Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe: Romania

Political and economic uncertainties since the overthrow of the Ceaucescu dictatorship in December 1989 have raised urgent questions about the path of development Romania will take in the coming decade. The critical issue is whether the country will follow the Western example of a market economy and parliamentary democracy or choose another model closer to its agrarian socio-economic and Eastern cultural heritage. The controversy has rekindled a national debate of long standing about the nature of modern Romania and its place in Europe: whether, in effect, Romania belongs to the West or to the East. It has revolved especially around fundamental processes of nation-building that origi­nated in the first half of the nineteenth century—the creation of new political and economic structures and integration into Europe. A review of these processes and the reaction of Romanians to them may serve to put the issues facing contempo­rary Romanian intellectuals and politicians in perspective.

From the early decades of the nineteenth century until World War II, the formation of a modern nation-state absorbed the energies of one generation after another of Romanians.¹ The achievement of national political goals had priority: from the preservation of autonomy for the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in the 1830s and 1840s down to the emergence of Greater Romania in 1918. At each stage, the initiative belonged to the Romanians. But crucial to their success was their ability to position themselves advantageously among the great powers, a strategy they themselves recognized was necessary in order to harmo­nize national aspirations and international realities. Although they sought sup­port mainly from the West, they received no special treatment from that quarter, except when it suited Western purposes. At first, from the later decades of the eighteenth century to the 1830s, Romanian leaders relied on a single patron, Russia, whose policies had been the most effective in loosening the bonds of Ottoman Turkish domination, but they were not prepared to accept a Russian protectorate in its place.² During the 1830s and 1840s, Russia dissipated the good

¹ The most recent general history of the Romanians in English that emphasizes the period covered in this essay is Vlad Georgescu, The Romanians: A History, Alexandra Bley-Vroman, trans. (Columbus, Ohio, 1991).

² A thorough, even-handed survey of Russo-Romanian relations is Barbara Jelavich, Russia and the Formation of the Romanian National State, 1821-1878 (Cambridge, 1984). There is much on Russian policy toward Moldavia and Wallachia and the Romanian reaction to it in Anastasie Iordache and Apostol Stan, Apararea autonomiei Principatelor române, 1821—1859 (Bucharest, 1987).

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will it had accumulated as the liberator of Orthodox Christians from Muslim rule by its heavy-handed interference in Romanian internal affairs. The Russophobia that afterward became a constant in Romanian foreign relations dates from this period. It was soon reinforced in 1848 when a Russian army destroyed a fledgling experiment in liberalism and independence in Wallachia.

Largely as a consequence of the Russian experience, Romanian politicians and intellectuals sought to replace dependence on a single power by a collective guarantee from all the powers. Their action represented a definitive shift in foreign policy away from the East toward the West, especially toward France. They also looked to the West to support their efforts to bring about the union of Moldavia and Wallachia, which they judged an essential step toward full inde­pendence. The crisis in international relations caused by the Crimean War gave the Romanians the opportunity they sought. In the Treaty of Paris of 1856, the victors in effect abolished the Russian protectorate and established the mechanism by which the Romanians themselves might have a voice in deciding their future form of government. When the great powers rejected the union of Moldavia and Wallachia, Romanian leaders, backed by a surge of public enthusiasm, brought about de facto union in 1859 by electing the same man, Alexandru Cuza, prince of each principality. Cuza himself completed the administrative union of the principalities in 1861, and the powers acquiesced in what seemed an inevitable sequence of events. It was through a similar combination of great-power bickering and Romanian initiative that independence was secured in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin and the Kingdom of Romania proclaimed and recognized in 1881.³ The settlement of these matters left a residue of bitterness on the Romanian side, for independence had been won at a high price. The Romanians had had to cede southern Bessarabia to Russia, despite their claims that the tsar's ministers had promised to respect the territorial integrity of their country. They had also been forced by the Western powers to change the country's constitution in order to allow Jews the opportunity to acquire full rights of citizenship.⁴

For the next three decades, until World War I, Romanian leaders abandoned the policy of reliance on collective action by the great powers to promote national interests. Their belief that their country had been ill-used by Russia and the other powers during the Eastern crisis of 1875-1878 and their perception of the international situation as uncertain and hostile to newly independent states

³ The literature on the crucial period between the union of the principalities and independence is abundant. Thad W. Riker, The Making of Roumania: A Study of an International Problem, 1856—1866 (London, 1931), remains a fundamental account of the policies of the great powers. A recent critical investigation of relations between the powers and Romania from a Romanian perspective is Gheorghe Cliveti, Romania siputerile garante 1856-1878 (Jassy, 1988). Indispensable for many aspects of nation-building is Lothar Maier, Rumanien auf dem Weg гиг Unabhangigkeitserklarung, 1866—1877 (Munich, 1989). As for Russo-Romanian relations between 1875 and 1878 and, in particular, the dispute over southern Bessarabia, an able presentation of Russian objectives is Mikhail Zalyshkin, Vneshniaia politiha Rumynii i rumyno-russkie otnosheniia, 1875-1878 (Moscow, 1974). Gheorghe I. Bratianu, Le probleme des frontieres russo-roumaines pendant la guerre de 1877—1878 et аи Congris de Berlin (Bucharest, 1928), analyzes Romanian policy.

⁴ The literature on the Jews of Romania during the period is lacking in impartiality. Hostility to Jews is manifested in such works as Verax [Radu D. Rosetti], La Roumanie et lesjuifs (Bucharest, 1903). Anti-Semitism is denounced in Carol Iancu, Les Juifs en Roumanie, 1866-1919: De I'exclusion a Vemancipation (Aix-en-Provence, 1978).

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persuaded them to bind their country to powerful allies. King Charles I and his prime minister therefore agreed to join the Triple Alliance in 1883, which they judged to be the most powerful bloc of states on the Continent. This commitment served as the foundation of Romania's foreign policy until 1914, despite a manifest sympathy for France among both politicians and the general public.⁵

With the achievement of independence, Romanian leaders could pursue more aggressively another significant task of nation-building—the joining to the king­dom of the some 2,800,000 Romanians in Hungary (the historical principality of Transylvania and the adjoining Banat, Crișana, and Maramures. regions), the 230,000 in Austria (Bukovina), and the 1,000,000 in Russia (Bessarabia). Al­though Romanian governments between the 1890s and World War I were circumspect in handling the nationality problem in their two powerful neighbors, the rising level of irredentist sentiments at home was a constant reminder of how fragile the partnership with Austria-Hungary in the Triple Alliance had become and how slight the sympathy for Russia remained.

Of the three communities, the Romanians of Bukovina and Bessarabia were perhaps the least fortunate. Cut off abruptly from their Moldavian homeland (the former when Austria occupied northern Moldavia in 1774 and the latter when Russia annexed that part of Moldavia between the Prut and Dniester rivers in 1812), they were subject almost at once to centralization. They could not participate in politics as distinct ethnic communities, and their cultural life was under constant pressure from unsympathetic bureaucracies. Yet a national consciousness, at least among the educated, remained alive and manifested itself vigorously in 1917 and 1918.⁶

The Romanians of Transylvania made the strongest defense of nationality.⁷ Their political leaders formed the Romanian National Party in 1881 to coordinate the preservation of political and cultural autonomy in the face of efforts by successive Hungarian governments to assimilate the non-Magyar nationalities.

⁵ On Romania's relations with Germany and Austria-Hungary, Ernst Ebel, Rumdnien und die Mittelmachte (Berlin, 1939), retains its value as a survey based on published diplomatic sources. It may be supplemented by Gheorghe Nicolae Cazan and șerban Radulescu-Zoner, Rumanien und der Dreibund, 1878-1914 (Bucharest, 1983). Uta Bindreiter, Die diplomatischen und wirtschaftlichen Bezie- hungen zwischen Osterreich-Ungarn und Rumanien in denjahren 1875-88 (Vienna, 1976), traces the links between trade, politics, and nationalism in Austro-Hungarian—Romanian relations. Relatively little has been published on Romania's relations with France during the period. Vasile Vesa, Les relations politiques roumano-francaises аи debut du XX^е stick (1900-1916) (Bucharest, 1986), is a useful introduction devoted mainly to the period of the war.

⁶ The writing of up-to-date, impartial, and comprehensive histories of the Romanians of each province is a pressing task for scholars. On Bukovina, one may consult Erich Prokopowitsch, Die rumanische Nationalbewegung in der Bukowina und der Dako-romanismus (Graz, 1965). On Bessarabia, there is Istoriia Moldavskoi SSR, vol. 1 (Kishinev, 1965), which ignores Moldavian (that is, Romanian) political and intellectual movements and treats the Moldavians as part of the broader Russian society. The standard Romanian work remains Ion Nistor, Istoria Basarabiei: Scriere de popularizare (Cernaufi, 1923).

⁷ The most recent of numerous surveys of the controversial nationality problem in Transylvania before World War I are ștefan Pascu, Faurirea statidui national unitar român 1918, vol. 1 (Bucharest, 1983), which sets forth a Romanian viewpoint, and Bela Kopeczi, ed., Erdily torUnete, vol. 3 (1830-tdl napjainkig) (Budapest, 1986), which presents the Romanian national movement within the context of Transylvania as a part of Hungary. Of particular value is Cornelia Bodea and Hugh Seton-Watson, eds., R. W. Seton-Watson and the Romanians, 1906-1920, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1988), which contains the correspondence and other writings of the famous journalist and historian.

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Largely as a consequence of these actions, the idea that Romanians and Magyars were natural allies destined to stand together "in a sea of Slavs and Germans" gave way to bitterness and intransigence. The Romanians were sustained by a new idea of nation that justified self-determination. Formulated in the 1890s by Aurel C. Popovici, a leading advocate of the federalization of the Habsburg Monarchy and much influenced by Social Darwinism, it likened the ethnic nation to a living organism endowed by nature with a right to develop in accordance with its unique attributes.⁸ Iuliu Maniu, on behalf of the Romanian National Party, took the idea of nation further by insisting that it knew no political boundaries and had united Romanians everywhere in a struggle to achieve national fulfillment.⁹ It was a view shared by many intellectuals and politicians in the Romanian kingdom. Inevitably, Romanian aspirations to self-determination could not be reconciled with the determination of Hungarian political leaders to transform multinational Hungary into a Magyar national state. Negotiations between 1910 and 1914 to effect a compromise failed, for by then both sides were certain that national survival itself was at stake.¹⁰

Greater Romania came into being primarily in response to specific conditions prevailing in each of the territories inhabited by Romanians, rather than by successes on the battlefield. (Romania had entered World War I in 1916 on the Allied side in order to gain Transylvania and Bukovina, but German and Austro-Hungarian armies had prevailed.) First in Bessarabia in 1917 and 1918 as a result of the chaos created by the Russian Revolution and then in Transylvania and Bukovina as Austria-Hungary disintegrated, Romanian political leaders rallied public opinion to demand union with Romania and called for the Romanian army to support them. The resulting territorial acquisitions more than doubled the size of the country to 296,000 square kilometers and increased the population from 8,500,000 to over 16,000,000. The acquisitions were sanctioned, though not without rancor, by the major Allied powers in the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920.¹¹ The great majority of Romanians were now included within the new borders (only some 600,000 remained outside). Territorially, the nation-state had thus become a reality.

An essential aspect of nation-building was the creation of new political institu­tions. The general tendency between the early decades of the nineteenth century and the 1930s was toward rationalization in administration and an alignment of government as a whole with Western models.¹² In the 1830s, the Organic Statutes,

⁸ Aurel С Popovici, Principiul de nafionalitate (Bucharest, 1894), 21.

⁹ Iuliu Maniu, Discursuri parlamentare (Blaj, 1906), 76-77.

¹⁰ Keith Hitchins, "The Nationality Problem in Hungary: Istvan Tisza and the Rumanian National Party, 1910-1914," Journalof Modern History, 53 (December 1981): 619-51.

¹¹ The often bitter relations between Romania and the Big Four at Versailles are discussed by Sherman D. Spector, Rumania at the Paris Peace Conference: A Study of the Diplomacy of loan I. C. Brutianu (New York, 1962).

¹² The most extensive survey of Romanian parliamentary institutions and activity between the 1830s and 1918 is Paraschiva Cancea, Mircea Iosa, and Apostol Stan, eds., Istoria parlamentului si a viefii parlamentare din Romania pina la 1918 (Bucharest, 1983). Indispensable for Romanian thought on constitutional theory and practice is the collection of essays written by leading public figures during the drafting of the Constitution of 1923 and published by Institutul Social Roman, Nona Constitute a României si nouile constitulii europene (Bucharest, 1923). Solid studies of political parties before World War I are Apostol Stan, Grupari si curente politice in RomAnia intre unire si independent

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in effect constitutions, one each for Moldavia and Wallachia, laid solid founda­tions for systematic government and confirmed the principle of representation in a legislative assembly, at least for the upper classes. During the springtime of peoples in 1848, Moldavian and Wallachian revolutionaries drafted constitutions guaranteeing citizens fundamental political and civil rights and expanding their participation in public affairs. Although the liberal government established to bring these principles to fruition in Wallachia was short-lived, just two decades later they were embodied in a new fundamental law, the Constitution of 1866, which provided a stable framework for the development of political life until the eve of World War II. The accession of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen dynasty, also in 1866, enhanced political stability by providing firm direction for both internal and foreign policy. Then, in the following decade, disparate political groupings coalesced into the two main parties—the National Liberal and the Conservative—which infused life into the parliamentary institutions outlined in the constitution. After World War I, political structures were adapted to the needs of the expanded nation-state in the Constitution of 1923. But the expectations of political continuity proved illusory as a drift toward authoritarian government gained momentum in the 1930s. The inabilities of parliamentary government and of traditional political parties to deal with the world economic depression and other crises have often been cited as causes of the weakening of democracy. But many critics also detected a fatal flaw in the political structure itself—the middle-class character of the constitutions of 1866 and 1923, which had been drawn up for a country in which the middle class constituted only a narrow stratum of the population. As a consequence, critics pointed out, the operation of sophisticated political machinery lay not with an enlightened and experienced citizenry but was left to a small circle of professional politicians and a peasant majority lacking in education and experience whom the politicians could manip­ulate at will.

Politicians and intellectuals beginning in the later decades of the nineteenth century undertook another essential task of nation-building—the transformation of an overwhelmingly agricultural economy into one based on industry and the city.¹³ The results were mixed. Agriculture remained the foundation of the (1859-1877) (Bucharest, 1979); and Ion Bulei, Sistemulpolitic alRomaniei moderne: Partidul Conservator (Bucharest, 1987). Of great value in assessing political programs and ideologies in the interwar period are the essays in Institutul Social Roman, Doctrinele partidelor politice (Bucharest, 1923). The drift toward authoritarianism in the 1930s is amply covered in Armin Heinen, Die Legion "Erzengel Michael" in Rumanien: Soziale Bewegung und politische Organisation (Munich, 1986), now the standard work on the Iron Guard. Also valuable on the nature of the Iron Guard is Eugen Weber, "Romania," in Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber, eds., The European Right: A Historical Profile (Berkeley, Calif., 1965), 501-74.

¹³ An indispensable guide to Romania's economic development in the interwar period is Henry L. Roberts, Rumania: Political Problems of an Agrarian State (New Haven, Conn., 1951). David Turnock, The Romanian Economy in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1986), provides up-to-date details. Essential reading is Virgil Madgearu, Evolujia economiei romanesti dupa ruzboiul mondial (Bucharest, 1940), an exhaustive survey of all the major branches of the Romanian interwar economy by a master economic thinker and a leading figure in the Peasantist movement. On agriculture and agrarian reform and its

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economy until World War II. It provided the bulk of the national income and the primary means of livelihood for almost 80 percent of the population. Striking, too, was the persistence of tradition. The organization of agriculture changed but little after the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Its characteristic feature remained "peasant agriculture," a system of production carried on by individual peasant families on small holdings. On the whole, it was primitive in technology and methods and burdened by overpopulation and debt, conditions perpetuated in large measure by a concentration on the production of grain for export. Not even the extensive land reforms of the 1920s significantly altered the traditional patterns of production, despite clear evidence that they impeded progress. The reforms that governments did introduce in the interwar period, such as support for cooperatives, an expansion of rural credit, and the promotion of industrial crops, benefited almost exclusively the relatively small number of prosperous peasants.

Industry from the 1890s on experienced steady growth. Output in some branches, such as oil, metallurgy, and chemicals, was impressive. The driving force behind industrialization was a small industrial and banking elite with close links to major political parties, especially the National Liberals, who had made the creation of a modern industry their primary economic goal in nation-building. Characteristic of the interwar period was the increasing intervention of the state to accelerate economic growth in general and promote industry in particular. Although it respected private ownership and allowed private capital numerous advantages, the government arrogated to itself the role of planning and super­vising what came to be called the "national economy." The state, in effect, assumed the economic functions that the middle class had exercised in Western Europe during the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the development of industry was uneven. Significant gaps remained: for example, industry could not produce all the machines it needed for its own continued growth, and in technology the majority of its plants remained behind those of the West. Another persistent obstacle to the development of industry was the inability of the domestic market to absorb its products because of the low standard of living and the consequent diminished purchasing power of the majority of the population. Thus industrial growth in many sectors depended more on state support than on consumer demand.

Romanian nation-building not only touched political and economic structures but also involved the integration of minorities and the dispossessed majority, the peasantry, into the general social fabric. Little progress was made in the interwar period. Problems of social integration had been aggravated by the acquisition of new territories at the end of World War I because with them came substantial minorities. In 1920, approximately 30 percent of the population was ethnically consequences, the fullest account in English remains David Mitrany, The Land and the Peasant in Rumania: The War and Agrarian Reform (1917-21) (London, 1930). It may be supplemented by D. șandru, Reforma agrara din 1921 in Romania (Bucharest, 1975); and Vasile Bozga, Criza agrara in România dintre cele doua razboaie mondiale (Bucharest, 1975). Marcela Felicia Iovanelli, Industria romuneascd, 1934—1938 (Bucharest, 1975), describes the successes and shortcomings of industrializa­tion and the limits of state intervention.

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non-Romanian compared to 8 percent before the war. The Hungarians of Transylvania, who composed 29 percent of the population of the historical principality, strove to maintain a separate political and cultural identity in Greater Romania and resisted integration into the broader Romanian society. For their part, the Romanian government and Romanian nationalist organizations, ever wary of irredentism, rejected Hungarian claims to autonomy.¹⁴ The Jews of Greater Romania, some 730,000, or 4 percent of the total population in 1930, had traditionally been treated as foreigners and in the 1930s had to confront virulent forms of anti-Semitism and government-sponsored discrimination.¹⁵ The major­ity of peasants also fell into the category of outsiders. Dependent on the yields of inadequate holdings, they led a substandard existence characterized by inade­quate diet, rudimentary housing, and poor or nonexistent health care. Govern­ment programs brought only slight improvements in their condition.¹⁶

A fundamental component of nation-building was the Romanians' growing relationship with Western Europe.¹⁷ Economic contacts were of paramount importance initially in drawing Romania out of the relative isolation imposed by Ottoman suzerainty. Relations grew steadily after the Treaty of Adrianople of 1829 between Russia and the Ottoman empire, in which the Ottomans renounced their centuries-old commercial monopoly over Moldavia and Wallachia and thereby opened the principalities' markets and raw materials to international trade. Exchanges between Romania and Western Europe (including Austria-Hungary and Germany) expanded dramatically between the 1870s and World War I, when Romanian exports tripled and imports quadrupled, clear evidence of Romania's integration into the international economic system. The same dynamic rhythm of trade with Western Europe continued in the interwar period. Roma­nia's exports on the whole were those of a predominantly agricultural country— grain, animals, and lumber, which along with oil constituted over 85 percent of total exports in 1937. Manufactured goods and machinery made up the bulk of imports, but in the 1930s significant changes occurred in the general pattern. The share of semi-processed goods and raw materials increased, because of progress

¹⁴ Works on the Hungarians of Transylvania in the interwar period are abundant but are almost all polemical. Imre Miko, Huszonket ev: Az Erdelyi Magyarsdgpolitikai tortenete 1918. December 1-tol 1940. Augusztus 30-ig. (Budapest, 1941), is a detailed and sympathetic survey of their political organization and objectives. The Romanian point of view is sustained by Silviu Dragomir, La Transylvanie roumaine et ses minorites ethniques (Bucharest, 1934).

¹⁵ An impartial monograph on the Jews of Romania in the interwar period has yet to be written. Representative of much anti-Jewish writing is Anastase N. Haciu, Evreii in JariU Romunesti (Bucharest, 1943). An indictment of anti-Semitism by a leader of the Jewish community is W. Filderman, Adevarul asupra problemei evreesti din Romania (Bucharest, 1925).

¹⁶ An indispensable introduction to almost every aspect of the peasant condition, except religion, is D. șandru, Populafia rurald a României intre cele doud rdzboaie mondiale (Jassy, 1980).

¹⁷ On economic relations with Western Europe, I. Puia, RelafiiU economice externe ale Romuniei in perioada interbelica (Bucharest, 1982), provides the necessary data within the general context of economic development. Maurice Pearton, Oil and the Romanian State (Oxford, 1971), describes the Western presence in the oil industry; and Constanja Bogdan and Adrian Platon, Capitalul strain in societafile anonime din Romania in perioada interbelica (Bucharest, 1981), make a minute investigation of the size and effects of foreign investments in Romanian industry, especially 1934—1938. On Western European influence on Romanian political institutions, see Alexandra Tilman-Timon, Les influences etrangeres sur le droit constitutionel roumain (Paris, 1946).

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in industrialization and the growing capacity of domestic industry to satisfy consumer demand.

The role of the West in the growth of Romanian industry was mixed. By exporting massive quantities of processed goods to Romania, it hastened the demise of traditional artisan crafts in the nineteenth century and retarded the development of a modern industry. But, at the same time, the transfer of technology and substantial investments of capital spurred industrialization. Large-scale investments began after Romania achieved independence in 1878, and by World War I foreign capital had become predominant in numerous industries, especially oil, gas and electricity, metallurgy, and chemicals. Foreign capital retained a significant share of industry in the interwar period, but by 1938 the Romanian industrial and financial elite had increased its own capital holdings in industry overall to about 60 percent.

Romania's economic relationship with Western Europe was clearly one of dependence. Essential to the country's well-being was the sale of large quantities of agricultural products and other raw materials. Thus the loss of international markets during the depression of the early 1930s, for instance, brought severe economic hardship at home. Dependence on exports discouraged reforms in agriculture because it tended to reinforce the traditional structures of inefficient, peasant agriculture. As for industry, although Romanian industrialists and bankers, aided by the National Liberal Party, tried to extend their control over the national economy by limiting the participation of foreign capital, Romania continued to be a large importer of capital and thus remained dependent on Western investments to propel the economy forward.

Western Europe also exerted a decisive influence on Romanian political institutions. Beginning in the 1830s, the Romanian intellectual and political elite traveled regularly to the West, mainly to France and Germany, for higher education. For a century, they drew inspiration and ideas directly or indirectly from all the ideologies current in Europe, from Romanticism and liberalism to the various strains of nationalism and conservatism. In institution-building, too, the West stood as the example: the Constitution of 1866 was modeled on the Belgian constitution of 1831, the main codes of law were inspired by French codes, and parliamentary structures drew heavily on Western experience.

The political and economic course on which Romania embarked in the 1830s almost immediately provoked controversy among Romanian intellectuals. Their concern centered on the massive intrusion of Western Europe into Romanian society, a process that compelled them to confront fundamental questions of who they were as Romanians and what path of development was best suited to the national genius. As the debate intensified, two general currents of ideas became discernible, one that held Romania to be a part of Europe and thus destined to develop economically and socially in ways similar to the urbanized and industri­alized West and the other that emphasized the country's inherent agrarian character and the consequent need to cleave to tradition.

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In the course of a century, until World War II, both the "traditionalists" and the "Europeanists," as adherents of the two currents came to be called, displayed a remarkable continuity of thought.¹⁸ The traditionalists insisted that Romania had always been and would remain a predominantly agricultural country. They focused their attention on the small peasant producer as the pillar of a vital economic and social order, and they extolled the village as the preserver of "healthy" tradition and "authentic" national values. Thus certain that Western Europe, urbanized and industrialized, could never serve Romania as a model of development, they decried the turn their country had taken in the nineteenth century when it adopted "wholesale" Western political and economic institutions. The Europeanists came to strikingly different conclusions. They had no doubt whatever that Romania was a part of Europe and would inevitably follow the same course of development as the West. They insisted that Romania had taken the right path in the nineteenth century by opening the doors wide to European ideas and institutions, and they predicted that their country would become more urban and more industrial and that the middle class would grow and rightfully assume leadership in a modern nation-state.

The first systematic criticism of the direction that modern Romania had taken came from a group of young intellectuals who in the 1860s and later argued that their country had entered the European economic and cultural world too precipitously, borrowing and imitating without regard for indigenous customs and experience. Known as Junimists (from junime, youth), they argued that such contact with Europe had been harmful precisely because it had touched only the surface of Romanian society.¹⁹ Much indebted to European historicist and evolutionist thought, they perceived in recent Romanian history a fateful devia­tion from the principles of organic social development that had led to a "paralyzing antinomy" between the form and substance of Romania's institutions. Titu Maiorescu (1840-1917), the leading theorist of Junimism, put the matter in stark terms: in appearance, the Romanians had acquired almost the whole of Western civilization, but in reality their politics, science, and literature had been stillborn, "phantoms without bodies" and "forms without substance."²⁰ He dis­covered a fundamental incongruity between the institutions and the social structure of contemporary Romania. In his view, there were only two classes in Romanian society—landlords and peasants—but the political and economic forms borrowed from the West were the products of profound changes that had brought the bourgeoisie to power. Yet, he claimed, Romania had no bourgeoisie, and hence its political and economic structures lacked substance. Although Maiorescu and other Junimists were eager to move their country toward a modern civilization patterned on the Western model, they were certain that they

¹⁸ Discussions of the main issues dividing traditionalists and Europeanists are to be found in Kenneth Jowitt, ed., Social Change in Romania, 1860—1940: A Debate on Development in a European Nation (Berkeley, Calif., 1978); and Z. Ornea, Traditionalism și modernitate In deceniul al treilea (Bucharest, 1980).

¹⁹ The most complete account of Junimism from a sociological perspective is Z. Ornea, Junimea și junimismul (Bucharest, 1975).

²⁰ Titu Maiorescu, "In contra direc{iunii de astazi a culturei romune," Convorbiri Literare, 2 (December 1, 1868): 305-06.

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could accomplish their goal without changing traditional social and economic structures, since they foresaw the continued predominance of agriculture in the economy and society and dismissed industry as merely the artificial creation of foreigners and foreign capital.

Arguments similar to those of the Junimists in their analysis of nineteenth-century Romania formed the core of all subsequent traditionalist theories of nationhood and development. At the turn of the century, burgeoning agrarianist writers were the most fervent promoters of traditionalism. The Samanatorists (from samanator, sower) insisted that Romania had been diverted onto a "false path" in the early nineteenth century by politicians and intellectuals who had abruptly broken with the country's agrarian past.²¹ They discovered in such a thoughtless act the underlying cause of all the contradictions in contemporary Romanian society. Their principal spokesman, historian Nicolae Iorga (1871— 1940), vehemently denounced capitalism as an "unnatural implantation" into an agrarian society that lived by economic and social laws of its own. For him, the great city was the symbol of everything that had gone awry in the evolution of nineteenth-century Romania. It was the place where capitalist industry and commerce flourished and where the new social and economic order that was undermining traditional society drew its nourishment. He found the whole process by which modern Romania had come into being artificial, an "exercise in ideology" imposed on a people who until then had followed a "natural, organic evolution."

Sharing a similar vision of an agrarian Romania and dismay at the course of development it had taken were the Poporanists (or Populists, from popor, people).²² Their leading theorist, the lawyer and journalist Constantin Stere (1865—1936), praised rural civilization as organic and authentic and rejected urban civilization as an import and hence inorganic. A rural life, he insisted, was the only social and political form for Romania; the peasant was the "whole man" and the village the only place where he could flourish. Aware of the peril that Western capitalism and industry posed for an agrarian society, Stere was nonetheless certain that an economic and social system based on small-scale peasant agriculture and operating in accordance with categories and values of its own could withstand the onslaught.²³

In the two decades after World War I, the traditionalists drew sustenance from general European currents of thought opposed to rationalism and scientific positivism. They turned for guidance to, among others, Nietzsche, whose anti-rationalism fascinated them, and Spengler, whose theories about the inevitable decline of civilizations, notably the West, provided them with welcome analytical tools. Strikingly new in their own thought was an emphasis on Eastern Orthodox spirituality as the essential component of Romanian ethnic consciousness. They discerned in Orthodoxy the primary support of the organic way of life preserved in the Romanian village. This fusion of Eastern Christianity and the folk tradition

²¹ Z. Ornea, Sdmunatorismul, 2d edn. (Bucharest, 1971), is comprehensive and critical.

²² The most extensive study is Z. Ornea, Poporanismul (Bucharest, 1972).

²³ Constantin Stere, "Social-democratism sau poporanism?" Via{a Româneasca, 2 (September 1, 1907): 327-34; (October 1, 1907): 17-18; 3 (April 1, 1908): 59-60.

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laid the foundations of Orthodoxism, a characteristic expression of Romanian identity in the interwar period.²⁴

The founder of Orthodoxism was theologian and journalist Nichifor Crainic (1889-1972). He insisted that the sources of Romanian spirituality, and hence the element that defined the Romanian national character and had determined the evolution of Romanian society until the nineteenth century, had originated in Byzantium. Thus he showed no hesitation in placing the Romanians squarely in the East. But his reverence for the East was balanced by a total rejection of the West; he found every aspect of modern Western society and thought incompat­ible with the national character. Proclaiming the differences between the Ortho­dox East and the Roman Catholic and Protestant West "insurmountable" and "eternal," like traditionalists before him, he blamed the liberals of 1848 and the authors of the Constitution of 1866 for having forced Western ideas and institutions on a society structurally incapable of assimilating them.

Crainic found a theoretical justification for his hostility to the West in the antinomy "civilization" and "culture." Borrowing extensively from Spengler, he adopted the thesis that the West (civilization), because of its embrace of science and materialism, had entered the period of old age and decline. He identified the distinctive sign of its crisis as the "world city," Berlin or New York, "centers of death," an environment of "unrelieved materialism" and "colorless internation­alism" that deprived people of a creative sense, leaving them sterile, "without metaphysics."²⁵ Crainic complained that Romanian liberals had introduced the spirit of the modern city into the world of the patriarchal Romanian village and had imposed a polished civilization dominated by scientific positivism on a culture of "primitive youth," delicate and almost childlike in its feelings, whose means of expression was religion. The results, he lamented, were everywhere to be seen in the "chaos" of contemporary Romanian society, and he could foresee no other salvation for the Romanians except a return to the "native genius" and the "autochthonous spirit," that is, a revitalization of spiritual life based on the Eastern tradition.

Allied spiritually to Crainic was Nae Ionescu (1888—1940), a professor of philosophy at the University of Bucharest and the chief theorist of trairism (from traire, living), the Romanian variant of existentialism. He stood in the forefront of the anti-rationalist current in Romanian thought in the interwar period and exerted a stunning influence on the generation of intellectuals who began their careers in the 1920s, including Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran.²⁶ Ionescu proclaimed the bankruptcy of positivism and insisted that the world was guided by forces intractable to man's cognitive powers. Life was a spontaneous gushing forth of the human spirit that reason was powerless to contain. This certainty of

²⁴ An extensive, though one-sided, account of Orthodoxism may be found in Dumitru Micu, "Gindirea" si gindirismul (Bucharest, 1975). See Mac Linscott Ricketts, Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945, 2 vols. (Boulder, Colo., 1988), for a comprehensive introduction to the anti- rationalist currents in Romanian intellectual life in the interwar period.

²⁵ Nichifor Crainic, "Parsifal," Gindirea, 3 (January 20, 1924): 181-82.

²⁶ For Ionescu's influence on the young generation of Romanian intellectuals, see Mircea Eliade's comments in Nae Ionescu, Roza vinturilor, 1926-1933 (Bucharest, 1937), 421-44; and Ricketts, Mircea Eliade, 1: 91-126.

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the primacy of exuberant life over the intellect led Ionescu to religious faith. Only the existence of God and his intervention in phenomena, he taught, relieved the world of its character as an "absurd anarchy."

Ionescu found a refuge from the absurdities of contemporary society in the Romanian village, for it was here that the soul prevailed over the mind and the Romanian peasant stood in direct communion with the essential nature of things. Orthodoxy, he thought, had been primarily responsible for shaping the attitude of the peasant toward life and thus for creating a specifically Romanian view of the world. Like Crainic, Ionescu traced the intimate relationship between Ortho­doxy and the village back to the coming of Christianity to ancient Dacia in the first century, and he judged the influence of Eastern Christianity to have been so profound that it became a part of the Romanians' very being; or, as he put it, "we are Orthodox because we are Romanian, and we are Romanian because we are Orthodox."²⁷

This blending of ethnicity and Eastern spirituality led Ionescu to conclude that fundamental, unbridgeable structural differences separated the Romanians from Western society. He found in Roman Catholic and Protestant Europe the stark antithesis to Romanian peasant society; the West was individualist in social relations, rationalist in intellectual preoccupations, and bourgeois-capitalist in economic structures. He stridently denounced the institutions of bourgeois Europe as artificial creations based on purely "juridical" relationships between groups and individuals. The institutions of the Romanian village, on the other hand, he pronounced "organic" structures, which had preserved Romanians' easy integration into nature and their community and had enhanced their receptivity to the mystery of existence. Such qualities, Ionescu insisted, explained why Romania could never become industrial: Romanians lacked the spirit of calcula­tion and the discipline of work that were the foundations of modern, urban, capitalist society.

Traditionalists of a different sort were the Peasantists (Taranigti, from $aran, peasant). They were concerned primarily with the material well-being of rural society and stood for a Romania economically and politically in harmony with its predominantly agrarian structures.²⁸ Like the Poporanists, they held peasant agriculture to be by its very nature noncapitalist, and they struggled to keep capitalism from penetrating the organization of agriculture, out of fear that it would destroy everything distinctive and genuine in the Romanian way of life. But they also made original contributions to the debate about Romania's devel­opment, notably the elaboration by economist Virgil Madgearu (1887—1940) of the doctrine of agrarian Romania as a third world situated between the capitalist West and the collectivist East (the Soviet Union).²⁹

Madgearu's theory was based on the assumption that the peasant family holding was a unique, noncapitalist mode of production and constituted the

²⁷ Ionescu, Roza vinturilor, 205.

²⁸ The best source for Peasantist economic and social doctrine is Virgil Madgearu, Agrarianism, Capitalism, Imperialism (Bucharest, 1936). Z. Ornea, furanismul: Studiu sociologic (Bucharest, 1969), is an ample survey intended to reveal the contradictions between Peasantist theory and the lamentable reality of peasant agriculture.

²⁹ Virgil Madgearu, "Teoria economiei Jaranești," Independent Economica, 8 (1925): 1-20.

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foundation of Romania's national economy. In formulating it, he was indebted to the Poporanists for fundamental ideas about the nature of peasant agriculture. But he also drew extensively on the writings of Russian agricultural economist Aleksandr Chaianov, especially Die Lehre von der bauerlichen Wirtschaft,³⁰which provided the theoretical foundation for Madgearu's analysis of the Romanian family holding. He was attracted particularly to Chaianov's arguments about the qualitative differences existing between peasant agriculture on the one hand and the large-scale, capitalist agricultural enterprise on the other. Madgearu insisted that peasant holdings, despite their technological inferiority to the large capitalist farm, had not only not disappeared but had, in fact, become stronger. He discerned the key to that strength in the special quality of the peasant holding— production by the family. That economic activity, he maintained, was governed by laws of its own, especially a different conception of gain and a different economic psychology from those of the capitalist enterprise. He had to admit that capitalism dominated the contemporary world economy; but beside it and separate from it, he claimed, existed an agriculture with its own distinctive mode of production and social organization.

In his last major work, Evolupa economiei romanesti dupa razboiul mondial (The Evolution of the Romanian Economy after the World War),³¹ Madgearu could discern no fundamental change in the structure of the Romanian economy in the interwar period: the capitalist sector in general was still small; in his view, capitalism as a mode of production had touched only a few branches of industry in a significant way and agriculture maintained its predominance. He concluded that there was still no possibility that the Romanian economy could be integrated into the world capitalist system, for its structure continued to be determined by several million peasant holdings, which formed an economic network governed by values qualitatively different from those of a capitalist economy. Nonetheless, he could not ignore the fact that Western capitalism exerted a powerful influence over Romanian agriculture. Although he continued to deny that it had trans­formed the mode of production of peasant holdings, he admitted that it had penetrated the mechanism of distribution and, as a consequence, had subordi­nated the "whole essence" of the peasant holding to the capitalist market.³²

Madgearu displayed considerable reserve toward Western European political institutions. As in economic development, he made a sharp distinction between the Eastern and Western experience. This comparative approach persuaded him that his brand of peasant democracy would in the long run prove superior to the "bourgeois" form that had evolved in Western Europe. The economic crisis of the early 1930s had crystallized his thought on the subject. Certain that the "bour­geois-liberal social order" was in decline, he perceived as the main cause a striking contradiction in Western society, exacerbated by the recent depression. He saw an infrastructure based on economic and social inequality on the one hand and, on the other, a democratic superstructure based on equality before the law and

³⁰ A. V. Chaianov, Die Lehre von der bauerlichen Wirtschaft: Verstich einer Theorie der Familientvirtschaft im Landbau (Berlin, 1923).

³¹ (Bucharest, 1940).

³² Madgearu, Evolu(ia economiei romanesti, 358.

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universal suffrage. This contradiction, in his view, was inherent in bourgeois, individualist democracy and therefore could never be resolved. Although he remained committed to democracy, he was determined to avoid the "pitfalls" of its Western form, which, he thought, came down to an exaggerated emphasis on individual rights and an almost complete disregard of individual responsibilities toward society. This style of democracy, which proclaimed liberty as an inalien­able right but ignored the principles of equal opportunity and social justice, was based, he concluded, on legal abstractions and had failed to keep pace with the general evolution of society.³³

The Europeanists were as diverse in their assessments of Romania's evolution as the traditionalists, but they shared a common conviction that its destiny lay with Western Europe. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, the doctrine was expressed by a number of economists who saw in industrialization the only means of achieving economic and social progress and of overcoming the handicaps of underdevelopment.

Not all Europeanists were capitalists. Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea (1855— 1920), the principal theorist of Romanian socialism, set forth similar views about a Western path of development in such influential works as Neoiobagia (Neo-serfdom) published in 1910.³⁴ He argued that underdeveloped countries inevi­tably came to be influenced by advanced nations, and, as a result, the social and economic conditions prevailing in the advanced nations at any given time determined the development of "backward countries." Pointing out that bour­geois capitalism was the primary determinant of development in the modern age, he showed how Romania's exchange relations with the West since the early nineteenth century had "revolutionized" all its social, economic, and moral relations and were relentlessly bringing the country into alignment with Western Europe.³⁵ The main task for socialists, he admonished, was to accelerate the process by all possible means.

Two figures in Europeanism stand out: literary critic Eugen Lovinescu (1881— 1943) and economist and sociologist ștefan Zeletin (1882-1934). For the first time in scholarly literature, they undertook a comprehensive investigation of the causes that lay behind the development of modern Romania. They both linked the process to the introduction of Western-style capitalism in the Romanian principalities in the first half of the nineteenth century. But Lovinescu found the motive force of change in ideas, whereas Zeletin emphasized economic and social causes. Nonetheless, they agreed that "Westernization" was a necessary historical stage through which every country was destined to pass, and they had no doubt that outside European influences rather than internal forces had been the main catalyst for the development of modern Romania.

³³ Virgil Madgearu, "Tendinjele de renovare ale democrajiei," Viafa Româneasca, 27 (May—June 1935): 10-13.

³⁴ A valuable introduction to Dobrogeanu-Gherea's career and thought is Damian Hurezeanu, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea: Stttdiu social-istoric (Bucharest, 1973).

³⁵ Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Opere complete, Ion Popescu-Pujuri, ed., 8 vols. (Bucharest, 1976-83), 38 (Neoiobagia).

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In his influential investigation of the origins and development of modern Romania, Istoria civilizaliei române moderne (The History of Modern Romanian Civilization),³⁶ Eugen Lovinescu traced the origins of modern Romania back to the early nineteenth century, to the beginnings of intense cultural contacts with Western Europe. He thus treated the encounter as a contest between Western and native systems of ideas. The West triumphed, Lovinescu argued, because the Romanian elites judged Europe to be superior to the East. Consequently, these elites undertook to close the enormous gap they perceived between themselves and the West by adopting Western institutions, ethics, and practices, in accor­dance with what Lovinescu called "synchronism." For him, this "law" was the key to understanding the relationship between agricultural, patriarchal Romania on the one hand and the industrial, urban West on the other. Accordingly, the inferior imitated the superior—the underdeveloped nations copied the more advanced, and the village the city. But, Lovinescu insisted, synchronism was not simply imitation; it was also integration. He was certain that all Europe was drawing closer together as a result of the expansion of modern means of communication, and he pointed out that the most diverse societies were becoming "homogenized" more rapidly than ever before. As an example, he cited the speed with which a new art form became internationalized, how rapidly cubism or expressionism spread across Europe. It was obvious, he thought, that Romania could not help becoming a part of this integral, cosmopolitan civilization.³⁷ He assigned to the middle class the responsibility for accomplishing this task, since it alone was capable of introducing all the elements of world civilization to the Romanians and of overcoming the resistance of the "passive" and "inert" peasant masses.

Ștefan Zeletin offered an economic interpretation of Romania's Europeaniza-tion complementing Lovinescu's analysis of the cultural phases of the process.³⁸ In his controversial investigation of the Romanian middle class, Burghezia româna: Origina și rolul ei istoric (The Romanian Bourgeoisie: Its Origins and Historical Role),³⁹ he showed how modern Romania was the product of fundamental economic changes caused by the introduction of Western capital in the first half of the nineteenth century. Europeanization, in his view, had been rapid, and he dated Romania's definitive entrance into the Western economic sphere from the period immediately after the Crimean War. The inevitable consequence was an economic revolution in which the old agrarian state slowly dissolved, the country adapted itself to the demands of capitalism, and a bourgeoisie emerged to guide it through all the successive stages of modernization. He could foresee no other course for Romania; to remain a predominantly agricultural country struck him as absurd and contrary to the laws of social evolution.

³⁶ Eugen Lovinescu, Istoria civilizaliei готйпе moderne, 3 vols. (Bucharest, 1924—26). Eugen Simion, E. Lovinescu: Scepticul mintuit (Bucharest, 1971), treats Lovinescu's Europeanism as an expression of his aesthetic values.

³⁷ Lovinescu, Istoria civilizaliei готйпе moderne, 3: 43—51, 63—103, 187—91.

³⁸ In the absence of a monograph on Zeletin's career, one may consult Cezar Papacostea, "ștefan Zeletin: Insemnari privitoare la viafa și opera lui," Revista de filosofie, 20 (July-September 1935): 201-62.

³⁹ ștefan Zeletin, Burghezia româna: Origina si rolul ei istoric (Bucharest, 1925).

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A short list of Europeanists would also include economist and politician Mihail Manoilescu (1891—1950). Despite his repudiation of "old-style" liberalism and his embrace of corporatism in the 1930s, he had no doubt that Romania would follow the Western path of industrialization, which he saw as the only means of surmounting economic backwardness and ending Romania's dependence on Western Europe. He dismissed as fanciful the goal of the Poporanists and other agrarianists to build a prosperous, modern economy based on agriculture. In his major work on international economic relations, Theorie du protectionisme et de Vechange international,⁴⁰he argued that industry enjoyed an intrinsic superiority over agriculture. From his own analysis, he concluded that the productivity of labor in industry was greater than in agriculture. He showed how the disparity in value thus created accounted for the immense advantage in trade and the economic and political dominance that Western Europe had gained over agricul­tural Eastern Europe.⁴¹

Like Zeletin, Manoilescu accorded a key role to the bourgeoisie in the development of capitalism in Romania in the nineteenth century. But he discerned a growing crisis in the Romanian bourgeoisie and urged fundamental changes in its structure if it was to fulfill its tasks in the twentieth century. He pronounced the creative period of the old bourgeoisie, which had assumed leadership of Romania's capitalist development after 1829 (his account of its origins was essentially the same as Zeletin's), to be at an end and prophesied that it faced a revolt of major proportions on the part of the mass of the population, whom it had exploited mercilessly. In Rostul și destinul burgheziei romanești (The Role and Destiny of the Romanian Bourgeoisie),⁴² he argued that the bourgeoisie must be "purified" through a complete reconstruction of its political, economic, and social organization, a process he perceived already underway in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. In Romania, too, he foresaw that the bourgeoisie would continue to organize and direct the economy, but it would no longer be burdened by the "dead weight" of capitalism and liberalism. Instead of remaining dominant, it would be integrated into the state through a single, all-encompassing political party, and its economic motivation would be "de-materialized" through corporatism. As a result, the Romanian bourgeoisie would be composed of persons eager to produce and to serve society as a whole, but it would remain a bourgeoisie because the individual ownership of the means of production would be maintained.⁴³

The expectations of both the Europeanists and the traditionalists were undone by World War II and what followed, as Communism became the overwhelming fact of life for Romanians in the second half of the twentieth century. For over forty years, from the late 1940s until 1989, it served as the ideological cover for

⁴⁰ Mihail Manoilescu, Theorie du protectionnisme et de Vechange international (Paris, 1929).

⁴¹ Mihail Manoilescu, "Le triangle economique et social des pays agricoles: La ville, le village, Гetranger," Internationale Agrar Rundschau, 6 (June 1940): 16-26; Mihail Manoilescu, Forfele nafionale productive si comerful exterior (Bucharest, 1986), introduction, 26-28.

⁴² Mihail Manoilescu, Rostul si destinul burgheziei românesti (Bucharest, 1942).

⁴³ Manoilescu, Rostul si destinul burgheziei romanesti, 322^8, 380-98.

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a political and economic system that turned Romania away from Western Europe toward the East. But Communism was not a robust indigenous growth. In the interwar period, it had struck but shallow roots in Romanian society and remained on the periphery of political life. Communism's lack of success had been partly owing to relentless pursuit by the authorities, including its outlawing in 1924, which drove it underground and kept membership small (the high point was about 5,000 members in 1936). Yet the economic and social structure of interwar Romania also set formidable obstacles in the way of a collectivist, internationalist movement represented by the Romanian Communist Party. The aspirations of the peasants for land of their own, their devotion to religion, even if only formal in many cases, and their respect for tradition made recruitment in the countryside difficult for the Communist Party. Moreover, the mental climate of the village persuaded many party leaders that the peasant was conservative by nature and unlikely to be moved by their vision of the new proletarian order. Thus Communists neglected the village, even the agricultural proletariat, which represented a potentially strong constituency. The relatively modest level of industrialization and urbanization kept the factory working class, the party's preferred constituency, small in number. Here, too, the influence of the village persisted, for the main source of urban labor was the countryside, where class consciousness was little developed. The Communist Party also had to combat a deep sense of patriotism in both the city and the village. Patriotism had been strengthened by the creation of Greater Romania in 1918, and it cut across class lines, causing Communist appeals to international proletarian solidarity and friendship with the Soviet Union to fall on deaf ears. Reduced to perhaps a few hundred members during World War II, the Communist Party became a significant and then dominant force only after the war through the support of Soviet occupation authorities and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

This is not the place to describe Communist rule.⁴⁴ Nor can its effects on the long-term development of Romania be fully measured without greater historical perspective. In time, the period may be judged an aberration that diverted Romania from the Europeanizing course it had taken in the early nineteenth century. But historians will undoubtedly point to those aspects of development in the Communist period that suggest continuity with the interwar years. They may note, for example, similar strivings to industrialize and to attain economic independence from Western Europe (and after I960 from the Soviet Union) and may cite the role of the state as economic coordinator. There will be those, too, who will see Communist rule as having contributed to the century-long process of modernization through forced industrialization, the reordering of agriculture and rural society, and the introduction of extensive collective social benefits. Yet,

⁴⁴ Of the numerous works in English on the Communist period, a short list would include Kenneth Jowitt, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of Romania, 1944-1965 (Berke­ley, Calif., 1971), a penetrating analysis of the policies carried out by the Communist Party to transform Romanian society; Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu's Romania (Berkeley, 1991), an important contribution to the study of the idea of nation and of mentalities in contemporary Romania; John Michael Montias, Economic Development in Communist Rumania (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), a comprehensive investigation and critical evaluation of Communist Party economic policies; and the useful survey by Michael Shafir, Romania: Politics, Economics and Society; Political Stagnation and Simulated Change (Boulder, Colo., 1985).

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whatever the judgment of historians may be in the future, it is evident now that the overall experience of Communism for Romanians was traumatic. In the economy, it substituted central control for the entrepreneurial spirit; in political and social life, it submerged civil society in institutions lacking integrity; in intellectual life, it stifled the free expression of the human spirit; and, gravest of all, it did incalculable injury to the collective moral sense by proliferating laws and disdaining Law.

To interpret the past and to analyze nation-building under such circumstances offered intellectuals a challenge far more formidable than that faced by their predecessors. History as a pure science that was disengaged from patriotism and ideology had rarely been practiced before World War II, but then, at least, historians and social thinkers had been free to pursue truth as they thought best and to confront ideas in open forums. By contrast, during the Communist period, the humanities and social sciences were subordinated to party interests, and intellectuals were mobilized to add their skills to the building of the new, collectivist order.

Nonetheless, the controls that historians and others had to endure were far from uniform during the Communist period.⁴⁵ Nor, after the early 1960s, can one speak of a "united front" of historians and social scientists engaged in fulfilling a single research agenda imposed from above. Rather, history and social thought between 1947 and 1989 evolved in three broad stages. The first was the period of mobilization, lasting until about 1960, and was characterized by a more or less strict adherence to the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, as interpreted by the party, and a general uniformity of views about Romania's past. The second period, between the early 1960s and 1971, was one of relaxation corresponding to the modest trend of liberalization in cultural life and a slight softening of political and economic rigidity. It allowed historical inquiry and discussion to diversify and flourish in ways unknown during the previous twenty years. Then, in 1971, the situation changed dramatically when Nicolae Ceaușescu demanded a return to strict ideological conformity in the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, his so-called July theses signaled the beginning of party-sponsored nation­alism in historiography, which soon became interwoven with an oppressive cult of personality unique in modern Romanian history.

These political and ideological shifts were reflected in changing conceptions of nation-building, which continued to be the primary object of historical investiga­tion and analysis. In general, the treatment historians and others accorded nation-building moved from an internationalist or proletarian interpretation in the 1950s to a nationalist or patriotic stance in the 1980s. This evolution is particularly evident in evaluations of internal and external influences on the process. At first, Russia was praised as the chief contributor to the formation of modern Romania, and matters of discord such as Bessarabia were passed over in silence. Much was made also of the role Russian revolutionaries played in creating the Romanian socialist movement,⁴⁶ and the Bolshevik Revolution was pro-

⁴⁵ Vlad Georgescu, Politico, și istorie: Cazul сотипцШог romani, 1944-1977 (Munich, 1981), 11-75.

⁴⁶ Gheorghe Haupt, Din istoricul legaturilor revolu(ionare romtno-ruse, 1849—1881 (Bucharest, 1955).

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claimed a turning point in Romanian history.⁴⁷ Soviet-Romanian friendship and cooperation were hailed as eternal. By contrast, Romania's relations with Western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were described in somber terms and judged to have had solely negative consequences. Yet the inevitability of Romania's entrance into the world capitalist system was grudgingly acknowl­edged. In the 1960s, the attitude toward Russia and the Soviet Union changed: the existence of a Bessarabian problem was recognized, and Marx's own writings were used to prove Russia's persistent hostility to the modern Romanian state.⁴⁸ This trend in historiography continued in the 1970s and 1980s, as anti-Russian and anti-Soviet sentiments mounted. At the same time, historians and social thinkers reasserted Romania's traditional pre-war links to Europe. However, they refrained from a wholehearted embrace of Europe, evincing instead the Roma­nians' century-old ambivalence toward the West. On the one hand, they achieved a certain balance in evaluating the respective contributions of East and West to the creation of modern Romania, but, on the other, they emphasized "internal forces" rather than "foreign influences" as the primary determinants of nation-building.

Many advocates of the new nativism joined together under the banner of "protocronism," which came to the fore in the 1970s.⁴⁹ The concept, which had affinities to earlier traditionalist interpretations of national development and, later, to Ceaușescu's increasingly nationalist utterances, emphasized the unique and pioneering character of Romanian culture.⁵⁰ Its proponents, like the interwar traditionalists, warned of the dire consequences of subordination to the West and by implication denounced such cosmopolitan theories of development as Lovi-nescu's synchronism.⁵¹ These critical issues of Romania's place in Europe and the viability of the Western model continued to absorb intellectuals in the 1980s and were by no means resolved by the fall of the Ceaușescu dictatorship.

Nation-building itself remains unfinished, as the post-1989 generation of intellectuals grapples with fundamental aspects of the process. The boundaries of Greater Romania must be reconstituted through the reintegration of Bessarabia (now the Republic of Moldova) and northern Bukovina, which were lost to the Soviet Union after World War II. The drafting of a new constitution and the establishment of new political and economic institutions are again urgent tasks. Serious problems of social integration have yet to be resolved. A peasantry and an urban working class, for forty years taught only to follow, have finally to be accorded full citizenship in a democratic state.

The most acute minority question concerns the status of the Hungarians of Transylvania. Old animosities, a heritage of both the interwar period and the Ceaușescu dictatorship, have come to the surface. The issue at hand is whether the Hungarians will have civil and human rights as members of a distinct ethnic community with political and cultural autonomy or as individual citizens in an

⁴⁷ Contributii hstudiul influenfei Marii Revolu{ii Socialist* din Octombrie in Rominia (Bucharest, 1957).

⁴⁸ Karl Marx, Insemnari despre Romani (Bucharest, 1964).

⁴⁹ Adrian Dinu Rachieru, Vocafia sintezei: Eseuri asupra spiritualita{ii românești (Timișoara, 1985), 36-59.

⁵⁰ Edgar Papu, "Protocronism romanesc," Secolul 20, 5-6 (1974): 8-11; and "Protocronism și sinteza," Secolul 20, 6 (1976): 7-9.

⁵¹ See, for example, Dan Zamfirescu, Istorie $i culture, (Bucharest, 1975), 64—65.

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integral Romanian state. By contrast, another minority problem has become less acute, as the Jewish community (about 20,000 members) slowly disappears, mainly through emigration.

Yet a fundamental question, not unlike the one posed by the Junimists in the nineteenth century, remains: Which path of development will the Romanians choose? Formidable obstacles confront those who would resume the Western path. The protocronists and their allies stand for tradition. Then there is the residue of Communism. The National Salvation Front, the majority party in the present government and dominated by former Communists, has been reluctant to adopt Western economic institutions and on numerous occasions has violated the letter and spirit of political democracy. Nonetheless, it has drawn support from many who fear a free market and capitalism as well as other changes that might jeopardize the collective benefits in employment, health care, and education, which they had gained during the Communist period. The idea of a third way, expounded so eloquently by the Peasantists in the interwar period and at present nourished by a resurgent nationalism, remains an attractive alternative to the Western (capitalist and cosmopolitan) and the Eastern (collectivist) models. The national debate over paths of development thus shows no signs of diminishing, and the Romanians stand as before at the crossroads of East and West.