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

AFTERWORDproud to have happened to be at or closely in touch with Central EuropeanUniversity most of this time, as our university is also their place of choice,their common alma mater. If one keeps in mind that students from Romaniaand Hungary make up roughly 30% of CEU’s student body, the success ofthis collaboration is also a measure of the graduate school’s first ten years ofexistence.Scholarly cooperation between Hungarians and Romanians hasa long, rich, and respectable tradition. It is not my intention to revisit it ina mere paragraph. Also, matters of academic disagreement and contentionhave been numerous, occasionally erupting in passionate controversies,both fueled by and fueling more mundane exchanges, from populist diatribesto government policies. Such polemics are endemic, and likely toremain a fixture of the Hungarian-Romanian exchanges. Good intentions,idealism, democratization, improbable (but not impossible) future harmonizationof legislations, political cultures, societal structures, infrastructures,institutions, economies, lifestyles, all in the framework of the New Utopia,European integration, will never completely suppress bilateral tensions, letalone collective memories, the instrumentalizations of conflicting “usablepasts,” even inevitable clashes of the respective economic interests andraisons d’Etat. NGOs and individuals that may appear to be politically correct(once again, let us not forget for a second that the region has a long,amazingly resilient, practice of the langue de bois) are trying to cover up historicalrealities with ever more talk of multiculturalism, positive discrimination,federalism, and related notions, frequently resorting to anachronismand other categorical frauds. This self-serving discourse, even when wellintended,is at best just a variety of wishful thinking. Realists (or active pessimists,like myself) should however continue to hope and work for bridgesover perennial and temporary gaps, past, present, and future. Some problemsdo not have solutions. Precisely because of that, we should concentrateless on (self-delusional) solutions, and more on their (tangible) second best,a sound understanding of problems.We should achieve this goal on the basis of a commonsensical assessmentof the Hungarian-Romanian predicament: Hungary and Romaniaare more than just neighbors. When I say this, I do not simply state the obvious,although such statements are never superfluous: the overlapping,palimpsestic, both volatile and stable demographic, linguistic, cultural,religious, social, economic, political history of Transylvania. I also meanmany centuries of contact, conflict, and exchange between a variety ofstate formations ran by or only encompassing (fragments) of the twoethno-national communities and their other more-than-neighbors: Germans,Jews, Roma, etc. From the heights of symbolic geography to thedepths of what I call ethnic ontology – the complete autochthonist meta-304