Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building and Ethnic Struggle, 1918-1930.

Abstract

Since the fall of the Ceausescu regime, Romanian politics have been haunted by unresolved issues of the past. In a book that will be essential for those concerned with the problem of nationalism in the contemporary world, Irina Livezeanu examines a critical chapter in Eastern European history - the trajectory of the aggressive nationalism that dominated Romania between the world wars. At the conclusion of World War I, Romania's annexation of territories of mixed population marked the beginning of a turbulent process of nation building. Drawing on original archival research, Livezeanu shows how the Bucharest government attempted, through dramatic reforms, to Romanize the newly annexed regions of Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina. In these areas, the educated urban elites were substantially non-Romanian, and often Jewish. Although Romanian nationalists had previously tended to think of their peasant majority as a revolutionary menace, they now hailed the peasants as the key to their sweeping program of cultural integration. Focusing on the new educational system, Livezeanu examines the effects of nationalist strategies for transforming peasants into middle-class Romanians who could replace the foreigners as educated urban elites. Tracing events from region to region across Romania, Livezeanu demonstrates how this approach to nation building, and the integralist ideology that drove it, gave rise to an anti-urban, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic nationalism that bred the Romanian fascism of the 1930s. She devotes particular attention to the role of the so-called generation of 1922, the radical nationalist students who came to form the core of the fascist Iron Guard movement. As sheexplores the consequences of assertive nationalist policies for interwar Romanian society, Livezeanu helps us to understand the dilemmas confronting those who today seek to build stable democratic institutions in the formerly communist countries of Central and Balkan Europe.