Diaspora Online

Diaspora Online

Author: Ruxandra Trandafoiu

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2013-04-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0857459449

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After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, millions of Romanians emigrated in search of work and new experiences; they became engaged in an interrogation of what it meant to be Romanian in a united Europe and the globalized world. Their thoughts, feelings and hopes soon began to populate the virtual world of digital and mobile technologies. This book chronicles the online cultural and political expressions of the Romanian diaspora using websites based in Europe and North America. Through online exchanges, Romanians perform new types of citizenship, articulated from the margins of the political field. The politicization of their diasporic condition is manifested through written and public protests against discriminatory work legislation, mobilization, lobbying, cultural promotion and setting up associations and political parties that are proof of the gradual institutionalization of informal communications. Online discourse analysis, supplemented by interviews with migrants, poets and politicians involved in the process of defining new diasporic identities, provide the basis of this book, which defines the new cultural and political practices of the Romanian diaspora.


Nationalism and Identity in Romania

Nationalism and Identity in Romania

Author: Radu Cinpoes

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2010-09-21

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0857720309

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The collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe produced a fundamental change in the political map of Europe. In Romania, nationalism re-emerged forcefully and continued to rally political support against the context of a long and difficult transition to democracy. Extreme right-wing party The Greater Romania Party gained particular strength as a major political power, and its persuasive appeal rested on a reiteration of nationalism and identity - and themes such as origins, historical continuity, leadership, morality and religion - that had been embedded in Romanian ideological discourse by earlier nationalist formations. Radu Cinpoes here examines the reasons for the strength and resilience of nationalism in Romania, from the formation of the state to its accession in the EU.


National Ideology Under Socialism

National Ideology Under Socialism

Author: Katherine Verdery

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1995-09-14

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 0520203585

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The current transformation of many Eastern European societies is impossible to understand without comprehending the intellectual struggles surrounding nationalism in the region. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery shows how the example of Romania suggests that current ethnic tensions come not from a resurrection of pre-Communist Nationalism but from the strengthening of national ideologies under Communist Party rule.


History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness

History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness

Author: Lucian Boia

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9789639116979

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Based on the idea that there is a considerable difference between reality and discourse, the author points out that history is constantly reconstructed, adapted and sometimes mythicized from the perspectives of the present day, present states of mind and ideologies. He closely examines historical culture and conscience in nineteenth and twentieth century Romania, particularly concentrating on the impact of the national ideology on history. Boia's innovative analysis identifies several key mythical configurations and shows how Romanians have reconstituted their own highly ideologized history over the last two centuries. The strength of History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness lies in the author's ability to fully deconstruct the entire Romanian historiographic system and demonstrate the increasing acuteness of national problems in general, and in particular the exploitation of history to support national ideology.


Nationalism and Territory

Nationalism and Territory

Author: George W. White

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780847698097

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Why do nations come into conflict? What factors lead to the horrors of ethnic cleansing? This timely book offers clear-eyed answers to these questions by exploring how national identity is shaped by place, focusing especially on Serbia, Hungary, and Romania. Moving beyond studies of nationalism that consider only the economic and geostrategic value of territory, George W. White shows that the very core of national identity is intimately bound to specific places. Indeed, nations define themselves in terms of spaces that have historical, linguistic, and religious meaning, as Serbs have clearly demonstrated in Kosovo. These territories are concrete expressions of a nationAIs identity, both past and present. With his detailed analysis of the places that define national identity in Southeastern Europe, White convincingly shows why territorial disputes so often escalate into war.


Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town

Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town

Author: Rogers Brubaker

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 0691187797

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Situated on the geographic margins of two nations, yet imagined as central to each, Transylvania has long been a site of nationalist struggles. Since the fall of communism, these struggles have been particularly intense in Cluj, Transylvania's cultural and political center. Yet heated nationalist rhetoric has evoked only muted popular response. The citizens of Cluj--the Romanian-speaking majority and the Hungarian-speaking minority--have been largely indifferent to the nationalist claims made in their names. Based on seven years of field research, this book examines not only the sharply polarized fields of nationalist politics--in Cluj, Transylvania, and the wider region--but also the more fluid terrain on which ethnicity and nationhood are experienced, enacted, and understood in everyday life. In doing so the book addresses fundamental questions about ethnicity: where it is, when it matters, and how it works. Bridging conventional divisions of academic labor, Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators employ perspectives seldom found together: historical and ethnographic, institutional and interactional, political and experiential. Further developing the argument of Brubaker's groundbreaking Ethnicity without Groups, the book demonstrates that it is ultimately in and through everyday experience--as much as in political contestation or cultural articulation--that ethnicity and nationhood are produced and reproduced as basic categories of social and political life.


Romania and the Quest for European Identity

Romania and the Quest for European Identity

Author: Cristian Cercel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-15

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1317061713

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Exploring the largely positive representations of Romanian Germans predominating in post-1989 Romanian society, this book shows that the underlying reasons for German prestige are strongly connected with Romania’s endeavors to become European. The election, in 2014, of Klaus Iohannis as Romania’s president was hailed as evidence that the country chose a 'European’ future: that Iohannis belonged to Romania’s tiny German minority was also considered to have played a part in his success. Cercel argues that representations of Germans in Romania, descendants of twelfth-century and eighteenth-century colonists, become actually a symbolic resource for asserting but also questioning Romania’s European identity. Such representations link Romania’s much-desired European belonging with German presence, whilst German absence is interpreted as a sign of veering away from Europe. Investigating this case of discursive "self-colonization" and this apparent symbolic embrace of the German Other in Romania, the book offers a critical study of the discourses associated with Romania’s postcommunist "Europeanization" to contribute a better understanding of contemporary West-East relationships in the European context. This fresh and insightful approach will interest postgraduates and scholars interested in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe and in German minorities outside Germany. It should also appeal to scholars of memory studies and those interested in the study of otherness in general.


The Orthodox Church and National Identity in Post-Communist Romania

The Orthodox Church and National Identity in Post-Communist Romania

Author: Adrian Velicu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-08-17

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 3030484270

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This book explores the Romanian Orthodox Church’s arguments on national identity to legitimize its own place in a post-communist Romania. The work traces the clergy’s deployment of the concepts of Christian Orthodoxy and Latin legacy as part of an uncharted constellation of arguments in contemporary intellectual history. A survey of public intellectuals’ opinions on national identity complements the Church’s views. The investigation attempts to offer an insight into the Church’s efforts to re-assert itself, given free rein in a post-dictatorial world of accelerated modernization. After clarifying and surveying the Church’s claims on institutional and national identity, the book then also explores the secular ideas on the subject. The subsequent analysis treats this material as “speech acts” (statements doing, not only saying, something) which are occasionally out of sync. Against a background of secularization, the Church’s rhetoric articulates a distinct line of thought in the post-89 intellectual landscape.


Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood

Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood

Author: R. Chris Davis

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2019-01-08

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0299316408

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Amid the rising nationalism and racial politics that culminated in World War II, European countries wishing to "purify" their nations often forced unwanted populations to migrate. The targeted minorities had few options, but as R. Chris Davis shows, they sometimes used creative tactics to fight back, redefining their identities to serve their own interests. Davis's highly illuminating example is the case of the little-known Moldavian Csangos, a Hungarian- and Romanian-speaking community of Roman Catholics in eastern Romania. During World War II, some in the Romanian government wanted to expel them. The Hungarian government saw them as Hungarians and wanted to settle them on lands confiscated from other groups. Resisting deportation, the clergy of the Csangos enlisted Romania's leading racial anthropologist, collected blood samples, and rewrote a millennium of history to claim Romanian origins and national belonging—thus escaping the discrimination and violence that devastated so many of Europe's Jews, Roma, Slavs, and other minorities. In telling their story, Davis offers fresh insight to debates about ethnic allegiances, the roles of science and religion in shaping identity, and minority politics past and present.


Russian Nationalism, Foreign Policy and Identity Debates in Putin's Russia

Russian Nationalism, Foreign Policy and Identity Debates in Putin's Russia

Author: Marlene

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-04-15

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 3838263251

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The contributors to this book discuss the new conjunctions that have emerged between foreign policy events and politicized expressions of Russian nationalism since 2005. The 2008 war with Georgia, as well as conflicts with Ukraine and other East European countries over the memory of the Soviet Union, and the Russian interpretation of the 2005 French riots have all contributed to reinforcing narratives of Russia as a fortress surrounded by aggressive forces, in the West and CIS. This narrative has found support not only in state structures, but also within the larger public. It has been especially salient for some nationalist youth movements, including both pro-Kremlin organizations, such as "Nashi," and extra-systemic groups, such as those of the skinheads. These various actors each have their own specific agendas; they employ different modes of public action, and receive unequal recognition from other segments of society. Yet many of them expose a reading of certain foreign policy events which is roughly similar to that of various state structures. These and related phenomena are analyzed, interpreted and contextualized in papers by Luke March, Igor Torbakov, Jussi Lassila, Marlène Laruelle, and Lukasz Jurczyszyn.