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

BALÁZS TRENCSÉNYIin the long run, an unsuccessful attempt to fuse those political discourseswhich Zeletin himself was trying to harmonize. The former war-hero’smovement was built on the personal charisma of its leader, a strong populistand nationalist rhetoric, a program of economic protectionism, and someelements from the ideological canon of Romanian liberalism.In the social-political storms of the twenties, the Popular Party was anexperimental configuration, cutting through both the frameworks of pre-warpolitical discourse (the conflict of conservatives and liberals) and the newdiscursive structure (liberals vs. agrarian populists and regionalists), muchin line with Zeletin’s theoretical reconsideration of the political agenda.Therefore, it is understandable that the thinker, in search of an “intelligentdictatorship,” and “an iron hand” of political action, envisioned this party asa potential solution for the political paralysis of the country. There wasa historical moment, in 1926-1927, when it seemed that, with the tacit consentof the liberal “oligarchy,” Averescu’s party might emerge as the triumphantthird side from the conflict of liberals and þãrãnists, and the violentand manipulated elections of 1926 gave the General an overwhelming parliamentarymajority (57 percent of the seats). In government, however, heturned out to be less efficient, and consequently, in 1927, the party lost allits seats in parliament (falling below the parliamentary threshold of two percent).Zeletin entered the party and became a Senator, but it quickly turnedout that they did not have a future. 33 This debacle might be the explanationof Zeletin’s curious silence in actual political issues afterwards. The greatesttheoretician of liberal oligarchy never reached a position of power, otherthan a rather belated nomination for a university chair in Iaºi.In conclusion, there are three key features of Zeletin’s political theory.First, as a relative outsider, he was well-placed to point out the inherentambivalence of the liberal discourse in Romania. While the liberalpolitical elite was trying hard to keep the democratic surface of the system,Zeletin could freely transgress these limits of politeness, and, with his constantreferences to historical inevitability, he could depict the work ofLeviathan in its natural brutality.Second, he was the most outspoken analyst of the logic of Romanianmodernization: an attempt at achieving national autarchy and “Westernization”simultaneously. This entailed a forced industrialization, financedfrom the brutal re-allocation of capital, to the detriment of the minoritiesand the agrarian population (leading, in fact, to the radical growth of theindustrial production, and a tragic decrease in the living-standard of thepeasantry, a process described as “self-destructive growth” by Roberts). 34Third, analyzing his conception leads to a deeper understanding ofthe roots of Romanian integrist nationalism. The traditional interpretationsof this phenomenon concentrated on the thirties, and sought to74