The Remote Borderland

Laszlo Kurti

Description

The Remote Borderland explores the significance of the contested region of Transylvania to the creation of Hungarian national identity. Author László Kürti illustrates the process by which European intellectuals, politicians, and artists locate their nation's territory, embody it with meaning, and reassert its importance at various historical junctures. The book's discussion of the contested and negotiated nature of nationality in its East Central European setting reveals cultural assumptions profoundly mortgaged to twentieth-century notions of home, nation, state, and people. The Remote Borderland shows that it is not only important to recognize that nations are imagined, but to note how and where they are imagined in order to truly understand the transformation of European societies during the twentieth century.
Preface

1 Introduction: Regions, Identities, and Remote Borderlands

2 Contesting the Past: The Historical Dimension of the Transylvanian Conflict

3 Fieldwork on Nationalism: Transylvania in the Ethnographic Imagination

4 Literary Contests: Populism, Transylvania, and National Identity

5 Transylvania between the Two Socialist States: Border and Diaspora Identities in the 1970s and 1980s

6 Youth and Political Action: The Dance-House Movement and Transylvania

7 Transylvania Reimagined: Democracy, Regionalism, and Post–Communist Identity

8 Conclusion: New Nations, Identities, and Regionalism in the New Europe

Notes
Index

Sujets

• Ethnic studies
• International relations
• Eastern Europe
• History of Europe

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 19 juillet 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791490273
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The
Remote
BorderlandSUNY series in National Identities
Thomas M. Wilson, editorThe Remote Borderland
Transylvania in the
Hungarian Imagination
László Kürti
State University of New York PressPublished by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2001 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or
transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic
tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in
writing of the publisher.
For information, address State University of New York Press,
90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207
Production by Michael Haggett
Marketing by Patrick Durocher
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kürti, László.
The remote borderland : Transylvania in the Hungarian imagination / László Kürti.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in national identities)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-5023-6 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5024-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Hungarians—Romania—Transylvania—Ethnic identity. 2.
Ethnicity—Romania—Transylvania. 3. Hungary—Relations—Romania—Transylvania. 4.
Transylvania (Romania)—Relations—Hungary. I. Title. II. Series.
DR279.92.H8 K87 2001
949′.0049511—dc21
2001020751
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1Contents
Preface vii
1 Introduction: Regions, Identities, and Remote Borderlands 1
2 Contesting the Past:
The Historical Dimension of the Transylvanian Conflict 25
3 Fieldwork on Nationalism:
Transylvania in the Ethnographic Imagination 49
4 Literary Contests:
Populism, Transylvania, and National Identity 77
5 Transylvania between the Two Socialist States:
Border and Diaspora Identities in the 1970s and 1980s 107
6 Youth and Political Action:
The Dance-House Movement and Transylvania 137
7 Transylvania Reimagined:
Democracy, Regionalism, and Post–Communist Identity 165
8 Conclusion:
New Nations, Identities, and Regionalism in the New Europe 187
Notes 201
Index 255Preface
This book is an exploration into the creation of a national unity not
only in Hungary but in Transylvania, where Hungarians can be found.
The discussion of the contested and negotiated nature of the Hungarian
nation-state is intended to reveal the cultural assumptions so profoundly
mortgaged to twentieth-century notions of home, nation, state, and
people. The starting point is to achieve an understanding of the process by
which intellectuals, politicians, and artists locate their nation’s territory,
embody it with meaning, and reassert its importance at various historical
ruptures. I want to demonstrate the value of emphasizing territoriality in
the creation of the nation. By focusing on a specific territory,
Transylvania, instead of on a particular village or group of people, the emphasis has
been shifted to a realization that nationalism and territories are both
fundamental in the creation of national identity: for both the state and for
the nation it is the homeland that is of utmost importance, but not in any
mechanical, unidirectional, or contradictory sense. It is not only
important to recognize that nations are imagined but how and where they are
imagined, which must be studied if we truly want to understand the
transformation of twentieth-century European societies.
The perspective taken in this book is anthropological: comparative,
historical, and critical. The idea is not to look at Hungarian nationalism
and dismiss it as an obstructive and a conservative force of history;
rather, this book prompts a critical reevaluation about the links between
nationalism, state formation, and territory. By viewing the contests
between the Hungarian and Romanian states over Transylvania, we comeviii The Remote Borderland
to the recognition that both states and nations have been territorial
animals. They expanded and grew, but they decreased as well; in fact, the
principality of Transylvania, a largely independent polity for hundreds of
years, ceased to function as soon as historical forces changed its fate. This
case study of the Hungarian imagination of Transylvania illustrates that,
at times, states and nations need each other, yet at other times, they
exhibit vicious hostility to each other. Thus the primary aim here is to
reveal those political, social, and cultural movements through which
both the state and the nation realize their dream through territoriality. It
is through these intersections that we gain important insights into how
regions receive their function and meaning as border cultures and archaic
ancestral terrains and, in return, provide important accoutrements to
state and national mythologies.
The history of Hungarian national identity as it relates to
Transylvania is too large a subject for one scholar and one book, for it touches
virtually every aspect of the interactions between the Hungarian and
Romanian states and nations since at least the early stages of feudalism. I
have therefore confined myself to a more modest argument in the edifice
of national identity. Central to this argument is the notion of reification:
the tendency to imagine Transylvania as a concrete territorial entity
engulfing the very essence of the Hungarian national identity. This
subject is treated in an anthropological way by utilizing historical and
sociopolitical definitions of territory and their place and significance in
the remaking of national identities. By using Transylvania as an example,
various political and cultural debates and negotiations between
Hungarian and Romanian elites are elucidated in order to reveal the underlying
assumptions about the intersections of regional thinking in the politics of
nation making.
This study is an effort to describe and analyze the development and
impact of this thinking on the internal and international politics of the
Hungarian nation-state from an anthropological perspective. A basic
assumption of this study is that the Transylvanian regionalist movement
was not a significant force among Hungarian intellectuals prior to World
War I. Without question, many insights could be gained regarding the
roots of nationalism extending into the cloudy and controversial feudalist
period. However, such an exploration is beyond the scope of this book
and is left to competent historians. The growth of Transylvania as a
politically sensitive regional issue has to be traced back to the disastrous end of
that war and the incompetence of several key players. Included among
them are Western politicians assisting at various “peace settlements,”
extremist nationalist leaders in Hungary and Romania, and educated
middle classes feeding on the ideologies of irredentism, secessionism, andPreface ix
territoriality in their eagerness to contest and negotiate the great national
state of their dreams. With regard to Transylvania, several such
contestations are analyzed through a discussion of: (1) the demagoguery and
scholarly manipulation of Transylvanian history by showing how the past
serves as a justification of present political aims; (2) how state socialist
ideology, despite the common Marxist–Leninist foundation, attempted to
homogenize the nation-state of Romania and, in turn, assisted in the rise
of fundamentalist Hungarianism, regionalism, and transnational identity;
(3) a particular nationalist process, populism, by revealing how this
ideology shifted the emphasis away from the centrality of peasants to
Hungarian populations in Transylvania; (4) a newly awakened generational
politics—the dance-house movement, a folkloristic turn of politics that
managed to subvert communist state ideology; and (5) how, after the
collapse of socialism, and despite the foundation of democracy, a renewed
sense of Transylvanianism has been maintained as a core doctrine of
nationalist controversy between Hungary and Romania.
There is much that connects regions and nation-states. Besides the
fact that both are cultural constructions politicized out of proportions,
they also are vehemently contested and negotiated at various intervals by
neighboring groups. Transylvania—similar in many ways to other
contested terrains elsewhere, such as Northern Ireland, the Basque lands,
Corsica, Cyprus, Silesia, Kosovo and Macedonia—is analyzed here as a
prime example of twentieth-century national struggles in the heart of
Europe. The importance of this study is manyfold: it points to how a
particular territory becomes paramount in nationalist thinking; it reveals
how elites have imagined this region for the purpose of fashioning
powerful images and ideas to remake the national self and the neighboring
other; and it points to the ways in which a region is clothed with specific
characteristics, meaning, and symbols that in turn serve the center in its
argumentation for entitlement for that land. The Transylvanian case
illustrates how Transylvania has acquired the meaning of a faraway border
culture in the Hungarian mentality and how in return it has helped the
nation’s elites to produce an enduring, p