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

National Prejudices, Mass Media and History Textbooksviolent attacks against the government, the Ministry of Education, and thetextbook coordinated by Sorin Mitu. Their ideas illustrate the core of thenational “vulgata” of history, since they employed, in a peculiarly coherentway, the majority of nationalist stereotypes.The first public figure is Sergiu Nicolaescu, a prominent film directorand politician, who was an independent senator at the moment of thepublic debate, while currently represents the governing party. The factthat Nicolaescu started the scandal is relevant for two reasons. First, thisaccentuated a basic feature of the debate: the main prosecutors of theincriminated textbook were not historians. Therefore, very soon after thefirst attacks, many historians reacted – in order to protect their professionand not necessarily to defend the textbook. Second, it threw light on theroots of the ethno-national “vulgata.” All media personalities involved inthis debate, in spite of their questionable training in this respect, displayedan extraordinary vision of a national teleology, a vision much strongerthan the one offered by historians. Both reasons made many historiansfeel like they were under siege by “the dictatorship of mass media.”Senator Sergiu Nicolaescu was instrumental in the establishment ofthe national-communist historical canon. Born in 1930 in Tîrgu Jiu, hegraduated from the Bucharest Polytechnic Institute, Faculty of Mechanics,but soon engaged himself with cinematography. Nicolaescu directed, in1967, one of the first Romanian historical super-productions Dacii(Dacians), in 1970 Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave), in 1986, Noi cei dinlinia întâi (We, those from the front line), and several other movies. Actually,many important and heroic moments of Romanian history were representedin his works. In 1989, Nicolaescu participated in the revolution.Close to the newly-established Front of National Salvation and associatedto many ambiguous moments of those events, he was often ironicallyaccused as being the director and the scriptwriter of the Romanian revolution.Thereafter, he managed to secure his senatorial seat from 1990until present.What is the connection between this person and the history textbooks?The answer is that his story exemplifies the communist instrumentalizationof nationalism. Speaking of the power strategy of the communistparties in Eastern Europe, the French sociologist, BernardPaqueteau, pointed out the centrality of nationalism in legitimizing theseauthoritarian and totalitarian regimes. 17 It is not by chance that Gomulka,Jaruzelski, Gheorghiu-Dej, Honecker, Hoxha, and Zhivkov all turned toa nationalist discourse at some point.The nationalistic exacerbation reached its peak under the rule of the Albanianand Romanian communist parties, led by Enver Hoxha and Nicolae99