Constantin Iordachi in Search-Of A Usable Past

East European Politics & Societies
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In Search of a Usable Past: The Question of National Identity in Romanian Studies, 1990-2000
Constantin Iordachi and Balázs Trencsényi
East European Politics and Societies 2003; 17; 415
DOI: 10.1177/0888325403255308
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East
10.1177/0888325403255308
In Search
European
of a Usable
PoliticsPast
and Societies ARTICLE
In Search of a Usable Past:

The Question of National Identity
in Romanian Studies, 1990-2000
Constantin Iordachi and Balázs Trencsényi*
This article offers an overview of the scholarly debates on Romanian nation

building and national ideology during the first post-communist decade. It
argues that the globalization of history writing and the increasing access of
local intellectual discourses to the international “market of ideas” had a
powerful impact on both Eastern European history writing and on the West-
ern scholarly literature dealing with the region. In regard to Romanian his-
toriography, the article identifies a conflict between an emerging reformist
school that has gained significant terrain in the last decade and a traditional-
ist canon, based on the national-communist heritage of the Ceaus7escu
regime, preserving a considerable influence at the institutional level. In
analyzing their clash, the article proposes an analytical framework that
relativizes the traditional dichotomy between “Westernizers” and
“autochthonists,” accounting for a multitude of ideological combinations in
the post-1989 Romanian cultural space. In view of the Western history writ-
ing on Romania, the article identifies a methodological shift from social-
political narratives to historical anthropology and intellectual history. On
this basis, it evaluates the complex interplay of local and external
historiographic discourses in setting new research agendas, experimenting
with new methodologies, and reconsidering key analytical concepts of the
historical research on Eastern Europe.
Keywords: Eastern Europe; Romania; historiography; nationalism;

nation building; post-communist political culture; authochtonism;
modernization
I.
The annus mirabilis of 1989 occasioned an unprecedented oppor-
tunity for convergence and cooperation between “Western” aca-
demic research and “local” scholarship in Eastern Europe.
Looking back to the period between 1945 and 1989, it was a gen-
* The authors would like to thank Sorin Antohi, Gail Kligman, Irina Livezeanu and Alfred
Rieber for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the article.
East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 17, No. 3, pages 415–453. ISSN 0888-3254
© 2003 by the American Council of Learned Societies. All rights reserved. 415
DOI: 10.1177/0888325403255308

eral specificity of Eastern European studies that Western and
Eastern European historiographies were evolving separately,
with limited scholarly interaction. As there was a “local produc-
tion” of historiography, heavily dependent on the troubled politi-
cal conditions, there was also a separate Western corpus of works
on Eastern Europe, informed by the analytical categories gener-
ally employed by social sciences in the West and often influenced
by the priorities of an inherent political agenda.
After 1989, national historiographies in Eastern Europe have
been challenged to overcome their underlying “parochialism”
and to internalize the theoretical and methodological achieve-
ments that marked the development of Western social sciences.
Nevertheless, the interaction between the two “branches” has not
been one-directional. The fusion of the two parallel develop-
ments was not simply necessitated by the alleged “backward-
ness” of local scholarly production in Eastern Europe. In fact,
from the 1980s on, topics that have been in the focus of national
historiographies in the region, most importantly the emergence
and development of national ideology, became of paramount
interest for the Western historiographic discourse as well. In the
1990s, the problem of nation-statehood came to the foreground
of interests in East and West alike because of the disintegration of
the multiethnic state projects in the former Soviet bloc and also
because of the upsurge of regionalism that went along with the
European supranational project.
This article explores the post-1989 cross-cultural dialogue and
methodological interaction between Western and local scholars
working on Romania. The analysis concentrates on the interre-
lated issues of state building and national identity, themes that
have traditionally dominated Romanian historiography, and
looks at representative Western and Romanian authors and
historiographic discourses. It offers an overview of the post-1989
scholarly literature on Romanian national ideology, assessing its
main intellectual trends and evaluating its place in the context of
Eastern European studies.
The central dilemma of Eastern European intellectual history,
usually described as the conflict between “imitation of the West”
and its “repudiation,” is characteristic of the Romanian national
416 In Search of a Usable Past

tradition as well. The reading of Romanian culture in terms of a
duality of polarized intellectual traditions has been an estab-
lished blueprint in Romanian cultural discourses throughout the
modern period. This dichotomy was first utilized as a sophisti-
cated ideological framework by the “Westernizer” leadership of
the 1848 revolution in the Romanian principalities, especially in
Wallachia, and emerged, with different accents, as an authorita-
tive intellectual formula in the discourses of the conservative
Junimea circle in the 1870s and 1880s. In the interwar period, it
ran central to all major political and cultural productions: mutatis
mutandis, we find similar formulations in the works of modern-
ists, such as the literary critic and cultural historian Eugen
Lovinescu; in radically antimodernist authors, such as Nichifor
Crainic; as well as in the texts of the “young generation” (tînara
generatie) emerging in the late 1920s. Notwithstanding the recip-
rocal influences and mutual contamination of the two sides, the
vision of a dichotomy between “autochthonists” and “European-
ists” became a modus operandi of Romanian cultural elites, inter-
nalized and reproduced by major sociopolitical actors, and
assumed by authoritative scholarly works on Romanian culture
as well.
This model came to play a central role in “Western” historical
works on Romanian cultural and intellectual history, too, due
especially to Katherine Verdery’s extremely insightful and influ-
ential book, National Ideology under Socialism. Verdery used the
autochthonist/Westernizer dichotomy to interpret the conflicts
within the Romanian intelligentsia in the 1970s over the status
and structure of the historical tradition, most importantly the so-
called “protochronism” debate.1 This framework proved highly
illuminating for understanding Romanian cultural debates during
the communist period. In trying to test the relevance of this inter-
pretative framework for the post-communist cultural develop-
ments, the present article argues that it is the dynamic of the
polemic that has linked otherwise dissimilar positions and has
1. Protochronism, probably the most paradigmatic cultural phenomenon of the Ceaus7escu
regime, asserted that all major achievements of European culture and society were invented
by Romanians. See Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cul-
tural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 167-
214.
East European Politics and Societies 417

arranged divergent standpoints into a monolithic counterposi-
tion, operating according to the logic of asymmetrical counter-
concepts memorably described by Reinhart Koselleck.2 In fact,
the various anti-Western positions might well be converging only
from a modernist perspective that seeks to define the “enemy.”
This can be read the other way round as well: the various
“modernisms” might be overlapping only if regarded from a radi-
cal antimodernist position. This feature is also revealed by the
terminological framework applied by various participants in the
debates over national identity in Romania. Although the majority
of participants agree in identifying the “essence” of Romania’s
cultural history in view of a counterposition, they profoundly dis-
agree over the definition of the two poles. Certain interpretations
are describing the conflict of traditionalists and modernists, oth-
ers talk about autochthonists versus Westernizers or nationalists
versus pro-Europeans. In the historiographic context, we find a
common interpretative model confronting protochronists and
antiprotochronists, while others define the conflict in terms of a
fight between the nationalist vulgate and the elites opting for the
adoption of European ideas.
If we try to project all these counterpositions on two clear-cut
poles, we find interesting results. For example, the addressee of
the dedication of Verdery’s above-mentioned work was the vet-
eran historian from Cluj, David Prodan, who courageously turned
against the protochronist megalomania and who was conse-
quently portrayed as one of the most positive figures of the
book.3 In the nineties, however, Prodan emerged not as a propo-
nent of “Europeanism” but as an author of nationalist pamphlets.
His case shows that in the post-1989 cultural space, the dichot-
omy between the two contrasting positions was not so sharp but
was represented rather by a continuum of combinations ranging
from one end of the political spectrum to the other. This article,
therefore, reasserts the problematic relationship between moder-
nity and national tradition as a crucial dimension of cultural self-
reflection in post-1989 Romania. Nevertheless, in view of these
2. Cf. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1985).
3. “To David Prodan and to all those who, like him, said ‘No!’ some even with their lives.”

hybrid combinations, it argues that the various cultural dis-
courses should not be described only in terms of this polarity.
The article is made up of four major parts, focusing on some
principal themes of the current academic literature concerning
the historical formation of Romanian national identity. The first
theme is the emergence of national consciousness in the early
modern period and its gradual politicization resulting, by the
middle of the nineteenth century, in modern nationalism. The
second theme, particularly debated in the historical writing
throughout the 1990s, concerns the origins of radical nationalist
movements and ideologies in Romania and, especially, the his-
tory of the Iron Guard. The third issue is the role and responsibil-
ity of the intelligentsia in the creation of radical identity politics,
particularly in view of the interwar period. The fourth topic is the
intricate relationship between communism and nationalism in
Romania, especially crucial for devising an interpretation of the
emergence of the syncretic national-communist ideology under
the regime led by Nicolae Ceaus7escu.4
II.
Romanian historiography has been traditionally dominated by
the themes of nation and state building. This might be explained
by the fact that in the case of Romania, this process was particu-
larly complex. Greater Romania (1918-40) was an aggregate of
different historical provinces: the former principalities of
Moldavia and Wallachia (unified in 1859); the former Ottoman
province of Dobrudja (annexed in 1878); the former Russian
4. Marked by space constraints, this article cannot address many important branches of Roma-
nian historiography, such as the acute debates over the Holocaust, the nature of the regime
led by Ion Antonescu (1940-44), or the history of ethnic minorities in Romania, which, given
their complexity, would deserve separate treatment. For general overviews of the post-1989
state of Romanian historiography, see Dennis Deletant, “Rewriting the Past: Trends in Con-
temporary Romanian Historiography,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 14 (1991): 64-86; Keith
Hitchins, “Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe: Romania,” American Histori-
cal Review 97 (1992): 1064-83; Paul E. Michelson, “Reshaping Romanian Historiography:
Some Actonian Perspectives,” Romanian Civilization 1 (1994): 3-23; Andrei Pippidi, “Une
histoire en reconstruction,” in Antoine Marès, ed., Histoire et pouvoir en Europe médiane
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), 239-62; Alexandru Zub, Discurs istoric s7i tranzitie (Ias7i, Roma-
nia: Institutul European, 1998); and, most recently, Bogdan Murgescu, A fi Istoric in anul
2000 (Bucharest, Romania: All Educational, 2000).

province (1812-1918) of Bessarabia; the former Austrian prov-
ince (1775-1918) of Bukovina; and territories that were part of the
Hungarian half of the Habsburg Monarchy, such as Transylvania,
Banat, Maramures7, and the Partium. The union of these prov-
inces catalyzed an arduous process of elite bargaining, adminis-
trative unification, and a thrust for cultural homogenization.
Since this process of homogenization has been contested, and
the various components of identity, such as territorial statehood,
ethnicity, language, and religion, have never been completely
overlapping, Romanian nation building implied various, rather
contradictory aims, discourses, and policies.
The early modern context of nationalism has not been a main
area of scholarly interest in the 1990s. Classical works on the
early modern forms of national identity have been written, how-
ever, throughout the post-1945 period, with the partial exception
of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the historical production
in Romania was overly ideological and did not tolerate meaning-
ful research on the national question. One can list significant fig-
ures mainly from the 1970 and 1980s: besides the works of two
prominent cultural historians, Pompiliu Teodor and Alexandru
Dutu,7 important contributions were made by Adolf Armbruster
(on the intricate question of the medieval and early modern eth-
nic self-identification of Romanians), S7tefan Lemny (on the intel-
lectual history of patriotism), and Andrei Pippidi (on the impact
of the Byzantine legacy on the identity constructions of the
Wallachian and Moldavian political elites).5 In the historiography
concerning the period, one can clearly identify a dividing line
between the adepts of the nationalist vulgate, committed to the
vision of a linear evolution of the nation from premodern times
to the “glorious” present, and the cautious professional histori-
ans, who were trying to describe this process in terms of the
ambivalence of identity formation. However, since the mytho-
poetics of national identity was concentrating either on Thraco-
Daco-Roman archaism, or on the national contentions activated
5. Adolf Armbruster, Romanitatea românilor. Istoria unei idei (Bucharest, Romania: Editura
Enciclopedica*, 1972); S7tefan Lemny, Originea si cristalizarea ideii de patrie în cultura
româna (Bucharest, Romania: Minerva, 1986); Andrei Pippidi, Traditia politica bizantina în
tarile române în secolele XVI-XVIII (Bucharest, Romania: Editura Academiei, 1983).

by the modern process of state building, the real “battles” were
not fought over the early modern period. Therefore, the different
historiographical approaches on this period were not so dramati-
cally clashing as in the historiography on romantic nationalism or
on the twentieth century.
We can find a typical example of this relatively peaceful coex-
istence of autochthonist and Westernizer discourses in the post-
1989 works of the erudite cultural historian Alexandru Dut u7 , who
made steady efforts to update his referential system by incorpo-
rating recent Western discussions on nation building and nation
formation (such as the works of Ernest Gellner, Benedict Ander-
son, or Hagen Schulze) and to present these references to the
Romanian audience. By tracing the dilemmas of Romanian
national identity from the premodern contexts to recent times,
Dut u7 sought to devise a model of nation formation in view of
Southeast Europe.6 He intended to account for developments in
the more advanced European societies and also for the “periph-
eral” cultures without falling into the trap of making one-sided
value judgements, either on behalf of the “developed” West or on
behalf of the “abandoned,” “suffering,” or “unique” Balkan civili-
zation. Without negating the “external impact” in catalyzing
national development in the region, Dut u7 emphasized the “local
modification” of “Western” doctrines. In doing so, he sought to
prove that the ideological “answers” of these societies to the
powerful but ambivalent pressure of modernity cannot be dis-
carded as boorish or reactionary, but were—sometimes very
sophisticated—attempts to harmonize the program of social and
cultural transformation with the local structures of social organi-
zation, which he described in terms of communitarian
(Gemeinschaft) patterns.
The main focus of the theories of nationalism, and also the
most crucial period of the formation of modern Romanian
national identity, has been, however, the nineteenth century.
Most of the general syntheses of Romanian history are, therefore,
concentrating on the emergence of national ideology and nation-
statehood. By and large, the local historiographic canon is still
6. Alexandru Dut u7 , Ideea de Europa si evolutia constiintei europene (Bucharest, Romania: All
Educational, 1999) (edited posthumously).

dominated by the national-romantic vulgate, so it is not by
chance that we have to turn to foreign authors for the most
important synthetic works on this topic. Keith Hitchins, professor
at the University of Illinois, authored the most solid and compre-
hensive syntheses on the history of Romanians. In two major vol-
umes, published in the mid-nineties, Hitchins focused on the
process of nation and state building in Romania in the modern
period.7 In his view, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the
main components of this process were the rationalization of the
government; legal codification; the separation of powers; the
regulation of public finances; and the formation of a well-trained,
professional bureaucracy. At the social level, Hitchins identified
the engine of change in the conflict between the upper aristoc-
racy (great “boyars”) and an emerging native middle class com-
posed of small groups of wealthy merchants; entrepreneurs; and
members of the liberal professions, notably lawyers. According
to Hitchins, since the institutions of political modernity were the
“creation of a handful of Romanian intellectuals,” the political
system was characterized by low-level participation, the preemi-
nence of the executive, the excessive centralization of the admin-
istration, and the factionalism of the parties. In addition, the pro-
cess of modernization exhibited the underlying cleavages
between the slow economic development, lagging behind that of
political institutions, and the rapidly modernizing elite mentali-
ties. This process resulted in the alienation between the “urban,
commercial outlook” of the new “Westernized” intellectual and
political elite and “the religious and folk traditions of earlier cen-
turies.”8
In his works written during the 1990s, Hitchins thus placed his
discussion of Romanian development within the framework of
the symbolic conflict between autochthonists and Westernizers.
His narrative brings together social, political, and intellectual
aspects, relating economic debates about sheltered industrializa-
tion to cultural controversies, and connecting the analysis of
social and demographic change to the structural modifications of
7. Keith Hitchins, The Romanians, 1774-1866 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); and Hitchins, Ruma-
nia, 1866-1947 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).
8. Hitchins, The Romanians, 2.

the political-institutional framework. His study of Romanian state
formation remains compatible with the perspective of the “local”
Romanian historical writing, as he offers a historical narrative
from the perspective of the nation-building center. Unlike main-
stream Romanian historians, however, Hitchins puts special
emphasis on a deep structural link between the specific social
determinants of the emergence of the nation-state and the sharp
political-intellectual conflicts dividing the elite that implemented
the state-building project.
Another integrative figure who in many ways abridges the pre-
1989 and post-1989 periods of Romanian historiography is the
multifarious historian from Ias7i, Alexandru Zub. In his prolific
work, dedicated mostly to the study of Romanian historiography,
Zub has been mainly interested in tracing the convergence and
interference of Romanian intellectual history with Western devel-
opments. In his recent essays, he argues that Romanian intelli-
gentsia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pro-
duced cultural and historiographic discourses closely related,
and thus comparable, to Western developments. This “success-
story” was brutally interrupted by the mid-twentieth-century
breakthrough of totalitarianism (Right and Left, both “alien” to
the Romanian “cultural space”), destroying the textures of this
intellectual synchronicity and leaving the Romanian intelligentsia
in the precarious post-communist limbo of trying to modernize
its own framework of references in line with the challenges of
globalization, while returning, simultaneously, to the discursive
patterns of the cultural flourishing of the interwar period.
If we look at the younger generations of historians dealing
with Romania, it is not surprising that we encounter critical and
more “deconstructivist” perspectives on the ideological heritage
of Romanian nationalism. One of the most acute observers and
critiques of the Romanian national historiographic canon is the
French historian Catherine Durandin, who wrote an insightful
account of the itinerary of Romantic ideas from France to Russia,
Poland and the Romanian Principalities, titled Révolution á la
française ou á la russe.9 In her chapters on Romania, she asserted
9. Catherine Durandin, Révolution á la française ou á la russe: Polonais, Roumains et Russes au
XIXe siècle (Paris: P.U.F., 1989).

that the Romanian political elite adopted the ideology of nation-
hood from French sources, especially from Jules Michelet. Draw-
ing on ample documents of the “romance” between the French
prophet of the Revolution and the tiny Europeanized elite of a
nation “to be made” through a revolutionary transformation á la
française, Durandin offered an extraordinary insight into the
psychological and cultural mechanisms catalyzing the nation-
state-centered modernization projects at the peripheries of
Europe. Describing the process of national identity formation,
she identified the roots of radical identity politics that became
prevalent in Romania throughout the twentieth century.
In many ways complementing Durandin’s attempts to subvert
the romantic canon, the book by a young historian from Cluj,
Sorin Mitu, mapped the identity mechanisms of the emerging
Romanian elite of Transylvania.10 Mitu’s book is a historical analy-
sis of the formation of national stereotypes and of the
thematization of national consciousness in the nineteenth cen-
tury. It starts with enumerating the identity mechanisms con-
nected with the image of the collective self and of the others and
then turns to the various representations of “Romanianness,” as
compared to other ethnic communities (Gypsies, Jews, Germans,
and Hungarians), analyzing both the pejorative registers and the
topoi of positive self-stereotypes concerning the historical, moral,
demographic, linguistic, and religious qualities of Romanians.
The process of Romanian national identity formation in
Transylvania, as depicted by Mitu, is different from what hap-
pened in Moldavia or in Wallachia. In all three historical regions,
the formative experience behind the emergence of nationalism
was similarly rooted in an attempt of emulating the “significant
others,” resulting in a profound identity crisis and, ultimately, a
program of cultural and political autarchy. There are nevertheless
significant differences in their respective social and cultural
ingredients. Although the principalities were under nominal
Turkish sovereignty and experienced an increasing Russian influ-
ence, the young Moldo-Wallachian boyars were part of the local
10. Sorin Mitu, Geneza identitatii nationale la românii ardeleni (Bucharest, Romania:
Humanitas, 1997). Translated into English as National Identity of Romanians in
Transylvania (Budapest, Hungary: CEU Press, 2001).

power elite, acquiring their formative cultural experience of cul-
tural “otherness” in Western educational centers. In contrast, the
Transylvanian Romanian elite was in a subordinate position in its
own political-cultural setting, and it encountered the dominant
“others” at home, thus producing a nationalist discourse based
on a constant confrontation with the privileged ethnic groups,
such as Hungarians and Germans.
The divergence between various branches of the national
movements in the three historical regions is a natural focus for
any historiographic attempt aiming at the relativization of the
doctrine of unitary nationhood. One can find an emphatic at-
tempt to extol these differences in the works of the Transylvanian-
born Hungarian historian Béla Borsi-Kálmán, who analyzed the
striking difference between the stances taken by the Moldavian
and Wallachian political elites toward the Hungarian revolution-
aries trying to use the principalities as a hinterland of their opera-
tions after the collapse of the 1848 to 1849 revolutionary govern-
ment.11 Pointing out the different degrees of urbanization,
patterns of land ownership, and mechanisms of assimilation and
elite formation in the two principalities, he concluded that the
more emphatically nobility-based composition of the Moldavian
reformist elite was comparable to the Central European type of
reform movements—such as the Polish, Hungarian, or Croatian
ones—also emerging from the middle nobility. Conversely, the
more urban, middle-class basis of the Wallachians made them
more receptive to the French romantic ideology of citoyenneté,
encompassed by the framework of a homogenizing nation-state.
Consequently, the Moldavian and Wallachian elites engaged in
intense political rivalries after the establishment of a unified state
in 1859. In the long run, however, the more radical democratic-
nationalist Wallachian component, incorporating certain ele-
ments from the irredenta nationalism propagated by
Transylvanians, proved to be more in line with the logic of politi-
cal modernity, based on the ideological mobilization of the
11. Béla Borsi-Kálmán, Nemzetfogalom és nemzetstratégiák. A Kossuth-emigráció és a román

nemzeti törekvések kapcsolatának történetéhez (Budapest, Hungary: Akadémiai, 1993). See
also his Liaisons risquées. Hongrois et Roumains aux XVIIIe et XXe siècles (Pécs, Hungary:
Jelenkor, 1999).

masses. As a whole, however, the politics of the unification
between Moldova and Wallachia has received limited attention,
since the process was considered, in a way, “natural” by the tradi-
tional nationalist historiography.12
The most encompassing challenge to the nationalist
historiographic narrative was posed by the University of Bucha-
rest professor of history Lucian Boia, whose interpretations are
rooted in a comprehensive theory of historical narrativity. The
historical text, according to Boia, is a quite arbitrary discursive
construction, but it also yields an important fabric of social cohe-
sion, being “the preferred medium of the expression of collective
consciousness.”13 One can prove everything and the contrary of
everything with historical arguments, but this does not mean that
our narrative structures of formatting historical experience are
not molded into very strict systematic forms. “Everything goes
through our brain and imagination, from the simplest representa-
tion to the most scientific constructions,” but there is indeed “a
specific historical logic, a peculiar mechanism of digesting and
actualizing the past.”14 The normative politics of historicity
imposes itself on us exactly through these logical structures, as it
creates its specific reconstructions of the past in the colorful sce-
narios of the “presentiment of the future,” the “escape from his-
tory,” or the “fight of the contraries.” Significantly, Boia’s inter-
pretation thus created an intricate link between the romantic
nationalist discourses and the ideological developments of the
twentieth century. Nevertheless, according to Boia, the period
after 1918 witnessed a new type of nationalism in line with the
emergence of modern mass politics in Romania. This new histori-
cal mythology, however, was not aiming at the legitimization of a
democratic system but rather at the construction of an ethno-
12. An important book, appearing in the late eighties to challenge these stereotypes, was pub-
lished by the American historian Paul E. Michelson: Conflict and Crisis: Romanian Political
Development, 1861-1871 (New York: Garland, 1987), republished as a revised edition:
Romanian Politics, 1859-1871: From Prince Cuza to Prince Carol (Ias7i, Romania: Center
for Romanian Studies, 1998). Concentrating on the first decade following the establishment
of the modern Romanian nation-state (1860-71), Michelson argues that the union between
the two principalities generated a complex “structural crisis” of the new state.
13. Lucian Boia, Jocul cu trecutul: istoria între adevar si fictiune (Bucharest, Romania:
Humanitas, 1998), 6.
14. Ibid., 6.

political discourse and praxis. In this interpretation, the
historiographic myths proliferating after 1945 are basically the
logical results of this “mutant” discursive modernization. The cult
of Romanian ethnic continuity, referred back to prehistoric time-
lessness, is also a perverted mythological manifestation of politi-
cal modernity, where the repetition of founding acts, periodi-
cally confirming this continuity, ultimately means a regression
into the “bottomless well” of the past.
Boia’s most thorough attempt to deconstruct the Romanian
historical “mythology” was put forward in his book, Istorie si mit
în constiinta româneasca.15 In his opinion, the way to the total
revision of the Romanian cultural canon leads through the demo-
lition of the illusion of historical objectivity: that is, making the
public conscious of the mythical nature of these historiographic
constructions. Boia thus proposed the most captivating paradigm
of the new Romanian historiography, reaching a pivotal position
in contemporary Romanian cultural discourse. Nevertheless,
while his models were utilized by numerous historians of the
post-1989 “new generation,” some authors distanced themselves
from his epistemological relativism and textualism.16
III.
One of the most important topics in post-1989 Romanian histori-
ography has been the creation of Greater Romania after the First
World War. The sides of the ongoing historiographical debate
concerning this issue have been generally characterized as “revi-
sionists” and “traditionalists.” Within the traditionalist camp,
however, we can identify at least two considerably divergent
trends. The first approach, numerically still the dominant one, is
highly influenced by the romantic-nationalist canon of historiog-
raphy and relies on the “triumphalist” historiography of the 1920s
and 1930s centered on the accomplishment of Greater Romania.
Its main tenet is that Romanians, although subjects to different
15. Boia, Istorie si mit în constiinta româneasca* (Bucharest, Romania: Humanitas, 1997).
Translated into English as History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness (Budapest, Hun-
gary: CEU Press, 2001).
16. See, for example, Sorin Alexandrescu, Paradoxul Român (Bucharest, Romania: Univers,
1998), 27.

multiethnic empires, have always been fighting for a political
union. The Romanian nation-state has been a “natural” and
“objective” historical outcome of this struggle. This approach is
also pervaded by historical resentments against the policies of
“denationalization” in Austria-Hungary and the post-1918
irrendentist policies of Hungary, themes that have been central to
communist historiography and to contemporary Romanian his-
tory writing as well.17
The second group tries to enlarge the national-communist
canon, enriching it by publishing collections of documents and
by tackling previously neglected or avoided topics, such as the
competing nationalist and federalist projects, the religious or
sociodemographic aspects, or the debates taking place in 1918
over the future organization of the country.18
An important example of this trend is Florin Constantiniu’s
book O istorie sincera a Poporului Român (A Sincere History of
the Romanian People).19 The author claims to break with the
national-communist canon and to provide a “sincere” and com-
prehensive history of Romania, mainly by denouncing the
primordialist claims about the existence of a pervasive Romanian
ethnic consciousness in the premodern period. He also puts for-
ward harsh criticisms of the Romanian political system, both in
the nineteenth century and in the interwar period. However, he
devotes less attention to the questions of ethnic intolerance, par-
ticularly with regard to the periods of dictatorship, such as the
Antonescu regime (1940-44) and the communist era. Although
criticizing the romantic narrative, Constantiniu did not explicitly
question “the hard core” of traditional Romanian historiography,
namely, the apotheosis of Romanian nation-statehood.
The most successful attempt to reconstruct the Romanian
historiographic canon, situated between the overtly “revisionist”
and the traditionalist sides, is the ample synthesis entitled Istoria
17. A representative work of this trend is the massive collective volume sponsored by
Gheorghe Funar, the nationalist mayor of Cluj: Anton Dragoescu, ed., Istoria României.
Transilvania, 2 vols. (Cluj, Romania: George Barit 7iu, 1997-99).
18. For such an approach, see Liviu Maior, Memorandul. Filosofia politico-istorica a
petitionalismului românesc (Cluj, Romania: Editura Fundat i7 ei Culturale Române, 1992).
19. Florin Constantiniu, O istorie sincera a Poporului Român (Bucharest, Romania: Univers
Enciclopedic, 1997).

românilor—a result of a particularly fruitful collaboration
between prominent foreign and Romanian authors. In the parts
on ancient, medieval, and early-modern history, Mihai
Ba*rbulescu, S7tefan Papacostea, and Pompiliu Teodor offered bal-
anced interpretations, renouncing the primordialist and ethno-
centric claims of the traditional Romanian historiographic dis-
course. Furthermore, the modern period was entrusted to two
prominent foreign historians, Keith Hitchins and Dennis
Deletant, considered as being “detached” from the local conflicts
of interests.20
The revisionist side emerged quite recently and is represented
mainly by a new generation of Romanian historians.21 Although
their methodological commitments and research agendas are
rather heterogeneous, these historians are ultimately united in
the effort of “de-mystifying” the nation-state. Consequently, they
concentrate on the study of regionalism and local history, on the
history of the “imaginary,” and on the multicultural past of histor-
ical regions such as Transylvania, or the Banat. As the revisionist
camp is far from being institutionalized at home, it is not by
chance that the most encompassing formulation of the implica-
tions of this perspective was put forward by the Romanian-born
American historian Irina Livezeanu in her Cultural Politics in
Greater Romania.22 The book consists of two parts. The first part
analyzes the process of cultural unification of the historical prov-
inces that were to constitute Greater Romania. Based on Ernest
Gellner’s theory of nationalism, Livezeanu gives a detailed analy-
sis of the policies of centralization and sociocultural homogeni-
zation implemented by Bucharest after World War I. She chal-
lenges the traditional Romanian historical narrative on several
20. Mihai Ba*rbulescu et al., Istoria românilor (Bucharest, Romania: Editura Enciclopedica*,
1998), 7.
21. Some of their most important works: Florin Gogâltan and Sorin Mitu, eds., Viat7a privata,
mentalitati colective si imaginar social în Transilvania (Oradea, Cluj-Napoca, Romania:
Asociat i7 a Istoricilor din Transilvania s7i Banat, 1995-96); Toader Nicoara*, Transilvania la
începuturile timpurilor moderne 1680-1800. Societate rurala s7i mentalitati colective (Cluj,
Romania: Presa Universitara* Clujeana*, 1997); Maria Cra*ciun and Ovidiu Ghitta, eds., Ethnic-
ity and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe (Cluj, Romania: Cluj University Press, 1995);
Ovidiu Pecican, Troia, Venetia, Roma. Studii de istoria civilizatiei europene (Cluj, Roma-
nia: Fundat i7 a pentru studii europene, 1998).
22. Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and
Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

accounts. First, Livezeanu considers Romanian national identity
not as a perennial given but as a socially determined and histori-
cally developed feature. The considerable regional and cultural
differences thus made the process of cultural homogenization
troubled and protracted, resulting in a veritable Kulturkampf.
Second, she presents the 1918 union as a “Trojan horse” for
Romanian democracy, bringing along not just a moment of glory
but also a number of inherent social and political dilemmas.
Third, Livezeanu points out that while the centralization was pro-
moted principally by the political elites of the Old Kingdom, in
the peripheries it often catalyzed a powerful “regionalist” resis-
tance. Consequently, she explores the social and cultural roots of
regionalism in Greater Romania and highlights the contradictory
social-political stance taken by the Romanian elite in Austria-
Hungary that included not only unionists but also loyalist, feder-
alist, and autonomist options.
The second part of the book concentrates on the genesis of
fascism in Romania, a subject that has been dominating the his-
torical research on the interwar period over the past decade.
However, while a majority of the new studies concentrated uni-
laterally on the 1930s, Livezeanu’s book was a significant excep-
tion, since it focused on the previous decade and placed the
emergence of the Iron Guard in the context of the nation-building
agenda of Greater Romania. Livezeanu identifies a “natural alli-
ance,” in the framework of the homogenization process,
between the political and bureaucratic center, cultivating an
“official nationalism,” and the radical-nationalist student move-
ment. She puts forward a sociological explanation of this alli-
ance: in the absence of a Romanian urban middle-class, the polit-
ical power had to rely upon the young nationalist intelligentsia
since they represented the only national—pan-Romanian and
antiregionalist—elite that was meant to mediate between the
overwhelming rural masses and the state apparatus. At the same
time, as products of the modern educational system, the young
nationalists were entirely dependent on obtaining positions in
the expanding bureaucratic apparatus. The fusion between the
prevailing nationalist discourses based on generational solidar-
ity—aggravated by the collapse of the bureaucratic job market

and the rise of intellectual unemployment in the late twenties—
generated an explosive political combination.
Livezeanu’s book was part of a larger wave of academic inter-
est in the Iron Guard. Initially, research on Romanian fascism in
the West was stimulated by the shift in the scholarly agenda from
the study of “generic fascism” in the 1960s and early 1970s to the
history of fascism in particular countries.23 In this context, two
prominent students of fascism, Ernst Nolte and Eugen Weber,
appealed for an intensified scholarly research of the Iron Guard,
regarded as an unusual “variety of fascism.”24 This evaluation was
due to a variety of reasons. First, the Iron Guard was a vigorous
political force, among the few in East-Central Europe, along with
the Arrow Cross in Hungary and the Croatian Ustasha Movement,
to become a mass movement. Furthermore, it originated inde-
pendently from Italian Fascism and German National-Socialism
and exhibited many peculiarities—combining, in a complex
syncretism, the more general fascist characteristics with specific
“local” ideological features such as Orthodox mysticism.25
By and large, pre-1989 research on Romanian fascism was car-
ried out by Western scholars, and Romanian historiography
devoted only a limited attention to it, due mainly to political
restrictions.26 After 1989, there was an outburst of interest in the
study of fascism in Romania, and much of this effort was directed
toward revealing its intimate connection with debates about
23. Robert O. Paxton, “Five Stages of Fascism,” Journal of Modern History 70 (March 1998): 1-
23.
24. See Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Social-
ism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966); Eugen Weber, “Romania,” in Hans
Rogger and Eugen Weber, eds., The European Right. A Historical Profile (London: London
University Press, 1965), 501-74. See also Eugen Weber, “Romania,” in Eugen Weber, ed.,
Varieties of Fascism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 96-105. Stanley G.
Payne also judged that the Legion was “the most unusual mass movement of interwar
Europe” in Fascism. Comparison and Definition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1980), 115.
25. On the peculiar features of the Iron Guard ideology, see Dan Pavel, “Legionarismul,” in
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, ed., Doctrine politice. Concepte universale si realitati românesti
(Ias7i, Romania: Polirom, 1998), 212-28; and Constantin Iordachi, “Charisma as a Mobilizing
Ideology: The Case of the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Interwar Romania,” in John
Lampe and Mark Mazower, eds., Ideology and National Identity in Southeastern Europe in
the 20th Century (Budapest, Hungary: CEU Press, forthcoming).
26. For the most comprehensive work on the Iron Guard to date, see Armin Heinen, Die Legion
“Erzengel Michael” in Rumänien: soziale Bewegung und politische Organisation. Ein
Beitrag zum Problem des internationalen Faschismus (München, Germany: Oldenbourg,
1986).

national ideology. Some authors insisted on the continuity
between the main ideas developed in the Romanian national
ideology in the nineteenth century and the interwar Legionary
ideology. Others emphasized the mutations introduced by the
Legionary movement in the Romanian national discourse.27
A key issue in the scholarly debates about Romanian national-
ism has been the problem of anti-Semitism. Trying to account for
the centrality of the “Jewish question” in the Romanian national
ideology, William Oldson argued that anti-Semitism in Romania
was driven preponderantly by economical and diplomatic moti-
vations. On this basis, Oldson portrayed Romanian “providential
anti-Semitism” as a tertium quid, a particular “mixture of ethnic
bravado and defensiveness,” differentiating it from the more doc-
trinaire Western models.28 Leon Volovici, the author of the most
important work on the intellectual history of anti-Semitism in
Romania, offered a markedly different interpretation.29 Volovici
studied the discursive framework of the Romanian national ide-
ology, seeking to identify the place of anti-Semitism in Romanian
cultural and political thought. In his view, anti-Semitism was ulti-
mately generated neither by economic competition, nor by the
alleged massive Jewish immigration in Northern Moldavia, but
was an intellectual pattern, a way of thinking, most “rampant
among the middle and upper classes and among the intellectu-
als.”30 According to Volovici, by the 1880s, anti-Semitism became
an integral part of Romanian political culture and administrative
practice, being linked to central sociopolitical issues such as the
peasant question. But it functioned as a full-fledged and inde-
pendent political ideology in Romania only after 1918 and
27. For post-1989 works on the Iron Guard, see Radu Ioanid, The Sword of the Archangel: Fas-
cist Ideology in Romania (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1990); and Alexandru
Florian and Constantin Petculescu, Ideea care ucide: dimensiunile ideologiei legionare
(Bucharest, Romania: Editura Noua Alternativa*, 1994). For the relation between the intellec-
tuals of the “young generation” and the Iron Guard, see Zigu Ornea, Anii treizeci: extrema
dreapta* româneasca* (Bucharest, Romania: Editura Fundat i7 ei Culturale Române, 1995), trans-
lated in English as The Romanian Extreme Right: The Nineteen Thirties (Boulder, CO: East
European Monographs, 1999).
28. William Oldson, A Providential Anti-Semitism: Nationalism and Polity in Nineteenth-
Century Romania (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991), 9.
29. Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Anti-Semitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals
in the 1930s (Oxford: Pergamon, 1991).
30. Ibid., 6.

reached its peak in the 1930s, when it emerged as “the center of
political and intellectual life.” Therefore, Volovici mainly focused
on the striking centrality of the “Jewish question” in the interwar
intellectual debates, pointing out the responsibility of the most
brilliant young intellectuals in elaborating essentialist discourses
of ethnic specificity that contributed to the symbolic exclusion of
the Jews from Romanian culture and society.
IV.
One of the most important debates of the 1990s in the Romanian
context concerned the intricate relationship between the intelli-
gentsia and the radical nationalist ideology in the interwar
period. In the post-1989 Romanian cultural canon, the works of
the interwar “young generation” are considered as normative,
being read as an alternative to the historical materialism of the
communist vulgate but, in many ways, also supplementing and
overwriting it. From a broader, cross-cultural perspective, the
debate around the political past of these figures fits into the gen-
eral thrust for assessing the implication of prominent intellectuals
in various totalitarian systems and ideologies (in the European
context, Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man were the two main
figures of contention).
In the Romanian context, the “iconoclastic” attacks against
these cult figures date back to the 1970s, when the first publica-
tions—mostly in Italy and in Israel—started to unveil Mircea
Eliade’s spiritual and political relationship to the Iron Guard. The
whole situation was further complicated by the gnomic “silence”
of the main protagonists concerning their pre-1945 activities and
also by the chronic lack of reliable critical editions of the incrimi-
nated texts. In its initial phase, the controversy was not so much
of a scholarly nature but evolved mainly in the form of
denunciating letters published in magazines. Nevertheless, in the
1990s, the debate was deepened and intensified, mostly because,
with the passing away of the main protagonists, it lost its immedi-
ate personal relevance but gained a broader cultural resonance
and became a primary context of historiographic concern.

Probably the most articulate example of the “frontal attacks”—
though, to a certain extent, couched in the technicalities of the
anthropological theories of mythology—is Daniel Dubuisson’s
attempt to prove that the essence of Eliade’s phenomenology of
religion is a radical antimodernism, rooted in an “anti-Semitic
ontology.”31 In Dubuisson’s description, Eliade is a syncretist
pseudo-philosopher, whose anthropological work is based on a
metaphysical construction with extremely sinister implications.
His conception of the sacred is taken to be a camouflage to hide
his real agenda of exalting a vitalist-organicist conception of life,
similar to the Nazi “metaphysics of blood,” repudiating Christian-
ity as a historicist deviation while hailing the ahistorical sacrality
of the premodern peasant societies and ritual practices. With this
argument, Dubuisson seeks to buttress his conception concern-
ing the “hidden agenda” (message secret) of Eliade’s philosophy
of religion, namely, its suppressed connection with the Roma-
nian fascist discourse. In his seemingly abstract conception of
Being and of the Sacred, Eliade is creating a metaphysical con-
struction around his original “local” agenda: “in his works, the
peasant of the Danube finds himself, doubtlessly unwittingly,
elevated to a position of a privileged interlocutor of the
Being”32—while the Jews are found guilty of committing the
“ontological crime” of representing historicity, that is, time, which,
for Eliade, would equal corruption and destruction. On the
whole, Dubuisson’s most immediate shortcoming is his vague
referential basis to the actual Romanian context of the 1930s. Not
having consulted any of the texts written by Eliade in Romanian
before 1945, his hypothesis of the link between the 1950s’ and
1960s’ speculations on the history of religions and the radical
antimodernism of the 1930s, even if it might prove true, remains
unsubstantiated.
The most resounding attempt to document this connection is
the memorable article “Felix Culpa” by the Romanian-Jewish
émigré writer Norman Manea. He uses the metaphor of the “skel-
eton in the closet” to express the Proteic presence of the “Roma-
31. Daniel Dubuisson, Mythologies du XXe siècle: Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss, Eliade (Lille, France:
Presses universitaires de Lille, 1993).
32. Ibid., 253.

nian” past (“ghost of another time, another personality”) in the
intellectual and psychological life of the “American” Eliade and
stresses that, to judge Eliade’s moral and intellectual responsibili-
ties, we have to put him into the context of the “age of extremes,”
characterized by the “summary and deviant logic of extremist
movements in times of crises.” Manea did not negate that Eliade
was in fact sharing many of the radical convictions of his genera-
tion, arising from “dilemmas of a long, troubled national identity
in which identity crises and mechanisms of easy identification
with utopian ideals were fertile soil for the new extremism.”33 But
he also felt it grossly unjust to culpabilize some intellectuals for
the collapse of democracy in Southeast Europe: he rather talked
of “Romanian paradoxes and ambiguities”—individual dramas
and collective tragedies at the most vulnerable margins of “Euro-
pean” modernity.
Recent attempts to interpret Eliade’s pre-1945 writings devised
broader generational horizons.34 Regarded from this perspective,
the phenomenon of the “young generation” becomes much
more complex than in the previous highly ideological readings,
which either posited these intellectuals as cultural models or
culpabilized them indiscriminately as fascists. The texts of Eliade,
Emil Cioran, Constantin Noica, or Mircea Vulca*nescu thus came
to be read not so much as instances of the eternal fight between
Westernizers and autochthonists than as documents of the self-
destruction of cultural modernism in Eastern Europe: how the—
intellectually Westernized—cultural avant-garde of the 1930s
turned against the liberal-democratic intellectual tradition, which
hitherto had been identified exactly with “Western political
modernity.”
The most significant texts from this perspective concerning the
Romanian interwar generation were written by another émigré
writer and literary scholar, Matei Ca*linescu. His exemplary essay
on Eugen Ionesco and the Rhinocerus was an attempt to place
the famous play into its original setting—that of Romania of the
33. Norman Manea, “Felix Culpa,” in On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist (New York: Grove
Press, 1992), 110.
34. See, most importantly, MacLinscott Ricketts, Mircea Eliade: The Romanian roots, 1907-
1945 (Boulder. CO: East European Monographs/Distributed by Columbia University Press,
Ithaca, NY, 1988).

late thirties, gradually slipping into fascism—a context generally
neglected by the Western audience that took the play more in its
metaphysical register.35 Ca*linescu used the contemporary corre-
spondence and the later memoirs of Ionesco and gave a colorful
tableau of this “legendary” group, the members of which were
subsequently swept tragically far from each other by the whirl-
wind of history. He also wrote an important interpretation of
Cioran’s post-1945 (French) oeuvre, accentuating the hidden
subtext of the philosopher’s suppressed political past. He proved
that in virtually all of his later writings, Cioran continued an inter-
nal dialogue with his own “previous self,” frequently subverting
his own value judgements. If, before 1945, Jews and Hungarians
were demonized as the two “significant others” from the perspec-
tive of forging a Romanian vitalist national characterology, in the
“French” works these two cultures became the grandiose sym-
bols of Cioran’s heroic-tragic phenomenology of history. In
Ca*linescu’s view, Cioran thus extended the scope of his analysis
from the destiny of a nation imprisoned by the geopolitical limi-
tations of being a peripheral “small culture,” to the destiny of
mankind, imprisoned by its metaphysical limitations of being
created by a Mauvais Démiurge.
The French philosopher Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine made a
similar attempt to place another key member of the “young gen-
eration,” Constantin Noica, on the map of Eastern European cul-
tural and political history.36 Her case study is supported by a
broad set of Eastern European references and comparisons rang-
ing from Jan Patocæka to István Bibó. Taking the principal claim of
the protagonists of the “young generation”—concerning the trag-
edy of living in a culture that might simply disappear—at its face
value, Laignel-Lavastine considered this fear as rooted not so
much in the spasms of the belated territorialization of nation-
hood, as described by Bibó,37 but rather in the frustration of being
35. Matei Ca*linescu, “Ionesco and Rhinoceros: Personal and Political Backgrounds,” East Euro-
pean Politics and Societies 9:3(1995): 393-434; and “‘How can one be what one is?’ Cioran
and Romania,” in Alexandru Zub, Identitate si alteritate (Ias7i, Romania: Ed. Universita*t 7ii Al.
I. Cuza, 1996), 21-44.
36. Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, Filozofie si nationalism: paradoxul Noica (Bucharest, Roma-
nia: Humanitas, 1998).
37. István Bibó, “The Distress of the East European Small States,” in Democracy, Revolution,
Self-Determination: Selected Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 13-88.

part of a “small culture,” permanently harassed by the psycholog-
ical urge of self-documentation. In her interpretation, exactly this
obsession connects the unfortunate distortion of the radical pro-
ject of constructing a new national identity launched in the inter-
war period and the intellectual movement that supported
national communism from the late-1960s onwards.
The most far-reaching attempt at rendering this generational
thrust for national metaphysics intelligible from a philosophical
point of view has been the work of the French philosopher and
anthropologist Claude Karnoouh. Besides his thorough anthro-
pological studies, he also published a fascinating book,
L’invention du peuple,38 combining his personal reflections on
anthropological fieldwork with the intellectual history of the calami-
ties of national identity formation in Romania. Karnoouh’s main
thesis is that the premodern life-world of peasantry in the South-
east European cultural space has been destroyed by the emerg-
ing structures of political and socioeconomic modernity, repre-
sented both by the nineteenth-century upsurge of nation-states
as well as by the post-1945 communist dictatorships, resulting in
“mutant” modernization. He concluded that the nation-state-
building elites attempted an “Aufhebung” of popular culture in
Eastern Europe. The chief engine of this process was the ruse de
la raison of national essentialism: formatting, and thus eventually
eliminating, the alterity of the essentially nonnational,
premodern, peasant cultures. The process of the elimination of
this “authentic” popular culture went hand in hand with the
growth of the artificial “quasi-populism” of official culture, seek-
ing to carve out “normative national pasts” from the symbolic res-
ervoir of premodern rural cultural patterns. “National philoso-
phers,” such as Lucian Blaga and Constantin Noica, who were
trying to devise a national ontology to link rural with urban,
popular with high culture, or premodern forms of life with the
conditions of social and political modernity, were therefore not
so much the heralds of the quasi-Hegelian “Absolute Spirit,” per-
forming an act of cultural self-reflection to raise their nation to
self-consciousness. They were, rather, ultimately self-deceiving
38. Claude Karnoouh, L’invention du peuple. Chroniques de Roumanie (Paris: Arcantère,
1990).

and tragically unconscious pawns of the dynamism of the
homogenizing nation-state formation that crushed everything
that was unique, human-sized, and metaphysically fascinating in
the premodern forms of life.
The common thread of these paradigmatic interpretations in
the past decade is the assertion that the process of state building
and the problems of elaborating a national cultural canon have
been deeply interrelated. This problem brings us to another fun-
damental question concerning the heritage of the interwar gener-
ation—that of the “afterlife” of their discourses about collective
identity. Most of the cultural figures in post-1989 Romania felt it
necessary to engage in a dialogue with the intellectual tradition
of the interwar “young generation,” attempting to modify the
post-Romantic canon of national self-thematization from
“within.” Authors such as Sorin Alexandrescu or Sorin Antohi
focused precisely on the basic dilemma of Eastern European
intelligentsia, namely, that the most poignant attempts to define
the national cultural “character” were dominantly linked to an
ethnicist way of thinking or even rooted in them.
After 1989, the autochthonist canon got a new impetus and
evolved into a syncretism that edged on the ideological border-
line between a neotraditionalist political ideology and a quasi-
philosophical new age doctrine, asserting itself vigorously in the
cultural-political space as well as in aesthetics. The main ideolog-
ical branch of this trend is “neo-orthodoxism,” rooted not so
much in the philosophical tradition of “national metaphysics”
(i.e., the “school” of the philosopher and publicist Nae Ionescu,
the controversial mentor of the interwar “young generation”) but
rather in the Orthodox political theology of the extreme right-
wing theologian and poet, Nichifor Crainic. In contrast, the
“Westernizer” camp has been proposing a reinterpretation of the
cultural canon as well as an integration of the various layers of
this tradition into a modernist discourse of “Europeanization.”
An ambiguous, but highly sophisticated, attempt of integration
was proposed by the Amsterdam-based Romanian scholar, Sorin
Alexandrescu. The author, specializing in comparative literature
and cultural history, reentered the Romanian cultural and politi-
cal space with his book Paradoxul Român. As is made obvious in

the preface, the problem of the “national canon” had a personal
stake for the author, since he himself descended from a family
with strong ties to the cultural tradition of the interwar elite. It is
therefore not surprising that the basic question of Alexandrescu’s
work is how to create a modus vivendi between the “Western-
izing” agenda of political-social modernization and the national
cultural canon, with its strong “meta-political” implications.
Alexandrescu’s historical reconstruction is in many ways
polemicizing with Irina Livezeanu’s approach put forward in Cul-
tural Politics. Alexandrescu seeks to answer the question, “Was
the post-1918 project of Romanian nation building ultimately
successful?” Although his analysis of Greater Romania drew
implicitly on Livezeanu’s conceptual apparatus and perspective,
Alexandrescu did not attempt to explain the “self-destruction” of
Romanian democracy by invoking the counterproductive mech-
anisms of the nation-building process but rather by analyzing the
distortion of the Romanian political-cultural character. Conse-
quently, Alexandrescu identified some “metaphysical” character-
traits, such as the Manolic passion,39 the cult of flexible balanc-
ing between external great powers, and the mechanism of self-
occupation, that organized the Romanian historical experience in
the twentieth century. The strongest feature of the book is
Alexandrescu’s hermeneutic approach, especially when the
author turns to concrete texts. He brought to the surface the
“subtexts” and the “hidden meanings” of historical documents,
exposing the duplicity of the militarist and discipline-oriented
discourse of Antonescu, providing a subtle account of the roots
of the “Legionary” political language, and reinterpreting Eliade’s
interwar political writings along the same lines.
On the whole, Alexandrescu’s book fits into the intellectual
syncretism of the 1990s in Romania, marked by a public spirit that
tries to venerate simultaneously two interrelated, but ultimately
incompatible, myths: that of the cultural “Golden Age” of the thir-
ties, which allegedly reached its peak in the “young generation,”
39. Manole was a mason who, according to a historical legend, built the church of Curtea de
Arges7, the residence of the medieval Wallachian voevods. Since the walls of the church
repeatedly collapsed, to erect the building, Manole had to fatally sacrifice his own wife (by
building her into the wall of the church). His figure appeared in numerous works attempt-
ing to define the Romanian national character.

and the democratic political traditions of the interwar period,
revolving mainly around the centrist-agrarian National Peasant
Party. On a more general level, the book is a significant attempt
to combine the two hegemonic paradigms of the Romanian cul-
ture, the autochthonist and the Westernizer ones, generally
described as diametrically opposed: the mode of speech used in
Paradoxul român is a very intricate fusion of certain constitutive
elements of both parts, inserting the Westernizer political rhetoric
into an autochthonist cultural discourse and historical self-
thematization.
The agenda of Sorin Antohi in many ways resembles that of
Alexandrescu. According to Antohi,40 “national characterology” is
not a meta-level discursive tool to express the “ontological speci-
ficity” of “Romanianness,” but rather a historically conditioned
mode of speech that proposes “the collective past,” that is, the
typical reactions of the political community, as a normative
model of conduct. National characterology is thus not “meaning-
less,” as many of the “Westernizers” would claim, but in fact mir-
rors a certain historical experience, though, of course, it cannot
be taken directly as a normative canon of a national culture, and
one should be especially wary of defining it deductively. Antohi’s
hermeneutic program thus invites us not to “distill” a canon (as is
the case with the extremely popular Romanian intellectual past-
time of actualizing the political/metaphysical message of
Eminescu) but not to repudiate it either. These two equally dis-
torted and one-sided attitudes are based on a more general cul-
tural fixation in the Romanian intellectual tradition, which can be
described as the psychological duality of self-aggrandizing and
self-despising, mutually conditioning each other, and rooted in
the same crisis of identity and self-evaluation. Antohi’s strategic
aim is to break through the aura of these canonized normative
images of the national community and to show that various mod-
els of society, camouflaged as objective descriptions of reality,
are in fact utopian constructs and “mutants” of imported ideolog-
ical traditions. Regarded from this perspective, the political-social
40. Sorin Antohi, Civitas Imaginalis. Istorie s7i utopie în cultura româna (Bucharest, Romania:
Litera, 1994), French version: Imaginaire culturel et realité politique dans la Roumanie
moderne: le stigmate et l’utopie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999).

program of the generation of 1848 becomes a “pas7optist utopia,”
while the political oeuvre of Mihai Eminescu, hailed by the
protochronists as the peak of objective sociological analysis, is
described as a “regressive utopia.”
This leads us to one of Antohi’s most important discoveries,
namely, that the autochthonist canon constructs the discourse of
Romanian specificity from imported ideological elements. This
question also stands in the focus of his analysis of Cioran’s writ-
ings. Antohi pushes the argument of Matei Ca*linescu even fur-
ther: He seeks to give not only a generational and personal-
psychological rendering of Cioran’s philosophical dilemmas but
refers him back to the entire tradition of Romanian cultural self-
thematization and also seeks to locate him in a more general
model of the Eastern European crises of cultural and national
identity. He analyses Cioran’s dilemmas from the perspective of
the formation of Romanian political attitudes and institutions and
claims that accumulated traditions and experiences did in fact
create a certain stigmatic collective-psychological character.
Antohi’s “offer”—formally similar to the character-discourses—is
that this stigmatic identity complex can only be overcome by self-
knowledge, that is, confronting the recurrent patterns of collec-
tive attitudes. Nevertheless, this “therapy” of self-understanding
cannot unfold in the heights of national metaphysics; it should
happen, rather, on the ground of historical reconstruction and in
view of the comparative history of political ideas and discourses.
The only way to get rid of this burden of stigmatic identity is
therefore to place Romanian culture in broader comparative frame-
works and, while relativizing this ahistoric self-mystification, to
abandon the thesis of “incomparable uniqueness.” Setting a
potential program for the new generation of Romanian histori-
ans, Antohi called the political implications of his analyses “the
third discourse,” signaling his distance from both of the preva-
lent modes of speech that are organizing Romanian cultural self-
interpretation.41 While “cultural Bovarysm” measures everyday
Romanian realities to an idealized image of Western civilization
41. See Sorin Antohi, “Românii în anii ‘90: geografie simbolica* s7i identitate colectiva*,” in
Exercitiul distantei. Discursuri, societati, metode (Bucharest, Romania: Nemira, 1997), 292-
316.

(thus reproducing the communication gap between the “West-
ernized” elite and the “uncultivated” masses), the utopia of
autochthonism, which is ultimately a critique of the West taken
from Western sources, self-complacently sinks into the false
security of a glorious, but fictitious, Golden Age of national autar-
chy. In contrast, the third discourse would ideally mediate
between these two positions: “deconstructing” them and putting
forward a creative synthesis.
V.
The study of the communist period has been one of the most
dynamic areas of research on Romania, carried out in an interdis-
ciplinary endeavor, by prominent Western historians, political
scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists. The study of the
relationship between communism and nationalism underwent
several stages of development that followed largely the evolution
of Western academic paradigms related to Eastern Europe: from
social and diplomatic history to anthropology and interdisciplin-
ary studies on national identity.
The first phase of the communist regime in Romania (1944-58)
was usually described, in Kenneth Jowitt’s words, as an
antitraditionalist “breaking through,” namely, “the decisive alter-
nation or destruction of values, structures, and behaviors which
are perceived by a new elite as compromising or contributing to
the actual or potential existence of alternative centers of
power.”42 According to most of the observers, the turning point in
the evolution of the communist regime was the abandonment of
the pro-Soviet foreign policy that took place in the period
between 1958 and 1964, going along with the emergence of the
national-communist ideology. The outbreak of Romania’s diplo-
matic conflict with the Soviet Union shifted the research agenda
to the study of Romania’s “strategy of partial alignment.” In a
comprehensive analysis of the connection between Romania’s
domestic and foreign policy, a prominent expert of Romanian
communism, the political scientist Michael Shafir, pointed out
42. Kenneth Jowitt, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of
Romania, 1944-1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 7.

that the Ceaus7escu regime employed a policy of “simulating
change-simulating permanence.” Internally, the regime created a
facade of mobilization and change to facilitate its control over
society while, externally, Ceaus7escu simulated permanent alle-
giance to the Soviet Bloc to avoid a military intervention while
constantly reassuring the West of Romania’s autonomous course
of foreign policy.43
The advent of “Western” anthropological research in Central
and Eastern Europe in the late 1970s and 1980s revolutionized
the study of Romanian communism. The country was a preferred
destination of Western anthropologists and benefited from an
exceptional concentration of American and French scholars such
as Katherine Verdery, Gail Kligman, and Claude Karnoouh. On
the whole, anthropology brought a new research agenda to East-
ern Europe that encompassed the study of culture and cultural
politics, temporal and spatial representations, social relations,
and forms of collective identity. In regard to the study of national
movements, anthropologists stressed the necessity of direct
access to texts produced by proponents of the “national ideol-
ogy” in a given country as well as to the social and cultural con-
texts in which they emerged.44 Fieldwork became a mandatory
and essential prerequisite for any contextual analysis of national-
ism. In the long run, the interaction between these “professional
strangers”45 and local academic communities generated a rich
collaboration that has shaped the research agenda of the disci-
pline as a whole.
In a path-breaking book, Transylvanian Villagers, Katherine
Verdery challenged the classical paradigm of modernization that
dominated Western social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s.46
Although initially Verdery focused on post-1945 interethnic and
economic relations in Romania, the dynamics of the topic led her
to a deeper historical analysis. To explore the antecedents of con-
43. Michael Shafir, Romania: Politics, Economy and Society. Political Stagnation and Simu-
lated Change (Boulder, CO: L. Rienner Pinter Publishers, 1985), 163.
44. See Verdery, “Methods,” in National Ideology under Socialism, 19-20.
45. See Klaus Roth, “European Ethnology and Intercultural Communications,” Ethnologia
Europea 26 (1994): 3-16.
46. Katherine Verdery, Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic and
Ethnic Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

temporary events, Verdery turned to the process of state building
in Austria-Hungary and focused on the transition from the impe-
rial legacy to the Romanian nation-state. In regard to the Habs-
burg Empire, Verdery stressed the absence of an overwhelmingly
dominant class or ethnic community. Instead, she emphasized
the competition between rival social-political groups, a process
“particularly apt for agrarian societies embarking on bureaucratic
modernization.”47 On the basis of this case study, Verdery rede-
fined ethnicity as a configuration of extremely complex social-
political relations. Although she did not overtly criticize the tenets
of Romanian official historiography, she was, by implication, going
against the essentialist understanding of ethnicity in the national-
ist canon. As the author herself described in a self-reflective rec-
ollection about the reception of the book, she was repeatedly
accused of being insensitive to Romanian history, and was even
labeled a “Hungarian spy.”48 Her subsequent book, National Ide-
ology under Socialism, was, in many ways, the result of her puz-
zlement in the face of these highly emotional reactions, aiming at
the interpretation of the strong nationalist upsurge that occurred
in Romania in the 1980s.
To explain this phenomenon, Verdery offers a sociological-
anthropological interpretation, concentrating mostly on the
intense cultural conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s. She developed a
complex model of “cultural market” to interpret the intricate
interplay of ideological frameworks and market mechanisms in
Romanian cultural policies under communism. From this per-
spective, Verdery sought to contextualize the instrumentalization
of nationalism by a regime marked by radical scarcity. The core
of Verdery’s analysis concerned the emergence of “national com-
munism.” To grasp its most important elements, Verdery revisited
the paramount conflicts over the Romanian cultural canon, rang-
ing from the issue of historiographic protochronism to the ambig-
uous cultural impact of the philosopher Constantin Noica.
Verdery argued that communist political elites neither re-created
47. Ibid., 5.
48. See her “How I Became Nationed,” in Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy, eds.,
Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1999), 341-44.

Romanian national ideology nor aimed at a conscious syncretism
with Marxist ideology. Rather, national ideology has been a con-
stitutive feature of modern Romanian cultural and political think-
ing. Consequently, once in power, the communists were “forced”
to integrate these cultural productions into Romania’s “socialist
political economy.”
The main research question, from this perspective, was the
ability of the Party to engage the intelligentsia and to use nation-
alism as an instrument of its own legitimization. In Verdery’s
interpretation, communist regimes used a combination of three
forms of control over society, namely, remunerative, coercive,
and symbolic-ideological. This model explains the considerable
shifts in the cultural policy of the Romanian communist regime
under Ceaus7escu. The first years witnessed a relative liberaliza-
tion of the regime coupled with a rapid economic development,
and a remarkable cultural boom. The growing institutional and
discursive autonomy of certain intellectual centers alerted the
communist leadership, who started to feel threatened in their
position of discursive control. As a result, the earlier attempts of
remunerative control were reversed, and with the “July Theses”
(6 and 9 July 1971), the regime shifted to coercive and symbolic-
ideological forms of control over society by “institutionalizing”
the discourse of national identity, suppressing the alternative dis-
cursive centers, and creating a privileged role for a conformist
cultural elite composed mainly of historians, writers, and philos-
ophers. As Verdery pointed out, the discursive continuity not-
withstanding, this “new nationalism” did not replicate the pre–
World War II forms but meant rather their “creative exegesis.”
The American social scientist Gail Kligman has also had a
strong impact on the study of communism in Romania. Although
a trained sociologist, in her first book on Romania, Kligman
showed a remarkable opening to anthropology.49 In a second
major book on the country, she offered a fascinating itinerary
into the social conditions and “rites of passage” of the region of
49. Gail Kligman, Calus: Symbolic Transformation in Romanian Ritual, foreword by Mircea
Eliade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Republished as Calus: Symbolic Trans-
formation in Romanian Ritual (Bucharest, Romania: Romanian Cultural Foundation,
1999).

50
Maramures7. After 1989, Kligman published an authoritative
book on the relationship between gender and nation-statehood
in Romania during communism.51 While acknowledging that
control over reproduction is a matter of universal concern,
Kligman concentrated on an extreme case of forced reproduc-
tion: the pronatalist policies implemented by the Ceaus7escu
regime. Based on substantive fieldwork, including interviews
with various social actors who were involved in the implementa-
tion of these policies, Kligman brought to life distressing events
in a highly emotional account. Kligman’s book is, however, ani-
mated by a dense scholarly agenda, focusing on the ethnography
of the politics of reproduction. This theme of study led her to the
exploration of the broader problem of the “ethnography of the
state,” defined as “an analysis of the rhetorical and institutional-
ized practices of the state within the public sphere and their inte-
gration into daily life.”52 She exposed the intrinsic relationship
between nation-state and gender and portrayed reproduction
policies as a fundamental part of programs of social and cultural
homogenization. The bulk of the book focuses on everyday life
in a totalitarian society and on mechanisms of implementing
social conformity and extracting political legitimacy. Kligman
also offers a comprehensive analysis of the main features of the
“paternalist socialist state,” whose social policies blurred the bor-
der between public and private and assumed the main social
tasks that were traditionally fulfilled by individual males in the
private sphere. By exposing the patriarchal nature of political
order in the nation-state, Kligman challenged the traditionalist
nationalist discourses. This approach opened up a vast research
agenda that had been largely neglected by Romanian historiogra-
phy: no classical synthesis on Romanian history mentioned
women as social actors in the public sphere. More recently, how-
ever, the sociopolitical status of women has been covered by
50. Gail Kligman, The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in
Transylvania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
51. Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu’s Romania
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); see also Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, eds.,
Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000).
52. Kligman, Politics of Duplicity, 3.

numerous studies that explored the relationship between gender
and the nation-state and the movements for the emancipation of
women in Romania.53
These sophisticated Western interpretations of the communist
regime in Romania went much above the head of Romanian his-
toriography. To be sure, after 1989, the need to forge a coherent
rendering of the communist past featured prominently in Roma-
nian historiographic and public debates, being intimately linked
with competing visions of development. One camp asserted that
the communist regime in Romania was imposed on the society
and never managed to gain “domestic” legitimacy. In contrast, an
opposing claim was that even if “communism” was introduced
by the Soviet army, it nevertheless succeeded in generating social
and political support and achieving a certain political legitimacy.
Unfortunately, academic research on the communist period was
placed in the narrow zone that was left in between these unilat-
eral and highly politicized perspectives. Historians addressing
the communist period tended to focus solely on political and
institutional history and concentrated on such topics as the his-
tory of the communist repression, military resistance and political
dissidence against the regime, or the political history of the
Romanian Communist Party. At the same time, other subjects,
such as the social history of the communist regime and the status
of minorities under communist rule, have received limited
attention.
While historiography was far from meeting the public demand
for comprehensive interpretations, political science played a
leading role in formatting the public debate about communism in
Romania.54 One of the most prominent scholars specializing in
53. See Ma*da*lina Nicolaescu, ed., Who Are We? On Women’s Identity in Modern Romania
(Bucharest, Romania: Anima, 1996); Maria Bucur, “In Praise of Well-Born Mothers: On the
Development of Eugenicist Gender Roles in Interwar Romania,” East European Politics and
Societies 9 (1995): 123-42.
54. See Pavel Câmpeanu, România: coada pentru hrana, un mod de viat 7a (Bucharest, Roma-
nia: Litera, 1994). This analytical effort was joined by Romanian cultural anthropologists,
sociologists and social psychologists. See Smaranda Vultur, Istorie Traita, Istorie Povestita:
Deportarea în Baragan (1951-1956) (Timis7oara, Romania: Amarcord, 1997); Eniko_
Magyari-Vincze, Antropologia politicii identitare nationaliste (Cluj, Romania: EFES, 1997);
and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Transilvania subiectiva* (Bucharest, Romania: Humanitas,
1999).

the history of communism in Eastern Europe, Vladimir
Tisma*neanu, placed the study of the Romanian communist
regime in a highly instructive comparative regional perspective.
To explain the evolution of Romanian politics, he developed the
concept of “national Stalinism.” This term refers to regimes that
instrumentalized a nationalist ideological framework while
opposing any significant political change.55 He also redirected the
research agenda of communism in Romania toward the study of
the political culture, providing a subtle and sophisticated account
of the interplay of Marxism and the national ideology.56 In Rein-
venting Politics, Tisma*neanu highlighted the importance of pre-
communist political experience and the communist path of polit-
ical development in the evolution of the Eastern European coun-
tries after 1989.57 He also emphasized the contribution of dissi-
dent intellectuals and of “civil society” to the fall of communism
and the pursuit of democracy in Eastern Europe. In Fantasies of
Salvation, Tisma*neanu focused on the role of political myths
after the communist period.58 He identified three main types of
dominant political myths: anti-utopian, the embrace of values of
individual autonomy; neo-utopian, the rejection of modernity in
the name of collective dreams of salvation; and liberalism, which
is taking shape in the region. In addition, he provided a compre-
hensive account of the contemporary debates between
Westernizers and autochthonists in Romania.
On the whole, the most important development in the past
decade concerning the emergence of national communism has
been the identification of its roots in the 1950s during the rule of
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1948-65). The ambiguous project of
modernization, launched by the communist leadership in the fif-
ties, provides a fertile ground for rethinking the analytical rele-
vance of the dichotomy between Westernizers and auto-
55. Vladimir Tisma*neanu, Fantoma lui Gheorghiu-Dej (Bucharest, Romania: Univers, 1995),
77.
56. Tisma*neanu, The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1988).
57. Tisma*neanu, Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: Free
Press, 1992).
58. Tisma*neanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist
Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

chthonists, since the regime renounced the political component
of Westernization and appealed to autarchic economic and dis-
cursive strategies to catch up economically with the West. An
interesting interpretation of this ambivalence was proposed by
the Romanian political scientist Stelian Ta*nase.59 He argued that,
striving to maintain control over society, the Romanian commu-
nist political elite alternated periods of repression (1948-53 and
1957-61) with periods of economic growth and political relax-
ation (1953-57 and 1961-65). Increasingly deviating from Mos-
cow’s orders, Romanian leaders gradually abandoned Marxism-
Leninism and adopted an autarchist policy of modernization.
Their program was supported by the new professional elites—
emerging as a result of the forced industrialization after 1958.
This support led to the formation of a new alliance between pro-
fessional and political elite groups, and the national ideology was
in a way the most advantageous framework of this
“modernizatory” project. On this basis, Ta*nase identified three
main sources of national-communism: the redefinition of the
relationship between “local” elite and Moscow, the identification
of this program of autarchic modernization with “national inter-
ests,” and the interwar discursive framework of Romanian
national identity.
The status of ethnic minorities under the communist regime,
and its relationship with the communist policies of moderniza-
tion and social homogenization, has also been left unexplored by
mainstream Romanian historiography. It is not by chance, then,
that the most important works on these topics are written by for-
eign authors. Dennis Deletant—a prominent English scholar who
wrote an authoritative study on the Romanian Communist Party
during the leadership of Gheorghiu-Dej, and also the first schol-
arly history of the Securitate60—offered a comprehensive treatment
of the status of ethnic minorities under the communist regime
in Romania, once again identifying the roots of Ceaus7escu’s
59. Stelian Ta*nase, Elite si societate. Guvernarea Gheorghiu-Dej, 1948-1965 (Bucharest, Roma-
nia: Humanitas, 1998); Anatomia mistificarii: 1944-1989 (Bucharest, Romania: Humanitas,
1997).
60. Dennis Deletant, Communist Terror in Romania: Gheorghiu-Dej and the Police State, 1948-
1965 (New York: Hurst, 1999); Ceausescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in
Romania, 1965-1989 (London: Hurst, 1995).

61
national-communist synthesis in the 1950s. Deletant pointed
out that Romania was one of the most active allies of the Soviet
Union against Hungary’s 1956 attempt of defection from the
Communist Bloc and that this event had a decisive impact on the
evolution of the Romanian communist regime. In Deletant’s
view, to reward their collaboration, Moscow granted the Roma-
nian leaders a larger autonomy in the national question. This had
a negative impact on the status of Hungarian minority in Roma-
nia, as the Romanian leadership implemented a set of restrictive
measures, such as abolishing the Hungarian autonomous terri-
tory, curtailing the minority educational system, and increasing
political repression. This process culminated in the 1980s.
Assessing the acute diplomatic conflict between Romania and
Hungary, Deletant did not negate the impact of the conflicting
historical legacies. He asserted, however, that the Romanian-
Hungarian confrontation was generated, first and foremost, by
the ideological conflict between the reformist stance, assumed by
Kádár’s regime, and the “neo-Stalinism” of Ceaus7escu.
VI.
This article seeks to offer an overview of the recent debates on
the history of Romanian national identity. On this basis, the con-
cluding part draws some general conclusions concerning the
complex texture of contacts and convergence between local and
Western scholars working on Romania. In a way, both branches
underwent a process of reconstruction, marked by sharp institu-
tional and methodological challenges. It is quite obvious that the
historical profession in Romania faces a profound crisis of orien-
tation. After decades of theoretical isolation and brutal political
interference, and without authoritative models at hand, the bulk
of Romanian historiography turned toward its own pre-Marxist
traditions, such as the “critical school” of the turn of the century
or the “new historical school” of the interwar period. This uncriti-
cal reliance on traditions reproduced numerous traditional prob-
lems of history writing in Romania, such as the absence of theo-
61. Barbulescu et al., Istoria românilor.

retical debates and of interdisciplinary dialogue, the primor-
dialist perception of ethnicity, and the close relationship
between historiography and political power.
The historiographic debates after 1989 have not automatically
reproduced, however, the sharp conflict between the ideal-typical
autochthonist and Westernizer positions. A more detailed look at
developments in Romanian historiography is in fact able to
nuance the above-mentioned picture and to break it into differ-
ent analytical segments. Although the duality between
Europeanists and nationalists continues to form identities in the
cultural and the political sphere, it does not necessarily corre-
spond to the conflicts of historiographic paradigms. The concept
of Europe itself was invested with different meanings in various
contexts. In the second half of the thirties, it was precisely a cer-
tain culturally modernist pro-European stance that advocated the
dynamically expanding totalitarian ideologies. Thus, the polarity
between Westernizers and autochthonists has never been fixed:
its specific content and participants are permanently changing,
depending on the social-political and ideological mutations in
society.
Although in a different manner, the “Western” historiographic
production on Romania has also faced profound challenges. First
and foremost, one can identify a paradigm shift in Eastern Euro-
pean studies—from social-political history to anthropology and
intellectual history. While the methodology of comparative
research in social-economic history has been relatively devel-
oped, the recent “cultural turn” made it far more complicated to
devise comprehensive comparisons of divergent intellectual tra-
ditions that are mediated by highly dissimilar processes of recep-
tion and characterized by different forms of internal dynamism.
Political events have also aggravated the crisis of interpretative
paradigms. After the temporary outburst of interests in Eastern
Europe that followed the events of 1989, the region has gradually
lost its pivotal place on the international agenda. One of the gen-
eral reactions to this situation was to develop a broader geo-
graphical scope of studies. Nevertheless, some of the successful
cases notwithstanding, Eastern European studies, as generalized
“area studies,” proved to be rather unproductive and has

remained mostly on a journalistic level. This is due principally to
the fact that countries and historiographic cultures in Eastern
Europe are very diverse and their relationship is extremely com-
plex. It was problematic to extrapolate a regional narrative based
on a couple of case studies.
The dynamism of the historiographic production on Romania
makes us conclude that the potential solution to all these dilem-
mas lies in the gradual blurring of hitherto disparate positions
and canons. “Western” methodological references gradually
become a common basis of professional selection and socializa-
tion. As more and more Eastern Europeans are studying in West-
ern institutions, and more and more Western students are able to
conduct field research in Eastern Europe, there is an irreversible
convergence of “external” and “internal” production, and there is
a chance for a previously unthinkable “double academic social-
ization,” creating empathic, but also critical, discursive positions,
and reflecting upon the intricate questions of identity from out-
side and inside the national canon. We can also observe the blur-
ring of the borderline between social and intellectual history
writing. This is partly due to the reemergence of the problem of
collective identity as the focus of the research agenda, a situation
that generated a greater emphasis on methodologies hitherto
neglected by mainstream historians, such as oral history or histor-
ical anthropology. These approaches naturally mediate between
the social and intellectual perspectives, and also contribute to the
formation of alternative institutional frameworks and research
projects that seek to analyze social conditions and cultural dis-
courses simultaneously. From this perspective, these two direc-
tions of interpretation are not only compatible but even incon-
ceivable without each other: to understand “social conditions,”
we textualize them and study them in their discursive setting,
while the discourses are contextualized in view of their social
frameworks.
This convergence, and the deeper comparative insight into the
mechanisms of social and cultural reception, effectively
problematize some of the conventional narratives about “exter-
nal impacts” and “internal dynamism.” Cultural phenomena,
which are considered by the self-centered local historiographic

canons as local products, are identified as imported. At the same
time, general megatrends, such as modernization, state building,
and fascism are contextualized in view of the particular local
framework that actually accommodated them. As a consequence
of this blurring of “external” and “internal” perspectives, the tra-
ditional narrative of the conflict between Westernizers and
autochthonists collapses, being replaced by a complex social and
intellectual landscape of various cultural configurations, perma-
nently rearranged according to the lines of the actual conflict.
Moreover, the convergence between local and Western research
might lead to the complete re-thematization of Romanian history.
This is relevant for the case of other Eastern European countries
as well, and it proves that, while writing on the “local” problems
of Eastern Europe, we are not engaging with “peripheral
mutants” but seeking to answer basic European cultural dilem-
mas. Studying the syncretic, overlapping, and conflicting forms
of collective identity abundantly present in this region, we are
ultimately testing the validity of our common “European”
historiographic framework of understanding social and political
modernity.


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430 In Search of a Usable Past

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East European Politics and Societies 431

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432 In Search of a Usable Past

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East European Politics and Societies 433

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434 In Search of a Usable Past

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East European Politics and Societies 435

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436 In Search of a Usable Past

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East European Politics and Societies 437

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438 In Search of a Usable Past

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East European Politics and Societies 439

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440 In Search of a Usable Past

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East European Politics and Societies 441

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442 In Search of a Usable Past

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