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

The Idea of Independent Romanian National Economy in Transylvaniamerchant bourgeoisie of Kronstadt (Brassó, Braºov). In addition, one mustremember that the percentage of Romanians in the public administration,being relatively high in the absolutistic Bach-era (1850-1859), graduallydecreased after the Compromise (1867), and only the church, the basic educationand the liberal professions offered more promising career opportunities.Finally, one can examine the Transylvanian Romanian embourgeoismentprocess in itself (though not isolated from other contexts) because the contemporarieshave also envisioned it as an autonomously developing “national society,”or “national space.”2These proportions in the case of the Magyar population were 63.0% and22.0% respectively, while in the case of Germans (Saxons) 60.0% and 28.0%,respectively. See Zoltán Szász, ed., Erdély története (History of Transylvania),vol. 3 (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1986), p. 1569.3As Ákos Egyed, a specialist in the history of Transylvanian peasantry, put it:“The process of embourgeoisment has led to relevant changes in the economicand social relations of every ethnic group, though undoubtedly not to thesame extent. A unilateral reliance on the statistics may even be misleading.When researchers give some figures in order to prove the backwardness ofa certain ethnic group, for example that 98.18% of Ukrainians in Galicia,90.10% of Romanians in Hungary and 86.0% of Croatians belonged to theagrarian population in 1900, they are not inaccurate, but their interpretation isone-sided. For, as it is well known, the process of embourgeoisment advanced,more or less successfully, among the peasantry, too. … For this reason, thestudy of the process of embourgeoisment in the case of agrarian societiesrequires special approaches and methods.” Egyed Ákos, “Polgárosodás,etnikum, udvar” (Embourgeoisment, ethnicity and the Court), in Polgárosodásés modernizáció a Monarchiában (Embourgeoisment and modernization in theMonarchy), Special issue of the review Mûhely (1993), p. 43.4See Ambrus Miskolczy, A brassói román levantei kereskedõpolgárság kelet-nyugatiközvetítõ szerepe (1780-1860) (The East-West mediating role of the Romanianlevantine merchant citizenry of Braºov, 1780-1860) (Budapest: Akadémiai,1987), p. 173.5In order to circumvent different national exclusivisms, references to geographicalentities feature all the relevant languages. In the case of villages, cities andregions, the first place was given to the language of the community that determinedthe ethnic and cultural character of the given settlement. In the case ofadministrative units (e.g., counties) of the time, the official – Hungarian –name is used.6Surely, this area was the most developed region of Transylvania, with the bestconditions for the process of embourgeoisment. “Studying this question in anadequate way, we can find that the Saxon agrarian area represented a moreadvantageous pattern of embourgeoisment thanm e.g., a mining area grapplingwith continuous crisis and with its destructiveness towards the environment.”Egyed, “Polgárosodás, etnikum, udvar,” p. 43. As far as the Romanians wereconcerned, let us listen to the opinion of a contemporary, coming from Romania.Constantin Stere, the ideologue of poporanism (a socio-cultural streamaiming at rural embourgeoisment based on cooperatives and associations),who repeatedly came to Transylvania, visited the flourishing Sãliºtea (Szeben217