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

Can Democracy Work in Southeastern Europe?Czech Republic. In the early 1990s, Hungarians constituted 7.1% ofRomania’s population and 10.6% of Slovakia’s, while the Turks constituted8.5% of Bulgaria’s population.Considering this, I analyze below the way in which ethnic nationalismwas a major hindrance to rapid democratization in post-communistRomania. It goes without saying that this analysis is not intended to praiseethnic cleansing as a precondition for rapid democratization. In Romania,the newly-installed post-communist regime made use of ethnic nationalismin order to preserve power, and the Hungarian minority in Romania,a relatively large ethnic minority and politically organized among ethniclines, was targeted as a threat to the unity of the Romanian state in orderto divert attention from the growing social and economic problems of thetransition. At the same time, the emotional attachment of both Romaniansand Hungarians to the present-day Romanian province of Transylvania,a core element of their modern national identities, and the ambiguoususe by the Hungarian government, in the early 1990s, of the conceptof “ethnic autonomy” with regard to the Hungarians living in the neighboringcountries, added a supplementary strain to the democratizationprocess in post-communist Romania. 16A comprehensive analysis of the Romanian debates on nationalidentity formation is beyond the scope of the present paper. However,there is a crucial element related to Romania’s recent history that explainsthe violent resurgence of ethnic nationalism after the breakdown of thecommunist regime and the way the state authorities and a major part ofthe ethnic majority reacted to the claims of the minorities, which needsa closer examination: the late creation of the nation. 17 In my opinion, thenotion of creation refers to a decisive shift in integrating large masses ofthe ethnic Romanian population into the imagined community of theRomanian nation, and not to the final, ultimate realization of nationhood.Here I follow Rogers Brubaker’s concept of “nationalizing state” whenreferring to the Romanian state. As Brubaker argues, nationalizing staterefers to a dynamic political stance:Characteristic of this stance, or set of stances, is the tendency to see thestate as an “unrealized” nation-state, as a state destined to be a nationstate,the state of and for a particular nation, but not yet in fact a nationstate(at least not to a sufficient degree); and the concomitant dispositionto remedy this perceived defect, to make the state what it is properly andlegitimately destined to be, by promoting the language, culture, demographicposition, economic flourishing, or political hegemony of thenominally state-bearing nation. 18 279