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

The “Münchausenian Moment”From this perspective, the “Romanian chapter” of the history of mercantilism(ranging from the 1870s to the 1920s in Zeletin’s scheme) is a success-story,since it managed to keep at least the external forms of a democraticgovernment instead of leading to a straightforward absolutistpolitical superstructure, although the power remained in the hands ofa well-defined “Enlightened” oligarchy, the functional equivalent of earlymodernabsolutism. This oligarchy is the personification of the identity ofinterests between “state and bourgeoisie,” reflecting the ultimate interrelationshipof capitalism and political modernity.These modifications in the political language of liberalism ledZeletin to a complete re-definition of the liberal canon. In his interpretation,Romanian liberalism becomes a synthesis of various ideologicaltraits and key concepts. The most important are: centralization (“breakingregional separatism,” “unification of public institutions”); modernization,following a universal pattern; autocracy (“what we need, is anintelligent dictatorship”); economic autarky (tariff system, economicself-protection, and subsidized local industry); nationalism (“the nationalideology is the direct articulation of interests of the bourgeoisie” 26 );anti-ruralism (a program of forced industrialization, the chief victims ofwhich are the peasants – ”the tragedy of the peasantry is the symptom ofthe transition” 27 ); and ethnic discrimination (distinguishing between theself-defense of the urban middle-class, which he incorporates into hisversion of liberalism, and peasant-xenophobia, which he describes as anirrational side-effect of the movements of rural discontent – doomed tofail, as all the Western peasant-wars “necessarily” failed in the sixteenthseventeenthcenturies).In general, Zeletin proposes a program that allows the Romanianliberal political tradition a compatibility with the vision of “creatinga closed Romania” 28 (following the intellectual tradition of socio-economicprotectionism, originated in the works of the German conservativethinker, Friedrich List). This project of “neoliberalism” is the context ofhis analysis of the role of national bourgeoisie in terms of a quest for the“authentic city-dweller” as well. Predictably, he begins his analysis witha recapitulation of the socio-economic process. The origins of Romanianbureaucracy (the “new urban stratum” – the main target of autochthonistattacks) can be found in the upsurge of capitalism. The commercializationof the economy ruined the social class of urban craftsmen, who had to“abandon their old occupations and apply for state-protection.” Thecraftsmen, as the par excellence urban class, transformed themselves intofunctionaries of the emerging nation-state.Zeletin accepts Eminescu’s famous depreciatory label, “proletariansof the pen,” for this “new class” of bureaucrats, but, with the usual refer-71