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

INTRODUCTIONdevises a broad comparative framework, placing the work of the Hungarianpolitician and historian Mihály Horváth alongside similar intellectualsfrom the region. Breaking through the traditional narrative about theoriginality and uniqueness of the respective national historian, the authorargues that Horváth’s ideas were derived from the German late-Enlightenment.Although focusing on the oeuvre of a particular historian, theessay has much wider implications: on the one hand, it is a reconstructionof the mental map of nineteenth-century liberal nationalism, on the otherhand, it is an attempt to explore the possible analytical strategies of tacklingthe historiographical canons of the region, while abandoning the traditionalnation-centered narratives.If the nineteenth century witnessed various modalities of the coexistenceof liberal and nationalist value-systems, 1918 meant a radical rupture.The new situation, after World War I, was marked by the emergence of variousdiscourses questioning the compatibility of the cause of liberty with thecause of the community, especially in the case of socio-political turmoils.Kinga Sata’s reconstruction of the emerging “national” discourse of the Hungarianminority elite in Transylvania focuses on the relationship of global andlocal normativities in the thinking of these intellectuals, who sought toreframe the identity of their community that shifted from being dominant tobecoming the principal target of the homogenizing thrust of another people’snation-building. Transylvanism, the ideology professed by these intellectuals,is occasionally seen as a regionalist mode of self-definition, or it is defined asa detailed plan of political action strictly designed for the Hungarian minorityin Romania. The paper concentrates on the Transylvanists’ conception ofsimultaneous membership in the Hungarian nation and the Romanian state,and the life strategies they envisaged for their community. While the authorpoints out the protean nature of Transylvanism in general, she also assertsthat a contextual reconstruction of its origins as a political ideology for theHungarian minority in the 1920s is rewarding.In order to understand the process of cultural reorganization of theminority group in the context of a nationalizing state, one has to look intothe shift of the ideological landscape that occurred after 1918, especially inview of the re-evaluation of the role of the state. Balázs Trencsényi’s analysisof ªtefan Zeletin’s political thought is an attempt to grasp the specific natureof post-1918 Romanian liberalism. The author points out that Zeletin challengedthe ideological traditions of his time. Repudiating the idea that liberalismwas merely an intellectual fashion imported from the West, Zeletinattempted to localize its emergence in the cleavage between the boyars, utilizingquasi-Marxist analytical tools to document the class-basis of politics.According to the author, Zeletin touched upon the inherent ambivalence ofthe liberal discourse in post-World War I Romania, aiming at national12