Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

RÃZVAN PÂRÂIANUI do not want to believe that the partisans of intrigues, of all kind ofsecessions, can be successful. This belief helps me not to become overlysad reading this book. However, I consider that this book must be known,having the utility of a self-defense manual, as a guide of protection thatmust be known by everybody. 22As he stated, “there is no dichotomy between the intellectual and thepolitician.” 23 In his case, it is difficult to determine how much politicalopportunism 24 and how much real conviction are behind his statements.It is not the goal of the present paper, however, to explore the consciousnessor the subconscious of Romanian politicians. What is important is therole played by the nationalist doctrine in their public discourse. Denationalization,the loss of state sovereignty and Huntington are favorite topicsfor Nãstase – be it at a PDSR conference, or a seminar organized by theRomanian Academy of Sciences:I am very confident that a real analysis of this textbook by honest scholarswill reveal surprising aspects. ... I am pretty sure, because I spent mylast weekend reading this textbook. [I did this] not as a specialist, becauseI am neither a historian, nor a high school teacher, but an intellectualwith solid knowledge of Romanian and universal history. And whatI found is fantastic: this book, which I cannot call a textbook, is antinational– developing the theses of the Hungarian historiography ofRoeslerian origins. It uses efficient means of professional misinformation,from omissions and malevolent interpretations to the false [ideas]dressed in half-true information. It is a true arsenal of conscious manipulation,of ideas vividly promoted nowadays by revisionist circles aimingat the autonomy of Transylvania and the dismemberment of the Romanianstate. 25Such an extreme danger indeed deserves an extreme vocabulary. Nãstase,in the good old tradition of the 1970s, indicated the way a real historyshould be written. Doing this, he reiterated the most vulgar version ofRomanian history.Following the chronological order chosen by Nãstase, there is incontestableevidence of the national treason committed by the authors of theincriminated textbook. The first such proof concerns the ethno-genesis ofRomanians. In Nãstase’s opinion, several important elements are missingfrom the story of the formation of the Romanian ethnicity. One is that theDacian roots of Romanians are not sufficiently underlined, and are evendiscarded, because they would disturb the “Hungarian version” of history.In this reading, the role of Dacians in Romanian historiography is to pre-102