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

Nationhood and Identitygories are produced, evaluated and hierarchized; and employing these categoriesin the production of self-definition and definition of the other,through operations of ascription and opposition. Ties established withRomanians help them understand and define their relationship with theRomanian state and its institutions (on the one hand, through interactionswith Romanian employees working in the various institutions; on theother hand, with Romanians as representatives of a culture that marks thecharacter of the state).The bonds with the Romanian state undergo a qualitative changewhen the person, belonging to the (Hungarian) minority, realizes his orher situation of being a citizen of Romania, a state bearing the name ofanother nation. Perhaps one of the first encounters with the Romanianstate is the experience of acquiring the first identity card. In many cases,this moment also represents an opportunity to assert a person’s own ethnicbelonging. 21 The relationship with the Romanian state is continuousand stable, since Romanian institutions structure the activity and everydaylife of the ethnic Hungarian citizen: education, work, leisure, etc. In fact,the Hungarian is accommodated within the Romanian state as much asany Romanian. To be dissatisfied with the performance of state institutionsand to express this fact is as natural and legitimate for him as wouldbe for any ethnic Romanian.But once the Hungarian relates himself to the other state, to theexternal homeland, his existence as citizen of the Romanian state alters.The direct experience of the institutions and the people of the homeland(much increased after 1989 by the free travel between the twocountries) modifies both the continuous process of identity-construction,and the way he relates to the Romanian state. Having experiencedthe functioning of the administration and institutions of the homeland,the Hungarian from Romania redefines his understanding and assessmentof the performance of the Romanian state institutions accordingly.A dissatisfaction with the performance of institutions is graduallydoubled by a dissatisfaction with the performance of the Romanianstate compared to the Hungarian state. In fact, this process of “ethnicizing”assessments and interactions is often present in situations characterizedby inconvenience, tension, or conflict, while objectively theyare independent of the ethnic variable of the actors.The relationship with the Romanian state is once more redefinedaccording to the expectations of the Hungarian with respect to the externalhomeland. The political and cultural elites from Hungary repeatedlyasserted that the ethnonational kin abroad have a special relation tothe Hungarian state, as members of the Hungarian nation. This discourselegitimizes the expectations of Hungarians abroad with regard to231