Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

Searching for Common Groundsmarket and justified cultural policies that substituted revanchist politicalgoals for the traditional claims of cultural supremacy. This case studyalso intends to prove that, if duly contextualized, the social history ofa well-circumscribed segment of a larger community can be extremelyillustrative, creating a possibility for a professional dialogue that goesbeyond the narrow, nationally exclusivist perspectives.The precarious relationship of regional and national identity in theprocess of nation-building remains a crucial problem to the present.Marius Turda reconstructs the Romanian discursive landscape from theperspective of the “Transylvanian problem.” The author points out that,since Romania’s emergence as a distinctive cultural framework, Romaniannesshas been defined in opposition to – either external or internal– ”otherness.” After 1989, debates on Romania’s place on the Europeanmap opened new registers of problems. To many Romanian intellectualsand political analysts, recent efforts to foster decentralization and localautonomy, promoted by some segments of the Romanian society – particularlyTransylvanians – constitute an imminent threat to the territorialintegrity of the country. Therefore, the aim of the essay is to assess theimage of Transylvania in the Romanian public sphere. By identifying variousconflicting public discourses, the author points out the existence ofa salient conflictuality within the Romanian society, which might underminethe possibility of a coherent domestic discursive domain.The third part of the volume, entitled Nationalizing Majorities andMinorities, assesses the complex interplay between the minority andmajority nationalizing projects. Since the issue of minorities is crucial tothe democratization of political communities in Eastern Europe, it isimportant to consider not only how minorities are perceived and becomeobjects of ethno-political concern, but also the way they themselvesbecome players of ethno-politics, turning ethnicity into a primary markerof political allegiance. Barna Ábrahám’s paper focuses on the mechanismsof social and economic community-building on the part of the minorities,in this case the Romanians living in Transylvania, after the Austro-HungarianCompromise of 1867. It examines how Romanian elites outlinedthe idea of an independent Romanian national economy in Transylvania,taking over the patterns of modernization from their Saxon compatriots,seeking to maintain the least possible contact with the state machineryconsidered oppressive and “ethnic Hungarian.” It also refers to the contemporarypress and scholarly literature that asserted the possibility ofconstructing a modern society even without the forces of manufacturingindustry, through cooperation, ethnic solidarity (in matters such as creditinstitutions, agricultural cooperatives, practical knowledge taught in well-15