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

KINGA-KORETTA SATAeral, universal content of the personality-nationality relation and itsdiachronic, situation-specific understanding. The conception of nationalitybasedidentity often enters the realm of universal “truths.” In one of hispolemical articles, Reményik responded to the criticism of Imre Kádár withthe following statement:But we believe and declare that the largest part of human values is made upby belonging to the group, by adapting oneself faithfully to the developmentsof history, by the love of the historic soul and by the adherence to historicvalues. The individual value is also dependent on the degree of developmentof the social sense, isn’t it? I think we agree with Kádár on thismatter. The difference is that by social sense Kádár and his circle understandsome sort of class consciousness, while we understand higher scaleconsciousness, i.e., national consciousness, by it. 18In this case, sociability is understood as based on nationality, which, in itsturn, is seen as a collection of the values of the past, but also as the “loveof the soul” that manifests itself in those values. It is quite obvious, however,that both the “historical values” and the “historical soul” are notionswith a content that is very difficult (if not impossible) to grasp or to delimit.Both are ideological, in the sense that both are dependent on one’sfaith in their existence.This ambiguity inherent in the notions that are central to an understandingof nationhood has its origins in the belief that national consciousnessis in its essence mystical, most similar to the faith in some transcendentalentity:The national feeling is in its ancestral depth mystical. … And becausenational consciousness is mystical consciousness, it is more complex andmore subtle than any class consciousness. The latter depends on meresolidarity of interests, that is, on some concrete things with some appropriatesentimental coloring. National consciousness is something else, moreuniversal, more gentle, more differentiated, that is, the result of morespiritual values. 19The difference between material interests and spiritual values is seen as theroot of the incompatibility of national consciousness with class consciousness,the two being on two separate levels of human experience. This differencecreates a discrepancy between the two types of consciousness also because itpresents them as the two extremes on a value-scale. On this scale, nationalconsciousness is presented as both originating and resulting in supreme valuesof spirituality, while class consciousness is placed on the lowest level, orig-48