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

INTRODUCTIONequipped schools, individual and public foundations, etc.), and the reinvigorationof traditional craftsmanship.In many ways, these issues have not lost their relevance. Turning tocontemporary Transylvania, Irina Culic’s paper, based on a survey done in1997 concerning the perceptions of identity, mental images, and theinterethnic relations of Hungarians and Romanians, presents severalaspects of the construction of national identity in the interplay of minoritiesand majorities. In general terms, the survey focused on the maindilemma that a member of a national minority is confronting, namely theduality of belonging. One is a formal, legal belonging, to the state whosecitizen one was born, while the other is an eminently cultural, emotionalbelonging to the nation one “comes from,” which is constituting anothernation-state. This duality generates ambiguities at less formal levels, suchas group loyalties, inter-personal relations, attitudes and opinions. Thereare many situations when the two dimensions can be conflicting. In fact,any circumstance in which one of the elements of identity-building is relevantmay generate a confrontation of the two faces of a person’s identity.Consequently, the author advocates a political framework that allowsfor functional compromises, ambivalent self-descriptions and avoiding theeither/or questions of identification.These contentions over membership within the larger political communitybased on ethnic criteria and the peculiar identity mechanismsinduced by membership in a minority group need to be studied in view ofthe interaction of the minority and the respective “national homeland” aswell. Zoltán Kántor’s paper proposes a broad interpretative framework fortackling these issues, focusing on the case of the Hungarian nationalminority in Romania. The author considers that one should use the conceptof nationalizing minority instead of national minority, because the formercaptures the dynamics of the national minority and offers a betterexplanation of East-Central European nationalisms. Furthermore, hestates that “nationalizing minority” is a concept of the same category as“nationalizing state,” and does not suppose different motivations for thetitular nation and the national minority. Presenting some of the politicalconflicts characterizing the Hungarian minority in Romania, the authorargues that since the nation will not loose its salience in the foreseeablefuture, the politics of nationalizing states and nationalizing minorities willcontinue to determine the political agenda in the region.It remains an open question whether the spasms of unfinished nationbuildingon the part of the majorities and minorities will effectively blockthe way of certain post-communist countries towards full integration intothe Euro-Atlantic political and economic structures. It is in view of thisdilemma that Dragoº Petrescu analyzes the relationship between ethnic16