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

CONSTANTIN IORDACHIrole in the Orient. In addition, the province served concomitantly as a neweconomic, territorial, ethnic, and maritime frontier for Romania. The ethniccolonization, cultural homogenization, and market nationalization inthe province can be thus regarded as forming part of a more generalprocess of internal and external colonial expansion in Europe. It confirms,as Katherine Verdery pointed out, that ethnicity and ethnic borders arethe creations and not the driving causes of nation-building. 93NOTES1See Alexandru Rãdulescu and Ion Bitoleanu, Istoria românilor dintre Dunãre ºiMare: Dobrogea (The history of the Romanians between the Danube and theSea: Dobrogea) (Bucharest: Editura ªtiinþificã, 1979), p. 284, translated intoEnglish as A Concise History of Dobruja (Bucharest: Editura ªtiinþificã, 1984);and M. Stanciu and V. Ciorbea, “Aspecte ale problemei agrare în Dobrogea lasfîrºitul sec. XIX ºi începutul sec. XX” (Aspects of the agrarian question inDobrogea at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentiethcentury) in Anuarul Institutului “A.D. Xenopol” (Iaºi) (1980) 17, p. 405.2For the most authoritative analysis of the process of administrative unification andcultural homogenization in Greater Romania, with an emphasis on education, seeIrina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building& Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).3For a comprehensive analysis of the integration of Northern Dobrogea intoRomania, see Constantin Iordachi, Citizenship, Nation, and State Building: TheIntegration of Northern Dobrogea into Romania, 1878-1913. Carl Beck Papers inRussian and East European Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh,2001). For a comparison between the legal status of the Dobrogeans and thatof other marginal socio-political, religious, or gender groups in Romania, seeIordachi, “The Unyielding Boundaries of Citizenship: The Emancipation of‘Non-Citizens’ in Romania, 1866-1918,” European Review of History 8 (August2001) 2, pp. 157-186.4On the role played by historiography in the process of nation-state building inCentral Europe, see R. W. Seton-Watson, The Historian as a Political Force inCentral Europe (London: University of London, 1922).5I employ here the metaphor used by Fernand Braudel for describing theprocess of territorial and demographic expansion of Western Europe in TheMediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York:Harper & Row, 1972).6I am using the concept of “internal colonialism” as stems from MichelHechter’s work Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development,1536-1966 (London: Routledge, 1975): an unilateral pattern ofauthority and allocation of resources between metropolis and periphery whichcharacterized not exclusively the organization of European colonies in LatinAmerica, Africa or Asia, but developments within European states as well.146