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

MARIUS TURDAInternal Orientalism: Transylvania and RomaniaTo a regionalist, Transylvania and Romania represent conflicting poles ofloyalty. Apart from the attractiveness of this axiom, there is, however,a very interesting detail of identity construction implied by this assumptionthat must be considered. Within various historical representations,a mimetic competition to gaining political domination emerged in Romaniaand simultaneously augmented the elaboration of a subaltern discourse,an internal Orientalism. 13Explicit or diluted, the alteritist discourse has always existed in themodern history of Romania. 14 After 1989, however, the simultaneousacceleration of economic poverty and attempts to administratively decentralisethe country produced conflicting principles of legitimacy withrespect to the place Transylvania occupies within Romania. Consequently,Transylvania proved to be a domain of contested power and competingnational mythologies, in which local and national groups permanently andhorizontally negotiated relationships of subordination and control.Internal Orientalism has gained prominence in the political rhetoricafter 1989, as the Romanian politics centred on the inclusion in “Europe”and European organisms. The process of inclusion and its counterpart,that of exclusion, are central to the redefinition of any post-communistEastern European political attitude. In many ways, the so-called “CentralEuropeans” constructed a new image of themselves, defined in oppositionto images of an external “Eastern European,” sometimes identified withthe Balkans. Balkanism, although latent for decades, explicitly emerged inpolitical and academic discourse in the 1990s, as a corollary of the tragicevents that accompanied the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia.Furthermore, a re-definition of Transylvania has emerged, which suggeststhat this region is (at least) culturally different than other parts ofRomania. In the context of this frustration, generated by political marginalityand economic disparities, intellectuals from Transylvania contoured thisregion as a distinct zone, with a particular identity, neither “Eastern” nor“Western,” but “Central European,” simultaneously different and superiorthan the rest of Romania. In many respects, this presumed supremacy profoundlypermeated the self-perception of Transylvanians, so that today thiscultural difference not only functions as an alteritist cliché, but also serves todefine the identity clash within Romania.In essence, both representations compete to gain ascendancy withinRomanian public rhetoric. Thus, Transylvanians would never conceive ofthemselves as being “Balkanized,” suggesting that such a perspective appliedonly to the rest of Romania, while intellectuals from Bucharest, althoughimplicitly accepting “Balkan” features as being part of the Romanian Weltan-202