in legal and moral terms, and to openly be a member of the political community. This can only be accomplished via integrated formalised school education.28
At the time of Cuza, the United Principalities were still far from emerging as an internal market; however, the rising bourgeoisie, which undertook to follow the Western pattern via its European orientation, anticipated this necessity. Titu Maiorescu described this forced path of following a model (social mimicry) in his theory of “contentless forms”.
In summary, by the end of the 19th century, the “imaginary community” of the nation of Old Romania came into being, but low levels of political participation prevented the emergence of a comprehensive political community since electoral laws in the wake of the 1859–1864 period limited the electorate to 3,800,29 which confined political competition to that of a few elite groups. Thus, the “imagined community” was formed among the small but competing elite groups, which reshaped and reinterpreted the modern idea of “Romanianness” according to the goals pursued in this narrow political space.
Basically, there were three narrow social layers competing: (1) traditional Boyars, who, in the absence of capital, tried to adapt to the market economy of crop exports; (2) the layer of “strangers”, traders having usury capital, playing a significant role in some cities (Greek traders in Brăila and Galac as well as the Jewry of some important Moldavian cities); and (3) the new Romanian “entrepreneur” bourgeoisie, one of the typical categories of which is the parvenu “ciocoi”, striving for the status of Boyars, but adapting better to the market. This new middle class gained strength under the pressure of the competition with the “strangers”, compensating for its disadvantage by the organisation of state positions, and controlling the “foreign” elite rich in capital through political means – e.g. anti-Semitic campaigns. In its ideology, this layer replaced the loftiness of the generation of 1848 (Boyars choosing the European way, Bălcescu and his followers) with bureaucratic nationalism. Their attitude was both inclusive and exclusive: they considered those who – as Ion C. Brătianu, a famous politician of this group, said – “made money here and became free, found a free and generous home here”, but the condition of all this was to convert to the religion of the “national Church”.
The emerging party system of Old Romania also showed signs of “contentless forms” in the form of an ideological mimicry: the conservatives and the liberals had spectacular fights in the press and in the parliament; however, they reached peaceful consensus in governance.30 The real political goal of this consensus was not to define the means and goals for modernising the country but to distribute public and other symbolic goods in a way that it should not endanger the frameworks of the established “political industry”, the interests and the monopoly of the “united oligarchy” in politics.31 As one of the French observers of the era stated, the Romanians regarded politics as a profitable industry and the parliament as a “money market”.32 This situation was consolidated by the Constitution of 1866, effectively excluding the problems of the agricultural society from politics and advocating the idea that the building of the nation-state should start with that of its roof structure. This state could not be legitimised by its social performance, only by its “nationalness”; thus the “united oligarchy” could only accept and provide a citizenship model that had no social content. In fact, a type of nation-building with state (bureaucratic) means had been developed, which remained unsuccessful for a long time due to the lack of its social component, but it was the only one conceivable for the elite of the state.
It is an important circumstance that in the case of Romania, it was Wallachia (Muntenia and Oltenia) that became the protagonist of the unification (although Cuza was Moldavian himself) – similarly to the Kingdom of Sardinia–Piedmont in the case of Italy and Prussia in the case of Germany (Hechter’s model of unifying nationalism). The unification did not only have ethnic-linguistic preconditions but historical-political ones too. According to Lucian Boia, the Phanariote era of the 18th century played a key role in the preparation of this process, in which the two principalities were administered in the same way by the governors appointed by the Turkish Empire (some of them ruled alternately in the two principalities). From 1829 (after the Treaty of Adrianople), this was replaced by the system of Organic Regulations (Regulament Organic), forced equally upon the two principalities during the Russian protectorate. So the unification had had a certain governmental “political example”.
At the same time, the ethnic-linguistic unity could not completely overcome the differences in regional identity. A strong regional identity was characteristic especially of the Moldavians. Prior to the unification, the history and geography of Moldavia along with the “Moldavian language” had been taught at Moldavian schools, whereas in Wallachia, besides geography and history, students were also instructed in the “Romanian language”. (This, in fact, sheds a different light on the aspirations of Moldavia beyond the Prut to consider the “Moldavian language” separate from the Romanian, which is simply attributed today to the assimilation policy of the Soviet empire in Romania.)
From 1862 it became clear that Moldavia and its capital, IaȘi (in Hungarian: Jászvásár), had lost the historical competition against Bucharest. In 1866 – after a bloody anti-unionist protest – the character of the new Romanian kingdom was determined by the bureaucratic, centralising nationalism of Bucharest.
GREATER ROMANIA: THE LEGACY OF UNITED STATE-BUILDING
The creation of Greater Romania in 1918–1920 merged the two nation-building activities into a single state framework.
The “awakening” Romanian nation of Transylvania with its civil and political society was embedded into Transylvanian public law tradition; moreover, paradoxically it started to play a modernising role from the beginning of the 19th century. The Greek Catholic priesthood of the 18th century attempted to make itself politically accepted as a Romanian “Estate”, but this ambition took the form of a Romanian civilian national aspiration in the 19th century. The Transylvanian political framework, however, was the dominant context of the transformation, based on the historical constitution defining the political identity of Transylvania, which can be traced back to Unio Trium Nationum (Union of Three Nations, 1437). Transylvania as a historical-political unity and the “nations” striving for consensual equality in it were two basic ideas that accompanied the evolution of the Transylvanian Romanian nation from the Supplex Libellus Valachorum of 1791 to the Alba Iulia Resolutions of 1918.
The Old Romania elite’s notion of homeland was determined by the idea of “political unification” as well as the imaginary unity of the broad ethnic area. Voievod Michael the Brave (Mihai Viteazul) as the symbolic figure of the “great unification”, was undoubtedly closer to the political imagination of the later bureaucratic unifying nationalists than the internal confederalism of Transylvanian Romanians. Territorial unification similar to the Prussian or Italian example was more likely based on the past of the strong unifying leader. The idea of the Romanian homeland as a large ethnic region – to be unified, but with borders not yet specified – was very much in line with the ideology of unifying nationalism of the 19th century and, as Lucian Boia wrote, unified history presupposes a unified geography.33 This imagination defined the Romanian homeland as “a perfect, almost circular area”: “it is surrounded by three large rivers, the Danube, the Dniester and the Tisza; its cohesive strength as a spinal column is provided by the Carpathians”.34 This gradually became rooted in mythological thinking via a slogan from Eminescu: “From the Dniester to the Tisza”.
The peace treaties ending the First World War clearly were followed by the triumph of the bureaucratic unifying nationalism, the political logic of state-building of Old Romania as prevailing in Greater Romania. The programme of the Transylvanian Romanians was quickly rejected by the government and the royal court in Bucharest, and they were left with occasional complaints and “regionalist objections” between the two world wars. The Romanian state-building tradition of bureaucratic nationalism had many consequences and it has an effect even today. Three of these effects are briefly described below.
The first is the notion of Romanian citizenship. This, as it has already been said many times, follows the French model, a model that is “learned” and “exclusive” at the same time.35 The “learned” character means that in principle it is inclusive; theoretically citizenship can be acquired by anyone (it is not necessarily granted by birth only) – one merely has “to learn” how to become a member of the Romanian nation. Nevertheless, it is “exclusive” at the same time because the important and binding norms of “being Romanian” relate to public attitudes. This means that the attitude of Transylvanian Hungarians who accept loyalty to the Romanian homeland in a legal sense only – i.e. limiting it to the compliance with the laws of the country and the acceptance of legitimacy – is unacceptable for the Romanian national pedagogy. This limited notion of citizenship is considered a scandal for Romanian nationalism since it rejects the public patterns of “being Romanian”, which became norms of public attitude from the second half of the 19th century. At the same time, the Romanian model differs significantly from the French one: the public manifestation of “being Romanian” is much more determined by political discourse and debate than by the cultural sphere. This can mainly be observed in the case of politically instrumentalised anti-Hungarian sentiment which continues to nurture the notion of “being a good Romanian”.
Of course, this also shows the inertia of the Romanian state elite, i.e. they have still been unable to find the answer to the basic question of the Romanian Risorgimento: we have created Greater Romania, yet not all of our citizens have become “good Romanians”, so what shall we do? This is, in fact, the main problem of bureaucratic nationalism of Old Romania of the 19th century surviving into the 21st century.
The second consequence is the issue of decentralisation and subsidiarity. Romanian state-building, which means modernisation of public administration today, still seems to be a continuation of the Old Romanian model of the 19th century. The elite building the state solely from the roof structure of the nation-state can only imagine the democratic civic community in its entirety as the only political community of the state. Although it provides a good basis for formal equality – which also played a positive role in the first phase of democracy building – it can no longer acknowledge the needs of more specific historical-regional and minority groups. The need for formal equality in the Old Romanian political tradition became a tool for homogenisation: it provided a certain 19th-century type of response to the question of “how to create good Romanians”. However, the modernisation of the 21st century and the adaptation to the area of European civilisation demands a Romanian state-building, which acknowledges the political community not only in the dimension of citizens but also as the belonging together of “natural” communities (historical-territorial and/or linguistic-ethnic communities), as accomplished in Italy, for example. This is included in the Transylvanian tradition, and it is still present in the Transylvanian territorial community structure today – this is why the public administration reform plans of Bucharest conflict with the bottom-up, primarily Transylvanian regional development ambitions carried by various movements.
Finally, the third consequence is the hidden continuity of étatism, which is represented by the constant control of politics by secret services. The centenary of the birth of Greater Romania also drew attention to this fact. In his recently published books about the hundred years of Greater Romania,36 Oliver Jens Schmitt, a Swiss historian speaks of an institutional integration interpenetration showing a surprising continuity and having the character of a “state within a state”, whose most important institutional components are provided by secret services, the army, the Orthodox Church and the Romanian Academy. This invisible interpenetration ensures the survival of bureaucratic ethno-nationalism over various political systems in Romania. In particular, the continuity that emerged among secret services is a decisive factor, which, according to Schmitt, is rooted in the state prior to Greater Romania and is still present today.
These three consequences also indicate that, due to geopolitical circumstances, from among the nation-building traditions developed by Greater Romania, the nation-building model of Old Romania (Regat) has prevailed instead of that of Transylvania, and due to its adaptive properties it can survive today. However, it seems more and more questionable whether this state model can be maintained in the 21st century without bringing Romania to a serious crisis.
Translation by Dóra Varga
(This paper is the adaptation of the article titled Two Nation-buildings, One State – The Last Century of Romania published in Kisebbségi Szemle, 3/2018.)
NOTES:
1 Hroch, M. 2004. “From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation: The Nation-building Process in Europe”. In: Kántor, Z. Z. (ed.) Nacionalizmuselméletek (szöveggyűjtemény). [“Theories of nationalism– An anthology”]. Budapest: Rejtjel, 230–247.
2 Ibid.
3 Hroch, op. cit. 231–232.
4 Nevertheless, Hroch emphasises that the two ways cannot be clearly separated on a territorial basis. There were non-dominant ethnic groups (Catalans, Irish, Norwegians) in Western Europe, too; however, most of them had already been assimilated by the medieval state.
5 Hroch, op. cit. 233.
6 Ibid.
7 Zoltán Tóth I. called the period between 1697 and 1792 “the first century of Transylvanian Romanian nationalism”. See Tóth, Z. I. 1998. Az erdélyi román nacionalizmus első százada, 1697– 1792 “[The first century of Transylvanian Romanian nationalism, 1697–1792]. Miercurea Ciuc: Pro Print.
8 This humanist literature inspired the Moldavian chroniclers, Grigore Ureche and Miron Costin, who had studied in Poland and had a high level of knowledge in Latin, to write in the 17th century that the Romanians descended from the Romans.
9 Boia, L. 1999 [1997]. Történelem és mítosz a román köztudatban – Istorie Și mit în conȘtiința românească [“History and myth in Romanian consciousness”]. Bucharest – Cluj-Napoca: Kriterion, 95.
10 I. Tóth, op. cit. 11.
11 Greenfeld, L. 2004. “Nacionalizmus és modernitás” [“Nationalism and modernity”]. In: Kántor, Z. Z. (ed.) Nacionalizmuselméletek (szöveggyűjtemény) [“Theories of nationalism – An anthology”]. Budapest: Rejtjel, 183–203.
12 Greenfeld, op. cit. 187.
13 Ibid.
14 Cf. Greenfeld, op. cit. 187–189.
15 Cipariu was a member of the commission elected by the National Assembly of Romanians at Blaj in 1848, participated in the founding of ASTRA (Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People) in 1867 (later on he was also president), and became a member of the leadership of the Romanian National Party.
16 See Vogel, S. 2001. Európai kisebbségvédelem – erdélyi nemzetiségpolitikák “[Protection of minorities in Europe”]. Miercurea Ciuc: Pro-Print, 154–156.
17 Boia, op. cit. 100.
18 Boia, op. cit. 101.
19 Ibid.
20 The concept was used by Smith following John Armstrong’s Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986). See also: Smith, A. D. 2004. A nemzetek eredete [“The ethnic origins of nations”]. In: Kántor, Z. Z. (ed.) Nacionalizmuselméletek (szöveggyűjtemény) [“Theories of nationalism – An anthology”]. Budapest: Rejtjel, 218.
21 Linz, J. J. 2004. “State Building and Nation-Building. In: Kántor, Z. Z. (ed.) Nacionalizmuselméletek (szöveggyűjtemény) [“Theories of nationalism – An anthology”]. Budapest: Rejtjel, 280.
22 As quoted by Linz, op. cit. 287.
23 See Hechter, M. 2003. “A nacionalizmus megfékezése” [“Curbing nationalism”]. In: Magyar Kisebbség, Vol. 1. No. 27, 146–204. Retrieved from: http://www.jakabffy.ro/magyarkisebbseg/index. php?action=cimek&lapid=22&cikk=m030121.html (3 February 2019).
24 Ibid.
25 Trócsányi, Zs., Miskolczy, A. 1992. A fanariótáktól a Hohenzollernekig. Társadalmi hanyatlás és nemzeti emelkedés a román történelemben (1711–1866) [“From the Phanariotes to the Hohenzollerns. Social decline and national progress in Romanian history”]. Budapest: ELTE-BTK, 83–86.
26 See Anderson, B. 2004. “Képzelt közösségek” [“Imagined communities”]. In: Kántor, Z. Z. (ed.) Nacionalizmuselméletek (szöveggyűjtemény) [“Theories of nationalism – An anthology”]. Budapest: Rejtjel, 79–108.
27 Gellner, E. 2004. “A nacionalizmus kialakulása: a nemzet és az osztály mítoszai” [The birth of nationalism: the myths of nation and class]. In: Kántor, Z. Z. (ed.) Nacionalizmuselméletek (szöveggyűjtemény) [“Theories of nationalism – An anthology”]. Budapest: Rejtjel, 55.
28 Ibid.
29 Trócsányi–Miskolczy, op. cit. 138.
30 Barbu, D. 2005. Politica pentru barbari [“Politics for Barbarians”]. Bucharest: Nemira, 63.
31 Ibid.
32 See also Trócsányi–Miskolczy, op. cit. 141.
33 Boia, op. cit. 161.
34 Ibid.
35 See the typology of citizenship by Tilly, C. 1995. “Citizenship, Identity and Social History”. In: International Review of Social History, Vol. 40, No. 3, 1–17.
36 Schmitt, O. J. 2018. România în 100 de ani. Bilanul unui veac de istorie [“Romania in a hundred years”]. Bucharest: Humanitas.