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

DRAGOº PETRESCUHungarians towards the Romanian state. As shown above, present-dayRomanian society is characterized by a cultural understanding of thenation. I would suggest that new forms of collaboration have to be establishedbetween democratic parties and the HDUR in order to createa lasting internal reconciliation and a shift from ethnic to civic nationalism.Obviously, a pre-condition for such reconciliation is that the moderatewing of the HDUR continues to control the party. At the same time, theclaim put forward by some analysts that the HDUR “has no objectives forthe Romanian society as a whole” and that it confines itself “exclusively togetting rights for the Hungarian minority” needs a closer examination. 49In my opinion, the HDUR has to decide how to reconcile its liberalstance concerning devolution and de-centralization with the idea of collectiverights and the efforts to build a sort of parallel polity for the Hungariansin Romania. Solving this inner tension would be crucial in order toavoid self-seclusion and, ultimately, the alienation of the Hungarian communityin Romania, which might lead to an increased migration towardsthe external homeland, Hungary. Meanwhile, the Romanian 2000 electionsbrought back former President Ion Iliescu and his party (Party forSocial Democracy in Romania) to power. The new government, led byAdrian Nãstase, succeeded in establishing a fragile (legislative) compromisewith the HDUR. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if the rulingparty and HDUR will be able to work together towards a civic-orientedcommunity.The third statement reads: “Economic problems tend to underminethe achievements in the field of politics; therefore, economic reform mustgo hand in hand with political reform.” With regard to the shift to a civicnationalism, economic recovery is crucial in order to prevent frustrationfrom turning into violence, a situation in which the national minoritieswould be among the scapegoats. In the case of Romania, it was not thepolitical, but the protracted economic transformation that frustrated largesegments of the population. In fact, the economic transformation provedto be more difficult than presumed. Regarding the relationship betweendemocracy and market economy, I follow the conceptual framework putforward by Béla Greskovits. In his analysis based on the Hungarian case,Greskovits explains why the emerging democracies of Central Europeproved to be crisis resistant:Democracy and a market economy could be simultaneously introducedonly because neither has been fully implemented. Democracy could onlystabilize at the cost of some of its qualitative aspects because of the crisisand economic transformation. Economic transformation, in turn, hasremained feasible only at a cost of its speed and radicalism, and its many286