Nation-Building and Contested Identities - MEK

Searching for Common Groundshomogeneity and democratic consolidation in post-communist East-CentralEurope. The author argues that in Romania, as compared with Hungary,Poland, or the Czech Republic, the post-communist transformation wasdelayed by an outburst of ethnic nationalism. In his view, it was a complexinterplay of political and cultural-historical issues, involving the Romanianmajority, the Hungarian minority in Romania and the Hungarian government,that created an environment less favorable for democratic transformation.In the early 1990s, the issues of national identity and loyalty towardsa “unitary nation-state” received disproportionate attention in Romania,and often overshadowed the issue of democratic transformation of thecountry. Consequently, the country’s post-communist transformation hasbeen longer and more traumatic than it was the case in most of the countriesof East-Central Europe. The paper concludes that the process ofdemocratic consolidation is conditioned not only by a triadic scheme ofcooperation (of the nationalizing state, the national minority and thenational homeland), but also by a fourth critical factor, i.e., the internationalcommunity.Surely, the intellectual references and methodological horizons of theauthors are quite diverse, ranging from the Anglo-American tradition ofsocial history and the “modernist” school of the study of nationalism tothe “Cambridge school” of intellectual history, political philosophy, politicalsociology, and oral history. Nevertheless, apart from the already “traditional”references to classic works of Eugen Weber, Ernest Gellner, EricHobsbawm, Anthony D. Smith, or Benedict Anderson, there are some scholarswhose works on the region have been extremely influential and providedcommon references for most of the contributors. In this respect, one canmention Katherine Verdery’s analysis of the debates on national identity incommunist Romania; Irina Livezeanu’s work on the process of nationbuildingand cultural homogenization in interwar Romania; RogersBrubaker’s theoretical model based on the dynamic “triadic” interplay ofnation-state, national minorities, and external national homelands in postcommunistEastern Europe; Vladimir Tismãneanu’s comparative analysesof East-Central European communist and post-communist political cultures;and Sorin Antohi’s writings on historical methodology, symbolicgeography and post-1989 Romanian intellectual debates.We can also observe the blurring of the borderline between social andintellectual history-writing. This is partly due to the re-emergence of theproblem of collective identity as the focus of the research agenda that generateda greater emphasis on methodologies hitherto neglected by mainstreamhistorians, such as oral history or historical anthropology. Thesenew approaches naturally mediate between the social and intellectual perspectives,and also contribute to the formation of alternative institutional17