2013

The Great Debate

THE INTERBELIC PERIOD

THE EUROPEANISTS THE TRADITIONALISTS THE THIRD WAY

LUCIAN BLAGA UNIVERSITY. ECONOMICS FACULTY OF SIBIU

Introduction

Between 1920 and 1940 the relationship between culture and ethnicity constituted one of the most dominant political themes in Eastern Europe. The cultural, historical, anthropological debates shaped national identity in every country in the region. After 1918 the building of the national state in East Central Europe had as a principal consequence a quest to define the nation. The political regimes engaged in an official sponsored project to define nationhood. The main reasons behind this political attitude were the inhomogeneous population inside their borderlands or the menacing strong neighbors. In the same time revisionism, political conservatories,artistic avant-garde,anti-modernism and fascism joined hands with the same purpose: to provide a rightwing definition of the nation where racial nationalistic grounds were the backbone for an exclusivist and anti-Semite ideology which eventually led to an explosive state of facts. The rise of Soviet Russia on the one hand and fascist Italy and Germany on the other hand had a tremendous effect on Eastern Europe: in the conflict between the god of the Nation and the idol of the class, the countries from the Eastern Europe attempted to avoid a political partnership with the revolutionary states and involved in different regional and international alliances. But these political alliances could not put an end to the appeal of the fascist states: it seemed that by the end of the 1930s, under the influence of the economic crises, the god of the Nation ruled over Eastern Europe, as well.

In the period between the two World Wars Rumanian intellectuals of the most diverse ideological commitments engaged in spirited polemics about the course of development their country should follow. With the Great War and the struggle for political unification behind them and with the task of organizing the new Romania immediately ahead they were compelled to re-examine old values and seek new definitions of national character. The enhanced opportunities for political and cultural integration into Western Europe gave added urgency to their task. The responses they gave to these fundamental questions defied consensus. Yet, however diverse the issues they raised, two broad groupings of intellectuals are discernible which may be designated as Europeanists and Traditionalists. The former treated Romania as a part of Europe and insisted that she had no other choice but to follow the path of economic and social development already taken by the urbanized and industrialized West. The traditionalist on the other hand, emphasized Romanias agrarian character and sought models of development based upon her own unique social and cultural heritage. The affinities of both groups with pre-war currents of thought are striking, but not surprising, for they drew copiously upon the earlier agrarian and industrial visions of the future Romanian. Yet, their thought yielded nothing in originality to their intellectual forebears as they reinterpreted Romanians place in Europe in the light of their own experience and their expectations of the new century.

THE EUROPEANISTS
The Europeanists, though approaching development from diverse perspectives, none the less shared s similar view of Romanias modern history and of her place as a part of Europe. Two figures stand out: the literary critic Eugen Lovinescu and the economist and sociologist Stefan Zeletin. For the first time in scholarly literature they undertook a comprehensive investigation of the causes that lay behind the development of modern Romania. They both linked the process to the introduction of Western-style capitalism in the Romanian principalities and treated the revolution of 1848 and the Constitution of 1866 as landmarks in assuring its survival. But Lovinescu found the motive force of change in ideas, whereas Zeletin emphasized economic and social causes. None the less, they agreed that Westernization was a necessary historical stage through which every country was fated to pass, and they had no doubt that outside, European influences, rather than internal forces, had been the main catalyst for the development of modern Romania. Eugen Lovinescu (1881-1943) was the most influential literary critic of the time. Besides Romanian, French literature and thought were paramount influences on his intellectual development (he received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1909), and, taking a European perspective from his earliest critical writings, he opposed the ideological and aesthetic notions of those like the Smntorist who sought creative inspiration in an idealized rural world and insisted upon a primarily social function for art. His most sustained criticism of the agrarian and traditionalist currents came in his sweeping analysis of the formation of modern Romania, (3 volumes, 1924-6; The History of Modern Romania Civilization). He traced the origins of modern Romania back to the first half of the nineteenth century, to the beginnings of massive intellectual and cultural contacts with Western Europe, and he thus treated the encounter as a struggle between Western and native systems of ideas. The former triumphed, he argued, because the elites in the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia judged Europe to be superior to the East. These elites thus undertook to close the enormous gap they perceived between themselves and the West by adopting the latters institutions, ethics, and methods, in accordance with what Lovinescu called synchronism. For him, this law was the key to understanding the relationship between agricultural, patriarchal Romania, on the one hand, and the industrial, urban West, on the other. Accordingly, the inferior imitated the superior the underdeveloped peoples the more advanced, and the village the city. At first, the imitation was complete; it was superficial

and unselective, but then, as maturity set in, it was transformed into the adaptation of what was consciously judged to be necessary and superior, a stage, in Lovinescus view, that Romania had reached in the 1920s. But, he insisted, synchronism was not merely imitation; it was also integration. He was certain that all Europe was drawing closer together as a result of the expansion of modern means of communication, and he pointed out that the most diverse societies were becoming homogenized more rapidly than ever before. As an example, he cited the speed with which a new art -form became internationalized, how rapidly impressionism, cubism, expressionism, and Dadaism spread across Europe. It was thus obvious, he thought, that Romania could not help becoming part of his integral, cosmopolitan civilization. Civilization, then, for Lovinescu meant the West with its industry, urban centers, and liberal political and economic institutions, and he noted how in every way Romania was rapidly becoming more like the West. He viewed the historical evolution of modern Europe as a contest between the innovative, democratic ideas propounded by its urban classes, on the one side, and the patriarchal, reactionary ideas fostered by the agrarian classes, on the other. A staunch believer in the idea of progress, he had no doubt which party would triumph. He denounced as romantic and reactionary the efforts of the Smntorists and similar agrarian currents to find in the Romania feudal past the necessary elements of an indigenous civilizations. To claim, as they did, that the ideas of the French Revolution of 1848, had somehow thwarted the organic natural development of Romanian society, to exalt rural primitivism, and to idealize the Middle Ages as the foundations of a vital and creative civilization in the modern age struck him as simply absurd. Since he admired the city of the West as representing the highest stage of social development and since the law of synchronism presupposed an alignment of the Romanians with these great centers, he assigned to the Romanian urban classes the primary responsibility for creating a modern Romanian civilization. He praised the urban classes, by which he meant the bourgeoisie and intellectuals, as the bearers of the highest gifts of civilization who alone were capable of introducing all the elements of world civilization to the Romanians and of breaking down the resistance of the passive and inert peasant masses.

tefan Zeletin (1882-1934) had studied in Germany ( 1909-1912) and had taken a doctorate at the University of Erlangen for a dissertation on the Hegelian origins of English pragmatism. A European and a materialist, he insisted thet Romanias fate was inextricably linked to the fortunes of Western capitalism. He tried to show that modern Romania was the product of fundamental economic changes brought about by the introduction of Western European capital after the Treaty of Adrianople (1829), which had freed the Romanian principalities from the stifling effects of the Ottoman commercial monopoly. The process of Europeanization, in his view, had been rapid, and he was convinced that Romania had definitively entered the Western European economic sphere after the Crimean War,an event which caused an economic revolution in the principalities. Thus, in the next half-century the old agrarian state had slowly dissolved as the country adapted itself to the processes and demands of capitalism. Economic transformation, he pointed out, brought in its wake political innovation, as old feudal institutions gave way to those of Western, middle-class democracy. He showd how a native bourgeoisie emerged out of these processes, the class that was to guide the country through all the successsive stages of modernization. Mihail Manoilescu (1891-1950) may be classed among the Europeanists, despite his repudiation of old-style liberalism and his embrace of corporatism in the 1930s. As for Romanias development, he had no doubt that it must follow the Western path of industrialization, which he saw as the solution to economic backwardness in general and the agrarian problem in particular and the means by which Romanias dependence upon the economically advanced countries of Europe could be ended. He dismissed as fanciful the global of the Poporanists and other agrarianisms to build a prosperous, modern economy based upon agriculture. In his major work on international economic relations, Thorie du protectionnisme et de l-change international (1929), he argued that industry enjoyed an intrinsic superiority over agriculture. He showed how the disparity in value thus created accounted for the immense advantage in trade and the economic and political dominance that Western Europe had gained over agriculture Eastern Europe.

THE TRADITIONALISTS
Opposed to the Europeanists were groups and individual who sought models for Romanias development in the native past, real or imagined. Traditionalist accurately describes them, but they were by no means unanimous about what constituted the Romanian tradition. In general, they shared a belief in the predominantly rural character of Romanian historical development and staunchly opposed inorganic cultural and institutional imports from the West. They all drew from currents of ideas that had come to the fore in European intellectual life in the twentieth. It is perhaps paradoxical that they should have been so indebted to Western European thought, for they tended to reject Western political and economic institutions. The influence of Germany was paramount. The German Romantics taught Romanian traditionalists to appreciate the superiority of culture (defined as unique, organic expression of the spirit of community or nation) over civilization (conceived of mainly as material or technological progress). In the years immediately after the First World War the insistence upon Romanias unique agrarian character and the search for authentic Romanian values in the countryside were overlaid by more general, European currents of thought opposed to the rationalism and scientific positivism of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The crisis of the European consciousness of the 1890s, which signalled a geological shift in patterns of thought and artistic expression and came to be known as modernism, was fully shared by Romanian intellectuals in the 1920s. Many rejected the values which had held sway for much of the nineteenth century. Gndirea was first issued on May 1st 1921 by a group of young Romanian intellectuals coming from the Transylvanian city of ClujNapoca like Lucian Blaga, Adrian Maniu, Gib I. Mihiescu, Emil Isac, Radu Dragnea, D. Tomescu, D. I. Cucu and Cezar Petrescu. As Dumitru Micu has pointed out, quoting Cezar Petrescu, one of the first directors of the publication, Gndirea was supposed to become a Romanian response on the cultural market to the Hungarian and Saxon cultural publication with a long tradition in sustaining a national culture70. As Keith Hitchins has pointed out, it was largely sociologists, literary critics, theologians, and poets who carried on the speculative and prophetic traditions in the Romanian thought and who, consequently, found themselves in the forefront of a great debate over the nature of Romanian ethnicity and culture.Although the purpose of the journal was not declared as a

nationalist rostrum from which the Romanian nationality should be proclaimed, it was obvious that confronted with superior cultures like the Saxons and the Hungarians with a long printing press tradition, the Romanian elite attempted to frame a nationalist cultural speech. Nichifor Crainic was one of the first non Transylvanian intellectuals invited to join the editorial board of Gndirea by some of his acquaintances, Lucian Blaga and Cezar Petrescu.80 Also, he will prove the most important theoretician of traditionalism in an Orthodox key. Ioan Dobre a.k.a. Nichifor Crainic was born on December 24th 1889 in a small village called Bulbucata (Vlaca). Between 1908 and 1912 he studied at the Central Seminary from Bucharest hoping that he could fulfill his family ambitions and become a priest. During this period he was influenced especially by Nicolae Iorga, a Romanian neoconservator, history professor at the University of Bucharest and its nationalistic discourse which followed closely the 19th century aversion of the Junimists against the cultural imports from Western countries, especially from France. The influence of Nicolae Iorga over the young Ioan Dobre continued to be intense during his years of studentship at the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest (19121916). In 1916 he published his first volume of poetries named esuri natale (Native fields). Between 1916 and 1918 he was concentrated on the Romanian army fighting in the WWI and during this period he became even more influenced by the personality of Nicolae Iorga which was one of the main artisans of the Romanian entrance into the war. After the war, Crainic published in 1920 another volume of poetry called Darurile pmntului [The Gifts of the Land] and in the same year, following Lucian Blagas advice he went to Viena to study Philosophy. After 1921 he started to collaborate with Gndirea. Nichifor Crainic became even more radical in his following texts about the relation between Orthodoxy and Romanianness. Politic i Ortodoxie 97 [Politics and Orthodoxy] established a principle for any political approach of the Romanian government, a principle which was disregarded by almost all political ideologies of his age (Bolshevism, Liberalism, Conservatorism, etc) and especially by the Peasants Party:

Agrarian peoples are religious peoples. And if the peasants represent three quarters of the Romanian population, than Romanian orthodoxy is, by all means, peasant orthodoxy. Any political doctrine which intends to define the cardinal needs of this social class and a politics which tends to turn to account not only political and economic point of view but also cultural and national must take into consideration this social reality. Therefore, a specific national culture from which the industrial minorities

tempted for economical internationalism exclude themselves must draw its inspiration from the traditional deposits of the agrarian majority.

Against any State-controlled or political process of defining the Romanian ethnicity, Crainic is arguing for a return to the traditional innocence of the village described by its commitment to moral values and its affinity with the faith of the Eastern Christianity. As Keith Hitchins has poignantly noticed,

Crainics assessment of Romanian culture and his hopes for its development rested upon a Christian philosophy of history. Drawing upon the Fathers of the Church and such modern theologians as Vladimir Soloviev, Serghei Bulgakov, and Nikolai Berdyaev, Crainic saw history as the unfolding of the divine plan to restore man to his original place in creation through the intermediary of Jesus Christ-a process that would end with the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth.

Lucian Blaga (1895-1961) took a broader, more European approach to the problem of national character and paths of development than Crainic, his colleague on Gndirea for nearly twenty years. As a poet Blaga experimented with a multitude of forms, and for his themes he drew upon the most varied sources, from Romanian folklore and his childhood memories of village life to German expressionism and his own very personal worldview. In his search for the co-ordinates of the Romanian cultural style Blaga focused his attention on hte rurl world, where, he thought, the constituent elements of Romanian spirituality lay. At first his warm appreciation of Orthodoxy, to which he accorded an organic place in the national psyche. Yet, he was uninterested in religious dogma.

The Third Way

Between the two World Wars the Peasantists (rniti from ran, peasant) were the most consistent and effective advocates of a Romania in harmony with its pre-eminently agricultural character. They stood for the elaboration of economic and social policies and the creation of a state they would correspond to the interests and needs of the peasantry, who formed the overwhelming majority of the population. They were convinced of the uniqueness of Romanias historical evolution, which they attributed to an agricultural system rooted in the independent family holding. Their aim throughout the inter-war period was thus to strengthen this nucleus of agricultural production, which they made the foundation of Romanias future social and political development. They did not deny that capitalism was possible in Romania and even recognized that modern industry had come to stay and could benefit agriculture. But they wanted to exclude capitalism from the organization. But they wanted to exclude capitalism from the organization of agriculture because they thought it incompatible with the character of Romanian agriculture as it had developed over the centuries. They were certain that capitalism and everything which came in its wake would destroy what was exceptional and genuine in the Romanian way of life. They had no doubt that their defence would be successful because peasant agriculture, in their view, was strong and was by its very nature non-capitalist. As proof they cited economic analyses of the family holding as a distinct production unit and he psychological incompatibility between the peasant and capitalist ways. In constructing their own theory of development, the Peasantists drew extensive from both Western and Eastern European scholarly literature, especially the writings of German economists and sociologists and of Russian agricultural economists. But the Romanians were by no means simply borrowing foreign models and dealing in abstractions. Rather, they were concerned with the most urgent economic and social realities confronting Greater Romania after the First World War agricultural stagnation and peasant poverty. The remedies they proposed fitted in with those indigenous currents of thought which since the middle of the nineteenth century had emphasized the agrarian character of Romanian society and had put forth strategies of development that promised to nurture healthy tradition and the national genius. Virgil Madgearu was not only an eminent economist and an active politician eager to promote the principles of agrarianism; he was also a reputable polemist. In a public conference sustained in 1925 at Romanian Social Institute, Virgil Madgearu prepared a critical analysis to the volume

of tefan Zeletin dedicated to the Romanian bourgeoisie. Like Zeletin himself, Madgearu agreed that a local bourgeoisie developed in the Romanian Principalities at the beginning of the Nineteenth century under the influence of the Western capitalism. But and this is the major difference for Madgearu, this bourgeoisie had no developmental characteristics, it only exploited national wealth. These characteristics were related mainly to the organization and exportation of cereal production. To accomplish this purpose only two solutions were theoretically feasible: i) the expropriation of peasants; or ii) the expropriation of boyars. The first solution was unacceptable for Western capitalism, because it would determine the destabilization of the internal social structure of the Principalities. The second solution was inoperable, because it would have implied a revolutionary bourgeoisie and an industrial proletariat strong enough to oppose the great boyars and landowners. The result was a historical compromise, concretized in the land reform of 1864, and with a juridical justification in the Constitution of 1866. The phenomenon was named neoserfdom and this is the real origin of the local bourgeoisie. Because the regime of neoserfdom was an artificial construction, the result, logically, was that the Romanian bourgeoisie was itself an artificial creation. This pattern was not disposed to follow the normal way of Western capitalist evolution: from commercial capitalism to the industrial and to the financial one. A normal evolution would involve the undermining of the regime of neoserfdom and the creation of an agrarian peasant regime, much more adequate to the new economic and social conditions of Romania. But this great transformation presumes, first of all, a deep reform of schools based on morality and social idealism. According to the necessities of the moment in a new united Romania, the idea of school reform also interested Stefan Zeletin. Therefore, these two theoretician met at the point of educational reform in an essay written one year later under the title Nationalizing the School. Zeletin was not only a sociologist interested in the analysis of the evolution of the Romanian bourgeoisie; his preoccupations were also related to philosophy and historiography. With a doctorate in philosophy on the influence of the Hegelian determinism on English empirical philosophy, obtained in 1912 at the University of Erlangen, Zeletin was a materialist, for whom traditional history was only a chronological row of figures and facts and social history dealt with the large historical processes produced by collectivities and not by individuals.

According to Virgil Madgearu, Romania is still a semi -capitalist state with an economic social- agrarian-peasant order. Only the demographic rural pressure can assure the process of an authentic transformation of the economy. Under this demographic pressure, the normal tendency of agriculture would be in the direction of its intensification. The practice of an extensive agriculture on small parcels with low productivity could not lead to a sustained rhythm of an increasing economy. Agriculture produced goods primarily for covering its own consumer necessities. It had a sporadic contact with the market and its influence on economy was low. Some structural conditions had a decisive influence on this: overpopulation, the rudimentary agricultural technique, the small and spread plots of land, the lack of cadaster and communal roads8. Only agriculture organized on cooperative principles could properly assure the expansion of agricultural production. It means that smallholders should be organized into common associations on production and delivery, sustained by credits adequate to the peasant economy. Industry could not provide an impulse for developing agriculture or sustain the necessities of the internal market. An orderly economy organized by the state could limit these enormous disparities between the agricultural sector based on small individual properties and the industrial sector which is rooted in large monopolies. Such an order, called directed economy by Madgearu, could also provide a healthy accumulation of capital, based not on individual and anarchic necessities but on national interest. These thoughts can be summarized as follows: He could discern no fundamental change in the structure of the Romanian economy: the capitalist sector in general was still small, since capitalism as a mode of production had touched only a few branches of industry in a significant way and agriculture maintained its predominance. He concluded that there was still no possibility that the Romanian economy could be integrated into the world capitalist system, for its structure continued to be determined by several million peasant holdings, which formed an economic network governed by values qualitatively different from those of a capitalist economy. Nevertheless, he could not ignore the fact that capitalism exerted a powerful influence over Romanian agriculture.

Conclusions
In the mid-Nineteenth century the Romanian intellectual elites rediscovered their own socio-economic realities, in fact their own roots, mostly through their Western academic experience. They realized the huge gap between the cultural and economic level of the Western countries and Romania and that something should definitely be done in order to solve the problem. An increasing number of theories were provided to find the most adequate way of developing the country. The passion with which the Romanians have argued these various views for the last half century derives from the urgency of the very difficult problem of adjustment to modern Western society as well as from the fact that the sides taken in the dispute often reflected the social and economic interests of their proponents. In turning to the political movements, one finds in their party ideologies, in their economic policy and practices, and in their political behavior all the elements of crisis and distortion associated with Western influence and inspiration32. Among these theoretical contributions to the development debate in the first decades of the Twentieth century, agrarianism undoubtedly has its own position. First, agrarianism emphasized the idea, similar to those of Constantin Stere, Radu Rosetti and Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea that because of the increasing number of peasants without the possibility to support themselves (especially due to the numerous obligations towards landowners), the agrarian issue represented the main problem which demanded an adequate solution applied to the specific conditions of Romania. In order to achieve this goal, the agrarian theoreticians, Ion Mihalache and Virgil Madgearu, proposed the sustaining of the small peasant property through a cooperative system based on mutual assistance and preferential rural credits. Second, the agrarians considered that the small peasant tenure is a non- capitalist and autonomous way of production, which should be self-sustainable and could assure the development of industry. tefan Zeletin completely rejects this idea; he thought that capitalism had a beneficial influence on the peasantry, assuring a debouche for the development of industry. Third, the agrarian doctrine should be redesigned for counterbalancing the devastating effects of the Great Depression and more liberal measures should be taken to protect the economy. This doctrinal inconsistency was severely condemned by Mihail Manoilescu in his study dedicated to emphasize the significance of the Romanian bourgeoisie. The above authors prove that the importance of the

agrarian issue was acknowledged and that they tried to provide a satisfactory solution, but they did not hold unanimous views. Numerous compromises had to be reached to obtain the political unification of two different parties and to retain power under the conditions of increasing political extremism. All this eroded the structure of agrarianism. To sum up, agrarianism was a political movement in the period of great opportunities that helped to keep the idea alive. Similarly to agrarian movements in East-Central European countries, Romanian agrarianism was an attempt at establishing a basis for a peasant state, exactly at the moment when capitalism succeeded in surviving political threats of extreme nationalism and the challenges of economic crises. From this perspective, the peasant solution proved to be economically untenable and politically disadvantageous. Agrarianism and its political expression, peasantrism have opened an immense horizon of expectations but did not deliver in terms of political solutions. It was a political as well as intellectual movement with favorable prospects and competent leaders yet average achievements. Posterity will have to judge agrarianism in the context of its inevitable limitations.