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

BALÁZS TRENCSÉNYIclass-basis of politics. Second, in line with the strategic interests of theRomanian liberal political elite, he attempted to reconstruct a type ofnational liberalism, by fusing the nationalist symbolic canon with theliberal political agenda and repudiating the usual critique that liberalismis somehow the “lackey” of “alien forces” (and a cosmopolitanpolitical canon). His central contention was that the liberal elite did infact represent the true national interests.The key weapon of his polemics is redescription: a rhetorical move,operating by the neutralization of the original normative connotationswith a seemingly value-free (“realist”) tone of analysis (asserting that it isirrelevant to apply the categories of “good” and “bad” in describing thephenomena of emerging modernity). Second, he introduced a new set ofnormative judgments, blurring the traditional binary oppositions andrearranging the conceptual framework of the discussion. His analysis ofthe “social basis” of politics serves exactly these aims, making it possiblefor him to wear a mask of a value-free observer, when identifying the –otherwise not value-free – commitment to liberal tenets on the part ofcertain social groups. Thus, he managed to cut through the traditionalconflict of liberals, who described themselves as impartial and idealistservants of the community, and anti-liberals, who accused their enemiesof selfishness and refined hypocrisy.It is obvious that this conflict was one of the crucial questions ofZeletin’s thought. Already in the bitter Gulliveresque pamphlet Dinþara mãgarilor (From the land of donkeys), published in 1916, hedescribed the cultural life of his country in terms of the disparagingclash of “Westernizers” and “Autochthonists” (describing the inhabitantsof this land as in-between “donkey-ness” and humanity). In hisanalysis, this cultural-civilizational in-betweenness led to the emergenceof two mutually exclusive and equally self-deceiving ideologies.The “Modernists” claimed that, due to their refined cultural “surface”(material culture, conventions, polished communication), they actuallyachieved a total transformation of substance – turning donkeys intohumans. But this is an illusion: “Their bodies are clean and nice, buttheir soul is just as filthy as in the ancient times.” 9 The spheres of thisdeceptive civility are insular: “The one who lets himself to be deceivedby his external humanity wakes up from his dream by the smashingkicks of hooves.” 10 Against this “modernist camp,” there ariseswith sounds of trumpets and drums, with deafening declamations, and thecries of hysterical animals, the Philo-Donkey nationalist camp, blaring tothe world the idea of salvation, that is founding a new and miraculous culturewhich would resemble the donkey soul as two peas in a pot. 1164