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

ZOLTÁN KÁNTORThe concept of nationalizing minority is thus helpful for a generalaccount regarding the politics of national minorities, but for a meticulousanalysis one has to operationalize the concept. The operationalization canbe achieved by analyzing the involved actors: the ethnic party and the eliteof the national minority. These are the factors I will tackle in the followingtwo sections.Ethnic PartiesThe main promoters of the nationalizing processes on the part of thenational minority are the ethnic parties. In this study, I use the concept of“ethnic party” as a synonym for “national minority party” or “minorityparty.” Ethnic parties are formed in societies that are organized along ethnicor national cleavages. In cases where nationally relevant conflicts exist,for example, in times of revolutions or changes of regimes, it is almost certainthat the elite of the national minority will form an ethnic party. Ethnicparties are mainly supported by members of their own ethnic group; atthe same time, it is very unlikely that non-members will vote for that party.Bearing this in mind, one may conclude that the main task of an ethnicparty is to make sure that their co-ethnics will vote for it; to convince thenon-co-ethnics to vote for it is less important. At the same time, the elitehas to persuade their co-ethnics that they should act in the interest of thegroup as a whole. Thus, an ethnic party is very different from non-ethnicparties in the sense that the national minority usually has a program thatis meant to secure the individual and collective rights of its members.The main concern of national minorities, expressed by the goals andpolicies of the ethnic parties, is generally the preservation of their cultureand the promotion of the interests of the members of the group and theperceived interests of the group as a whole. To achieve this aim, the minorityhas, on the one hand, to secure the legal and political framework on thestate level and, on the other hand, to establish institutions and an internalorganization that enable them to form a distinct society. Therefore, onehas to analyze the ethnic party as both an ethno-political party and an ethnicorganization. The ethnic party has to act simultaneously as a politicalparty, as a representative and promoter of the interests of its community,and has to strengthen the internal boundaries of the community, organizingthem into an ethno-civil society. The key difference is the politicalarena in which the party acts. As a political party, the ethnic party acts inthe political sphere of the state. As an ethnic or minority organization, itssphere of action is the ethnic or national political subculture.For ethnic parties, the problems regarding the entire populationare important in so far as they touch upon the interests of their distinct256