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Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-socialist Romania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Katherine Verdery
Katherine Verdery*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

For western observers, a striking concomitant of the end of communist party rule was the sudden appearance of national movements and national sentiments. We were not alone in our surprise: even more taken aback were party leaders, somehow persuaded by their own propaganda that party rule had resolved the so–called "national question." That this was far from true was evident all across the region: from separatism in Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia and the Baltic and other Soviet republics; to bloodshed between Romania's Hungarians and Romanians, and between Bulgaria's Turks and Bulgarians; to Gypsy-bashing in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria; and widespread anti-Semitism–even in countries like Poland where there were virtually no Jews.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , Summer 1993 , pp. 179 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1993

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References

1. Earlier versions of this paper were delivered as lectures at George Washington University, Duke University and the University of Rochester. I am grateful for suggestions from the organizers and audiences on those occasions, as well as to the following people for comments on earlier drafts: John Borneman, József Böröcz, Gerald Creed, Susan Gal, Ashraf Ghani, Ewa Hauser, Gail Kligman, Melvin Kohn, Andrew Lass and an anonymous reviewer.

2. Because none of the countries ruled by communist parties described themselves as “communist,” I prefer not to use this term but speak instead of “socialism” and “post-socialist” Romania.

3. Eminent Yale historian Ivo Banac discovered as much when an initial invitation to appear on a national news program foundered on his refusal to defend this explanation (Ivo Banac, personal communication).

4. See Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

5. It may serve nationalist east European politicians as a way of justifying their actions and western policy-makers as a justification for their inaction.

6. Some would object to this usage, arguing that not all of eastern Europe— especially Romania—is post-socialist. While I sympathize with the argument, I have spelled out my reasons for disagreeing in my paper (with Gail Kligman) “Romania after Ceausescu: Post-Communist Communism?” in Eastern Europe in Revolution, ed. Ivo Banac (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

7. I am grateful to Ashraf Ghani for suggesting this phrasing, in another context.

8. Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 18–20 Google Scholar.

9. In many cases, issues that had engaged much passionate debate in the 1920s and 1930s began to recur in political discussions of the 1970s and 1980s. For example, in Poland and Romania, interwar arguments reappeared as to whether or not the Polish or Romanian soul is quintessentially peasant, as opposed to urban and cosmopolitan. See Verdery, Katherine, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceaus,escu's Romania (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 5; and Banac, Ivo and Verdery, Katherine, eds., National Ideology and National Character in Interwar Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

10. Although not phrased in exactly these terms, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse's analysis was perhaps the first to signal the significance of this fact for the Soviet Union. See her Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt (New York: Newsweek Books, 1979). For further discussion of the significance of reified nationality in the Soviet context, see Zaslavsky, Victor, “Nationalism and Democratic Transition in Post-Communist Societies” Daedalus 121 (Spring 1992): 97-121Google Scholar; and Philip G., Roeder, “Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization” World Politics 43 (1991): 196–232 Google Scholar.

11. Valery Tishkov, “Fire in the Brain: Inventions and Manifestations of Soviet Ethnonationalism,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, 1991. See also works cited in note 10.

12. The Romanian Communist Party claimed, for instance, to represent the national minorities proportionately in its membership and governing bodies. This sort of “affirmative action” program necessitates, of course, a prior reification of group identities.

13. See Verdery, Katherine, “Theorizing Socialism: A Prologue to the ‘Transition,'” American Ethnologist 18: 419–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burawoy, Michael, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism, and Socialism (London: Verso, 1985), chap. 4Google Scholar; Kornai, Jànos, Economics of Shortage (New York: North Holland, 1980)Google Scholar. For an expanded version of the argument summarized above, see Verdery, , “Ethnic Relations, Economies of Shortage, and the Transition in Eastern Europe,” in Socialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Local Practice, ed. Hann, C. M. (London: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar.

14. The analysis of socialism and shortage was least applicable to Yugoslavia, yet the disparities among regions produced a consciousness of relative shortage that was perhaps of similar consequence.

15. See my Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic, and Ethnic Change (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).

16. As of this writing, it is unclear just how far the Romanian government will go in decollectivizing agriculture. In February 1991 a land law was passed but its implementation has been delayed, and in the electoral campaign of fall 1992, the Democratic National Salvation Front (which won the largest percentage of the vote) called into question the wisdom of decollectivizing. It does seem likely, at the least, that villagers will have a clearer sense than before of the amounts of land that are “theirs,” even if maintained within a form of cooperative cultivation; the argument in my text would hold for this situation. The decollectivization provided for in the land law was to apply to collective farms (Cooperative Agricole de Produc(ie, or CAPs) but not to state farms, which comprise about 30% of the arable surface in Romania.

17. See Sergei Arutiunov, “Ethnic Conflicts in the Caucasus,” paper presented at the Johns Hopkins University, 18 February 1993.

18. Ibid.

19. Hayden, Robert M., “Constitutional Nationalism in the Formerly Yugoslav Republics” Slavic Review 51 (1992): 654–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See especially his discussion on 657-58, concerning how the Croatian constitution systematically excludes Serbs.

20. Hungarians with whom I spoke generally viewed the resulting constitution as discriminating against them; Romanians saw it as giving Hungarians suitable rights but not the “privileges” they claim Hungarians were demanding.

21. In the run-off elections for president, these parties urged their members to vote for President Ion Iliescu. Their programs, like his, are skeptical of “Europe” and reform, preferring policies that will preserve the institutions and privileges of the former Communist Party (which institutionally no longer exists, but several organizations can be seen as its heirs). The influence of these parties is extended by publications such as the weekly paper of the Greater Romania Party, which has a very large circulation. In summer 1991 Greater Romania apparently had a print run of about 600,000—that is, almost one for every ten members of the Romanian labor force. (It fell to about 200,000 by the following summer.)

22. See e.g., Ion Cristoiu, “Un document care nu rezolvă nimic,” Expres magazin 2, no. 28 (17-23 July 1991): 16; also Nicolae Manolescu, “Ideologic extremistă si joe politic,” Româania literară 24, no. 33 (15 August 1991): 2; “Sub cizma Securităţii,” Rornânul liber 7, no. 3 (1991): 8; and Dennis Deletant, “Convergence vs. Divergence in Romania: the Role of the Vatra Românească Movement in Transylvania” (ms, author's files).

23. See the report in “Revista revistelor,” România literară (12 December 1992): 24.

24. My sources are, for Hungary, József Böröcz, personal communication; for Poland, Adam Michnik, “The Two Faces of Europe,” New York Review of Books (19 July 1990): 7; for Slovakia, Andrew Lass, personal communication. My argument holds for some of the Soviet nationalisms as well, where a move from communist boss to nationalist leader similarly afforded a new lease on power.

25. An excellent account of the link between anti-communism, old elites and nationalism is to be found in Adam Michnik, op. cit.

26. It has long been rumored that at least a wing of the Romanian Securitate was funded by the KGB and that this support continued after the December 1989 “events. ”

27. This is not a necessary association, for in other countries former communists have found it possible to take up the banner of reform. I suspect it is partly Romania's lesser likelihood of rapid economic growth and partly the positions already occupied by other political forces in Romania that relegated the ex-communists to the nationalist option.

28. Officially, 79 parties presented candidates but a total of 144 considered themselves to be participants. See Petre Datculescu, “How Romania Voted: An Analysis of the Parliamentary and Presidential Elections of September 27, 1992,” ms, author's files.

29. For the Romanian case, see Dennis Deletant, op. cit.; for Bulgaria, see Gerald Creed, “The Bases of Bulgaria's Ethnic Policies,” Anthropology of East Europe Review 9 (1990): 11-17.

30. Many Romanians believe that the Hungarian party was organized from Budapest, hence its capacity to organize so rapidly and well. This view is lent some credence by a Hungarian journalist in Bucharest, who explained to me that the day after the revolution, he had been given the text of a declaration of principle for a Hungarian party, to print in his newspaper, and then a day later had been given a “revised version” that to his eyes was not of local origin: it was typed in a typeface not generally found on typewriters available in Romania. This journalist suspects that Hungarian emigres from Transylvania, now living in Budapest, were responsible for the party's rapid organization.

31. For details on this process, see Staniszkis, Jadwiga, The Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe: The Polish Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Stark, David, “Privatization in Hungary: From Plan to Market or from Plan to Clan?” East European Politics and Societies 4 (1990): 351–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The term “entrepratchiks” is my own.

32. The historians are especially important, for, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, “Historians are to nationalism as poppy growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market” ( Hobsbawm, E. J., “Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today” Anthropology Today 8 [1992]: 3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

33. In Romania, it happens that those most likely to take this line also served as Ceausescu's court intellectuals. In the confusion surrounding the dictator's fall, they lost influential positions (as heads of institutes, or university professors or editors of important publications) to intellectuals from the opposition. Thus, in that country the humanist-intellectual nationalists coalesce with nationalists privileged by the former regime.

34. These comments accord well with Steven Sampson's observation that many of the ethnic conflicts in the region are the direct consequence of the transition to democracy and markets, just as African “tribalism” was the consequence of the formation of new states. See his “Is There an Anthropology of Socialism?” Anthropology Today 7 (1991): 19.

35. Andrew Lass, personal communication.

36. See, e.g., Stewart, Michael, “Gypsies, the Work Ethic, and Hungarian Socialism,” in Socialism: Ideals, Ideologies, and Local Practice, ed. Hann, C. M. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 187–90Google Scholar.

37. See Marody, Mira, “The Political Attitudes of Polish Society in the Period of Systematic Transitions” Praxis International 11: 227–39Google Scholar; and Ost, David, “Interests and Politics in Post-Communist Society: Problems in the Transition in Eastern Europe” Anthropology of East Europe Review 10 (1991): 7 Google Scholar.

38. Katherine Verdery, “From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 9 (1994).

39. Lefort, Claude, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 297Google Scholar.

40. I borrow this phrasing from John Borneman. See also Jowitt, Ken, “Moscow ‘Centre,'” Eastern European Politics and Societies 1 (1987): 296–348 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. See Lefort, op. cit., 298.

42. The idea of representing the social whole entered into many of the opposition parties, after the changes of 1989. Leaders of Poland's Solidarity, for example, before it broke apart, saw themselves as successfully representing the whole, unlike the Communist Party (see Marody, ibid., and Szacki, Jerzy, “Polish Democracy: Dreams and Reality” Social Research 58 [Winter 1991]: 718 Google Scholar). Anthropological observers of electoral politicking in Romania and Hungary have noted the same thing. Gail Kligman and I attended the founding congress of a new Romanian political party in summer 1991, at which it was clear that the party saw itself as representing all of Romanian society, rather than a selected group of interests within it; the governing National Salvation Front employed the same rhetoric. Susan Gal likewise observed a local electoral campaign in Hungary in which the most common claim was to represent the whole interest, the community interest (see Gal, “Local Politics in Post-Socialist Hungary,” ms).

43. Urban, Jan, “Nationalism as a Totalitarian Ideology” Social Research 58 (1991): 776 Google Scholar.

44. See also Marody, op. cit., 237.

45. I am grateful for a lecture by Czech psychotherapist Helena Klimova, which made the significance of this point apparent to me.

46. I have this story from psychologist Jerrold Post of George Washington University.

47. A similar suggestion is made by Sampson, op. cit., 19.

48. Barth, Fredrik, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969)Google Scholar.

49. See also Szacki, op. cit., 717-18.

50. See Sampson, Steven, “Towards an Anthropology of Collaboration in Eastern Europe” Culture and History 8 (1991): 116 Google Scholar.

51. Communists have not been “othered” in precisely this way everywhere. Andrew Lass notes that in 1991 Czechoslovakia, the communists were not represented as ethnic aliens but as pariahs, lepers, sick or diseased people (Lass, personal communication).

52. My thanks to Melvin Kohn, who posed both the problem and part of the solution I offer here.

53. We see the same mixing of registers—communist others and ethnic ones—in the vexed question of who should be blamed for the disaster everyone is now facing. After the “revolutions,” establishing blame was an obsession all across the bloc, perhaps least marked in Hungary and particularly virulent in Romania and the former Soviet Union. Russian sociologist Igor’ Kon argues (personal communication) that Russians think it more important to establish who is guilty than to decide what to do. The obsession with blaming facilitates substituting the ethnic dichotomy for the communist one—precisely, as Czech President Havel explains, because everyone was complicitous with the communist authorities, who therefore cannot be uniquely blamed.

54. The closest attempt I know of is Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski's paper on social schizophrenia, “Dimorphism of Values and Social Schizophrenia: A Tentative Description,” Sisyphus 3 (1982): 81-89. See also Ilie, Bâdescu, Sincronism european şi cultură criticd românească (Bucharest: Ed. Ştiinţifică, 1984)Google Scholar, which has a number of interesting observations linking “social schizophrenia” with the articulation of modes of production.

55. I thank Susan Gal for this observation.

56. From “Destinul culturii romanesti,” cited in George, Alexandru, “Onesti bibere” Româniă literara 24 (15 August 1991): 4 Google Scholar.

57. Toma, Florin, “De veghe în elanul de ocară” România literară 24 (19 September 1991): 3 Google Scholar.

58. See also Volkan, Vamik D., The Need to Have Allies and Enemies: From Clinical Practice to International Relationships (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1988), ixGoogle Scholar.

59. In taking this line, I follow Aleksander Hertz's views on anti-Semitism: “It is not the few Jews … who are the source of the anti-semitism but certain … wideranging diseases that eat away at the society in which [they] live. Jews become only a convenient means to facilitate the polarization of certain feelings and reactions” (The Jews in Polish Culture, trans. Richard Lourie [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988], 1).

60. See Nicolae, Gheorghe, “Roma-Gypsy Ethnicity” Social Research 48 (1991): 832, 833Google Scholar.

61. See Aleksander Hertz, op. cit.

62. Jews and Gypsies share an important feature, related to their being “non-European” groups: both (until the formation of Israel) are stateless peoples who defy national borders, in an area obsessed with statehood and borders. They are therefore particularly good symbols of the border-violating mobility of international capital.

63. This quotation is by Greater Romania Party Senator Corneliu Vadim Tudor, from his paper Greater Romania. I have it from an issue of the opposition paper 22 (4-10 February 1993): 12.

64. Şorban, Raoul, Fantasma imperiului ungar şi casa Europei (Bucharest: Ed. Globus, 1990)Google Scholar.

65. See the discussion of this in the magazine 22: “Masa rotundă la GDS: Ultimele luari de poziţie ale U. D. M. R. privitor la minorităţI’ şi problema naţională,” 22 3 (12-18 November 1992): 8-11.

66. I refer here to the Congress of Hungarian Emigres and the World Conference on Transylvania, both held in Budapest during July 1992. Parts of them were shown on Romanian television.

67. See Williams, Brackette F., “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 401–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68. See also my “Whither ‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism'?” Daedalus, forthcoming (Summer 1993).

69. See National Ideology, conclusion. “Complementary schismogenesis” comes from Bateson, Gregory, Naven (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1936)Google Scholar.

70. This final section is a rejoinder to Robert Hayden and owes much to his objections.

71. Hammel, E. A., “Demography and the Origins of the Yugoslav Civil War” Anthropology Today 9 (1993): 8 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.