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

More Than Just Neighbors: Romania and Hungary Under Critical Scrutinyto establish in my native Romania; Transylvanian Hungarians half-succeeded).It pleased me to discover, a few months later, during my first term asa teacher at Central European University, that Balázs was exceptional inmany ways, but not singular. Beyond the intellectual promise he has beenfulfilling eversince, Balázs had already, more than six years ago, an interestin matters Romanian which ran against the grain of my (standard Romanian)expectations: he did not have any relatives in Transylvania; his curiosityencompassed the whole of Romania’s history and culture, with specialattention to “Generation ‘27” (Eliade, Cioran, Noica, etc.) and its posterity;moreover, he was on his way towards studying the whole region, includingits many languages. His was a project that far exceeded the “human, alltoo human” limitations of a career plan, let alone the clinical credibility ofsomeone’s scholarly agenda.Before becoming my student at CEU, Balázs came to attend some ofmy classes at the University of Bucharest, to improve his Romanian languageskills, and get acquainted with whatever he couldn’t find in the piles of bookshe was reading avidly. His Bucharest trip was also a chance for some of myRomanian students to meet him, emulate his model, teach him things he didn’tknow, debate with him over cheap beer. The core group that was tolaunch what I consider to be the most ambitious, sophisticated, engagingemerging research community in their generation and fields was thusformed. This is how Rãzvan Pârâianu, Cristina Petrescu, Dragoº Petrescu,and Marius Turda joined this voluntary experiment in common socialization,and in lively, open-minded, interactive pursuit of knowledge. Over the followingyears, moving between various universities, libraries, and researchinstitutes, from Bucharest and Cluj/Kolozsvár to Budapest, from Istanbuland Moscow to Berlin, Oxford, London, Washington, and many other Europeanand North-American cities, learning and publishing, initiating and contributingto projects, the original group of friends and colleagues has keptgrowing. First, by including more people with similar backgrounds (i.e.,Romanians from Romania, Hungarians from Hungary), then by attractingthe most likely partners (i.e., Hungarians from Transylvania). Symptomatically,Transylvanian Hungarians were not prepared to function as mediatorsbetween Romanians and Hungarians, for reasons that are too complex to belisted here, but surely include parochial upbringing, almost self-sufficientparallel Lebenswelten, and the atmosphere of mutual mistrust only a handfulof people from both communities are willing, and able, to overcome. Fortunately,learning by doing is always productive, and it only took a few monthsin Budapest for all these three distinct subgroups to merge. Finally, the triangularcollaboration proved to be working, although not entirely devoid ofa Girardian dynamics of mimetic competition, and expanded into a multiethnic,multi-lingual, global network of young scholars. I feel privileged and303