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

The “Münchausenian Moment”This “patriotism” is “the most horrifying and the most murderous amongall the plagues the unfortunate land of donkeys was ever hit with” 12 –blocking the possibility of ever emerging from sub-human filth. “There isnot a single work of culture that has any significance for them if it is notcovered by heavy layers of their ancient mud.” 13In this pamphlet, Zeletin ultimately assumed a radical Westernizerposition (the climax of his pamphlet is an almost eschatological vision ofthe influx of modernity: “the fences will be broken through, and all thedoors will be opened, and the foreign rivers can flow in freely, turning intopurifying waters, richer and frothier than ever” 14 ), but this grotesque parodyfeatures some of the crucial elements of his mature analysis. First, inhis depiction of Donkey-land, the attempts of “modernization” (change ofsubstance, i.e., turning into humans) came first, and the “nationalist” ideologyis the counter-reaction. This obviously contradicts the conventional19 th century picture, where the national community – and its ideologicalrepresentation, i.e., nationalism – is something primordial, being radicallychallenged by the emergence of modernity.Second, real civilizational achievement depends on the ability of thenation to understand its specific conditions, and to come to terms with thehistorical itinerary it has to accomplish in the future:We admit in face of the Gods and humankind that the waters of culturewashed off only our surface, but in the depth of our souls we stillremained donkeys. And this is not a shame, since our nation is only at thestarting-point, and all the others were like us at the dawn of their lives.It would become shameful only if we started to hide our donkey-ness, asthe patriots of sad memory did in the past. 15A decade later, when Zeletin wrote his analyses of the emergence of theRomanian bourgeoisie, he resumed the argument of this early pamphlet.Assimilating modernity is essential for the community (it makes the donkeyhuman), but not in the way the 19 th century elites conceived of it (a setof abstract values and cultural practices), rather in terms of the exposureof the country to the sweeping forces of socio-economic transformation.In this way, he circumvents the debate of “Westernizers” and“Autochthonists” – the question is not whether modernity should be assimilatedor not (in this sense, he accepts the liberal agenda), rather whoseascendancy will be the result of this process.The key to Zeletin’s depiction of the emerging Romanian bourgeoisideology lies in the way he connects private vices to public virtues.He claims that liberalism is ultimately the expression of the exigencies ofmodernity, and modernity is something beyond “good” and “evil,” it sim-65