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

DRAGOº PETRESCU1. Ethnic nationalism threatens democratic consolidation; and historyis a key element on which ethnic nationalism is based;2. De-ethnicization of the government is a major step towardsa civic/democratic understanding of nationhood;3. Economic problems tend to undermine the achievements in thefield of politics; therefore, economic reform must go hand in handwith political reform; and4. The process of democratic consolidation, although cannot bereversed, can be slowed down, if not stopped.The first statement suggests that in Romania, as compared with Hungary,Poland, or the Czech Republic, the post-communist transformationwas delayed by an outburst of ethnic nationalism. It was, in fact, a complexinterplay of political and cultural-historical issues involving the Romanianmajority, the Hungarian minority in Romania and the Hungarian government,that contributed to the formation of an environment less favorablefor democratic transformation in the early 1990s. 3 Therefore, the issues ofnational identity and loyalty towards a “unitary nation-state” received disproportionateattention and often overshadowed the issue of democratictransformation of the country. It was also due to such an approach tonationhood that Romania’s post-communist transformation has beenlonger and more traumatic than in most of the former communist countriesof Central Europe.Before going into details, I would like to briefly summarize the conceptsand some related theoretical issues on which my analysis is based. Inmy opinion, one of the main goals of the process of democratic consolidationin Romania is the widespread adoption of a democratic definition ofthe nation. Furthermore, I relate the democratic definition of the nationwith civic nationalism and the cultural definition of the nation with ethnicnationalism. As Yael Tamir puts it, a democratic definition of the nationconsiders the nation as synonymous with “the governed” or “the group ofindividuals living under the same rule.” This definition is opposed to thecultural definition of the nation, as “a community sharing a set of objectivecharacteristics grouped under the rubric of culture and national consciousness,”4 from which derives Ernest Gellner’s definition of nationalism,as “a political principle which maintains that similarity of culture isthe basic social bond.” 5 From the many definitions of ethnic and, respectively,civic nationalism, Charles A. Kupchan’s are most appropriate:Ethnic nationalism defines nationhood in terms of lineage. The attributesthat members of an ethnically defined national grouping share includephysical characteristics, culture, religion, language, and a common ances-276