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

Transylvania Revisitedidentities – is represented in Romanian public discourse. Simply put, thisrepresentation takes two distinct discursive forms.The first calls for unity against foreign forms of ideological oppression,implying that Romanians are one people within a centralised form ofgovernment, embodied in “the Romanian unitary nation-state.” Thisexpression is yet another facet of the phenomenon – emphasized earlierin this study – which describes the nation-state as possessing the onlyexpression of sovereignty. The supporters of this conception, integralists,suggest that Romania is the “home of all (and only of) Romanians,” theeternal state. The slogans and populist rhetoric of Romanian nationalists– the most common being “Transylvania is in danger of being occupied byHungarians” – reflect a common psychological phenomenon that manyRomanians spontaneously share. From this perspective, the communistregime proved successful in uniformly shaping the Romanian psyche andinoculating various fundamentalist themes. Well-represented in Transylvaniaby the Mayor of Cluj, Gheorghe Funar, and in Bucharest byCorneliu Vadim Tudor, the leader of Greater Romania Party, this national-communistperspective does indeed benefit from quite large domesticsupport, hence its variations and representations in the public opinion.The second form emanates mainly from Transylvania (and Hungary)and suggests that centralisation has lived its days and other forms of politicalloyalty should be introduced (via devolution and federalization). Thatis, the supporters of regionalism (or regionalists) believe that a sense ofdistinctness survived in Transylvania and can successfully be exercised inorder to gain various strategic political goals. In other words, within theofficial national character that presents the Romanian nation as superiorto other nations, a subaltern mentality has emerged in Transylvania, indicatinga transgression of Romanianness. By pointing out that parts ofRomania, such as Transylvania and the Banat, 11 may more convincinglyintegrate into an European framework – due to historic traditions, multiethniccohabitation, religious tolerance –, this new trend visibly createsspace for addressing fundamental questions concerning the Romanianpsyche, i.e., that there is a difference within Romania in terms of the samenational group, or, in other words, it seems that “Europeanness” has differentconnotations in Cluj than in Bucharest. Promoting the idea ofbelonging to Central Europe, intellectuals from Transylvania and theBanat attempt to construct a distinction between their regions, in whichcivil society and political pluralism had certain traditions, and the rest ofRomania, which they putatively associate with the Balkans. 12 At the intersectionof these two symbolic geographies resides an understanding ofboth Transylvania’s relationship with Romania and of Romania’ place inEurope. How could these positions be reconciled?201