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

The “Münchausenian Moment”the agriculture-centered indigenous economic framework, i.e., from“aliens.” Thus he is not debating the second tenet of the autochthonistcriticism of modernity (blaming capitalism for the intrusion of nonautochthonousmerchants into the country), but he rebuts the normativeconsequences of the analysis by referring to the inevitability of this transition.In this polemics, he makes an additional master-stroke by fusingRomanian conservative and Marxist positions (and thus discrediting themwith each other), showing that Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea (the mostimportant representative of Marxist agrarian populism at the beginning ofthe century) 17 and the Junimist (anti-liberal, conservative) 18 camp bothappealed to the local tradition of pre-modern economical structures asa normative basis for fighting modern capitalism.Zeletin describes the influx of foreigners as a necessary stage in the formationof the modern economy, attested by historical examples from allpossible contexts (e.g., Flemish capitalism was created by Italian capital, theEnglish one by Flemish capital, the German by Hugenotte refugees, etc.).However, by the force of the same law of unilinear historical development,the second step is always the “autochthonization” of capital, alongside theemergence of a “local” entrepreneurship. The dynamism of Romanianmodernization follows the same pattern, and the political history of thecountry is the necessary consequence of this process. The appearance ofsocial-political modernity in the Romanian principalities is the result of theopening of Romanian ports to English merchants, following the Adrianopol(Edirne) Peace Treaty of 1829. In Zeletin’s analysis, this had a twofoldeffect: the substantial increase of the external demand for agrarian products(as the Western market opened up for Romanian grain), and the collapse ofthe local industry (due to the competition of cheap imported goods).Making use of the economic conjuncture, reforms were needed tofacilitate the circulation of goods and money, and the development of infrastructurewas demanded to facilitate transport. The bearers of this reformprogramwere the “agrarians conquered by the spirit of commerce,” 19 the“commercialized boyars,” who felt “excluded by their more substantialpeers,” and thus took up the rhetoric of liberty to break through the staticsocial framework of the Romanian ancien régime, basing their social ascensionon a new kind of power-relationship, that of economic forces. This interpretationundermines the Junimist criticism, the famous “forms without substance”(forme fãrã fond), since it becomes clear that it were not theimported ideas that created the Liberal Party, but the “local” realities. Whatis more, if there is a political movement in the country that is rooted insocio-economic realities – it is exactly the liberal one.This makes it possible for Zeletin to turn the traditional nationalistsemantic framework (where liberalism is equated with something ideologi-67