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

The “Münchausenian Moment”aristocracy, or rootless intellectuals, “were educated abroad,” and“remained, for all of their lives, strangers [my emphasis] to the concreteneeds of their country.” 24All in all, Zeletin’s attempt was to fuse the nationalist symbolic languagewith a liberal political discourse – narrating and legitimizing thespecific social characteristics of the politics of Romanian liberals. Themost striking theoretical consequence of his redescription of the conflictof liberals and autochthonists is that some of the basic traits of the Romanianliberal praxis (phenomena, which were considered to be contradictoryto the ideal-typical liberal doctrine and self-image) all of a suddenbecame compatible with the “trunk” of liberal ideology. To name a few:a state-oriented political economy (perfectly legitimate, if one accepts thatmodern statehood and political liberalism conditioned each other andemerged together), nationalism (liberals are redescribed as the “real representatives”of national interests), and the co-existence of the rhetoric ofrevolutionary transformation and the survival of the elite of the ancienrégime (the liberal movement is the continuation of one side of the premodernelite: i.e., of those boyars who opted for the commercializationof the economy thanks to the unusually favorable conjuncture of the1830-1840s).The discursive trap of this reformulation of liberalism is obviouslythe question of “aliens.” Here the ideal-typical liberal canon dictatesemancipation, a kind of “color-blind” attitude, and ultimately the welcomingof foreign capital in the country, while the autochthonists perceivedthe influx of foreigners as the principal threat to the nation. Since theseperceptions are hardly compatible, to strike a balance here is difficult. Thisis complicated further by the actual political position of the Romanian liberalpolitical elite (it is well-known that Romania was the last country inEurope to legislate the Jewish emancipation – this took place only afterWorld War I), and these “imposed” measures, together with the minoritytreaties, were so much opposed by the liberal political class that Ionel Brãtianuused them as a pretext to resign, even though they were “packaged”together with a Western acknowledgement of Romania’s substantial territorialgains.Zeletin’s answer was his analysis of the nature of the development ofcapitalism. As seen above, the march of capitalism in his vision startedwith a gesture of importation: capitalism, coming from outside to a societydevoid of mobile capital, necessitates the utilization of external capital,therefore it is natural (and unavoidable) that “the invasion of capitalism”coincided with “the invasion of Jews.” This triggered a further coincidence:the necessary relationship between the “destructive” side of capitalism(i.e., the dissolution of the pre-modern structures of craftsmanship69