Identity discourses on national belonging: the Hungarian minority in Romania.

AuthorVeres, Valer
PositionReport

Introduction

Hungarians living in Transylvania--the northern province of Romania--represent 19% of the region's population and 6.5% of the country's population, which renders them the largest ethno-national minority in the country. However, their number has started to steadily decrease over the past two decades. 1,624,000 people considered themselves Hungarians at the Romanian census from 1992. This number decreased to 1,434,000 in 2002 and to 1237 thousand in 2011 (INS 2012). However, the entire Romanian population had significantly decreased between 2002 and 2011.

The political and public representatives of Hungarians from Romania are greatly concerned about the future of their culture and its relationship to the majority population from Hungary. The present paper employs a qualitative method and makes use of a focus group analysis to explore representations of national identity among Hungarians from Transylvania and their group boundaries within the context of the Hungarian and Romanian nation.

Literature review

Our analysis is based on a theoretical background developed during our earlier research (Veres 2005, 2010). Therefore, we shall only review the most important concepts used in this study. We conceive a nation as the "imagined community" of a large social group, where the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.(Anderson 1991). National identity can be defined as collectively developed knowledge and an inclination made up of affective and cognitive elements that are the result of a national ideology. A national identity represents one of the most important forms of bonding for modern social groups, and can be differentiated in terms of cultural or citizenship-based senses of identity (see Hobsbawn 1990).

Previous studies have analysed the social manifestation of national discourses about the Hungarian minority identity, but we can grasp natural national identity 'as the consequence of the social communication of the national ideology, namely that people consider themselves subject to the national category in their everyday life with the help of certain elements of the stock of knowledge presented by the national ideology, they distinguish the in-group designated by the national category, they share the symbolic universe created by the national name, fatherland, meanings of national symbols' (Csepeli, 1997: 108). This delineation is not so simple for minorities. It has been noticed that many minorities feel that they belong to two nations at the same time, as different cultural and citizen-based aspects of one's identity may play complementary functions. According to Csepeli, it is not rare for people today to be within the scope of two national categories, which is also the case for many Hungarians living in minority (Csepeli 1992: 35). In fact, this may occur frequently in an identity field which, as Brubaker has stated, "feeds upon the ideological effects of three ideological sources: the majority state, the leaders of the minority community and the cultural, external kin-state" (Brubaker 1996: 60-69).

During our data gathering, we did not only inquire about the participants' knowledge as to national symbolism (see A. D. Smith, 1991), but we also categorised group boundaries and mapped interpretations of group relationships. We define Hungarians from Transylvania as a social group according to Horvath Istvan's interpretation of national minorities according to which ethnoculturally self-conscious groups that have developed into national groups, but which experience belonging to a majority nation, suddenly finding themselves in a subordinate position due to a modification of state frontiers (Horvath 2006).

The antecedents of this research may be traced back to Verdery, who analysed in detail the characteristics and transformation of the Romanian national discourse about the nation during the last phase of communism and in the first years after 1989 (Verdery 1991, 1993). Research on the identity of Hungarians from Romania and Romanian-Hungarian relationships was commenced by a common work group set up within Babes-Bolyai University from Cluj in cooperation with Eotvos Lorand University from Budapest in 1997. The writings of this work group offer a representative and complex picture of the relationships between Hungarians and Romanians from Transylvania (Csepeli-Orkeny-Szekelyi, 2000), the duality of cultural and civic identity among Hungarians from Romania (Culic, 1999) and the main characteristics of the national identity of Hungarians and Romanians from Transylvania (Veres 2000). Another prior study conducted by Mungiu used the focus group method and it had a similar topic. Mungiu contends that Transylvania continues to be an obsession for "geostrategists" who include this location on risk maps, disregarding the stability which has been characteristic to it since the last half of the nineties (Mungiu 1999: 236). Another stream of research on Hungarian-Romanian relationships is related to ethnobarometers. Their results may be consulted in a paper by Culic, Horvath and Rat (2000) and they provide a starting point for the question of self-identification and group boundaries in relation to Romanians and Hungarians from Transylvania. However, because this paper lies on different premises, it is difficult to compare its results with our own. In a collection of data from 1999, Hungarian respondents were asked what they considered themselves in terms of group identification, yet this was investigated by means of closed questions and the researchers did not allow for the selection of an ethnonym without connection to predefined answers (Magyar-Hungarian). Culic pointed out that the "problem" of Hungarians living outside the country's borders had persisted in Hungary (Culic 2006:175-200).

The research carried out by Brubaker, Feischmidt, Fox and Grancea in Cluj-Napoca in 2006 concluded that "there is a contrast between the rhetoric, ideological inclusion of Transylvanian Hungarians into the Hungarian nation, but at the same time, many Transylvanians experience social exclusion from the 'Hungarian' category in everyday life in Hungary, and they are frequently regarded 'Romanian' by common people." (Brubaker et al. 2006[2010]: 350-356.) Recent works in Hungary have revealed that the discourse of national radicalism takes into account expectations of political correctness in a proactive way. National radicals represent a closed worldview feeding upon the anti-historical narratives of mainstream history, and the national identity it feeds upon is novel compared to the previous national authoritarianism model (Csepeli, Muranyi & Prazsak, 2011). These radical discourses have also influenced the discourse regarding the national belonging of ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania, but to a lesser degree.

A volume of articles on the topic of Romanian national identity edited by Boari, Gherghina and Murea (2010) contains a chapter that analyses the identity of Hungarians from Romania based on quantitative data from the research of the Carpat panel (2007) that compares the characteristics of the identity of the Hungarian minority from Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine, as well as the minority attitude toward Romanians and Hungary (Veres 2010). In the following we will think through the results of this paper.

The ethno-political context of national discourses

The Hungarian nation-building process was rather controversial because Hungary, as part of the dualist Habsburg empire, was multi-ethnic, with less than 50% declaring Hungarian as their mother tongue in 1880 (Varga 1998, see also Szucs, 1984, p. 30-31, Bibo, 1997, p. 23-24). The minority status of Transylvanian Hungarians is the result of World War I and the Treaty of Trianon signed in 1920, when a significant part of the Hungarian population (roughly 1.5 million) became a minority in Romania. As a result, ethno-cultural nation development emerged both in Hungary and successor states (see Veres, 2005, p. 33-39): between the two world wars, Hungarians from Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia did not belong to the state-forming process. Therefore, they were viewed as defeated and "imperial" minorities, especially in the interwar period (see Mungiu 2007). During this period, the position of the Hungarians from Transylvania had undergone significant changes. Not only did they become a minority, but also their political, economic, and social status decreased (Culic 2006: 176).

After World War II, with the instauration of the communist dictatorship, the linguistic and educational rights of minorities were mostly respected in Romania (see Bottoni 2003, pp. 71-93); but in the second half of the communist period, an assimilation policy was implemented in Romania (and Czechoslovakia), which was meant to speed up the linguistic-cultural assimilation of the Hungarians into the Romanian (and Slovak) majority (Bugajszki, 1995, p. 200; see also Gallagher, 1999, and Gilberg, 1974).

After the political regime changes from 1989-1990, Romania's minority policy became more tolerant in several respects, yet in the field of minority rights, significant changes could only be witnessed after the initiation of the EU integration process. The European integration process significantly influenced interethnic relations in Romania, and also the relational potential between the Hungarian society and the Hungarian minority communities from neighbouring countries (Mungiu 2007: 70-71).

The last years of the communist regime had a particularly strong impact on the ethno-national minority discourse of Hungarians in Romania. The late communist minority policy in Romania generated an "imagined community," to use Anderson's (1991) term, within the Hungarian minority in Romania, forging an unequivocal form of social solidarity and self-identity. The...

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