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

MIHÁLY SZILÁGYI-GÁLtoo unsystematic to be defined as conservative. While lacking a conceptuallyand politically clear-cut conservative character, their organicism had manycommon features with an academically intelligible conservativism. Nevertheless,the statements in question were too racist in their content, and conceptuallytoo pre-political, to be described as “classical conservative.”In 1918-1919, both the population and the territory of the countryhad doubled. The political measures adopted after World War I, such asthe universal male suffrage, the emancipation of the Jews and the landreform, gave birth to new tensions. The problem of the elites was both ethnicand social, because in the acquired territories, especially in the case ofTransylvania, only a very small part of the intellectuals and of the commercialelite was of ethnic Romanian background. 8 The proportionally andsocially significant Hungarian, German and Jewish population hadchanged not only the ethnic character of the country, but also led to thesharpening of the symbolic cleavages. In Transylvania or in Bukovina,there was a significant non-Romanian elite that had been educated ina foreign culture, while the ethnically Romanian peasantry had a strongsense of regional identity, together with its broader ethno-national consciousness.In 1914, ethnic minorities represented only 8.0% of the population,while in Greater Romania this proportion ran up to 30.0%. Moreover,in Greater Romania, the urban population made up 20.2% of theentire population, and, according to the 1930 census, only 58.2% of thesewere ethnic Romanians. 9 In this context, priority was given to the creationof a unified national consciousness, which was to be forged simultaneouslywith the urbanization of society.Assimilation was also a constitutive part of the nation-buildingprocess designed to achieve large-scale cultural inclusion. The nationbuildingprocess was supposed to work both on the level of social integrationof the massively rural ethnic Romanian population and on the levelof cultural assimilation of Hungarians, Jews and Germans. It was only theTreaty of Saint Germain that stipulated the full emancipation of the Jews.Actually, this treaty had a paradoxical consequence to the process ofnation-building. On the one hand, it recognized the acquirement of formerAustrian territories by Greater Romania, and, on the other hand, itconditioned the country’s international acceptance upon its willingness toemancipate the Jews. This involved an intrinsic tension: although, in theinternational context, the emancipation of the the Jews was seen as a necessarystep, the domestic nationalist circles received it with open hostility.Furthermore, the urban-peasant social conflict was often perceived as correspondingto the “foreigner”-Romanian cleavage. The Liberal Constitutionof 1923, respecting the international requirements, offered equalrights to the ethnic minorities, but it gave birth to the radical nationalist84