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

CONSTANTIN IORDACHIserved as a boulevard of military communications between Constantinopleand Southern Bessarabia; and, finally, the agricultural riverside of theDanube, which was inhabited mostly by Romanians and was in permanentcontact with the Wallachian neighboring counties.After 1878, Dobrogea abruptly transited from the multi-culturalimperial heritage to the homogenizing order of the nation-state. By a decisionof the Berlin Treaty (July 1878), the province was divided betweenRomania, which acquired the larger Northern Dobrogea, and Bulgaria,which incorporated Southern Dobrogea. In the ensuing period, Dobrogeabecame the object of an acute Romanian-Bulgarian territorial conflict.Both states engaged in assiduous and competing processes of nationalexpansion and border-making in the province. As a result, previous formsof multiple identities and the network of formal and informal contactsbetween the inhabitants of the southern and northern parts of theprovince were discontinued, replaced by border demarcations and exclusivenational definitions of citizenship. 121.2 FROM A “FATAL GIFT” TO AN “ANCIENT ROMANIAN LAND”:MYTH-MAKING IN THE ROMANIAN NATIONALIST DISCOURSEABOUT DOBROGEAAs the previous section pointed out, at the time of its annexation toRomania, Dobrogea carried a specific Ottoman legacy, most evidently inthe demographic sphere: the province had one of the most diverse ethniccompositions in Europe, being inhabited by Turks, Tartars, Romanians,Bulgarians, Russians, Greeks, Armenians, Serbs, Jews, Germans, Italians,Albanians, and Arabs. 13 In reaction, numerous Romanian politicians perceivedthe geo-political location and ethnic composition of Dobrogea asa danger to Romania’s ethnic homogeneity and political stability. The1878 annexation of the province to Romania spurred therefore a puzzlingdiplomatic and domestic episode: according to W. Gladstone, the provincewas “a gift ungraciously given and reluctantly received.” 14 The followingsection explores the shifting place of Northern Dobrogea in the Romaniannational ideology, and documents a symbolic substitution between NorthernDobrogea and Southern Bessarabia.Ever since its appearance on the Eastern European diplomatic agenda,the political fate of Dobrogea was linked to the delicate territorial situationof Southern Bessarabia. An integral part of the larger province ofBessarabia, occupied by Russia in 1812, Southern Bessarabia was returnedto Moldavia by a decision of the Paris Congress (1856) that followed theCrimean War (1853-1856). Subsequently, the province became a centraltarget of Russia’s diplomatic agenda, mostly during the Eastern Crisis124